Libraries as Armouries

Daniel Coit Oilman, Geography, and the Uses of a University

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4476232
AutoresRichard Heyman (Division of the Humanities, University of Minnesota at Morris, 600 East 4th St, Morris, MN56267, USA), Richard B Heyman (University of Minnesota Morris, autor correspondente)
Ano2001
Volume19
Fascículo3
Páginas295-316
Data de publicação2001-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d13s
OpenAlexW2127638837
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas37

The author builds on recent work on the history of geographical thought by focusing on the career of American geographer Daniel Coit Oilman, who was the first President of the Johns Hopkins University. It is argued that Oilman's influential work in professionalizing an instrumentalist approach to knowledge production in the new institution of the research university forms an important link between the philosophically oriented geography of Alexander von Humboldt and the geopolitics of Isaiah Bowman. The author extends work in the history of the discipline by showing how geographical knowledge came to be seen in instrumentalist terms not only in the institutional context of geographical societies and European imperial administration-the focus of much of the historical scholarship-but also within the context of an intellectual division of labor that emerged in the second half of the 19th century as the modern research university took shape. It is suggested that a full account of the way in which Humboldt's project was displaced by Oilman's may give us a better understanding of the role that geography might play in moving knowledge production beyond a purely instrumentalist orientation and into more liberatory projects of social justice

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Economic geography · Epistemology · Geographer · Geography · Geopolitics · Human geography · Institution · Instrumentalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Geography Education and Pedagogy · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought · Law · Philosophy