This kind of orientation to knowledge production then leads to thinking about scholarship (including geographic)
in a way that emphasizes its embeddedness (always-already) in a Gordian knot of knowledge, practice, politics,
and personnel. Considered in this way, it is clear that knowledge always has a social component and that it is always
for something and arising in particular material contexts. One way of looking at the trajectory of scholarship in any
field, then, is to trace the shifting struggles over who constitutes an authorized scholarly voice, what counts as
scholarship, and what scholarship is for. In accounts that simply describe the leading figures in a field, the major
“schools of thought,” the evolution of sub-disciplinary specialties, or the changing constellation of big concepts,
these contested aspects of the historiography of a field often remain hidden or under-developed. Here we pay
special attention to geography as a formal discipline historically linked to global, national, and regional projects
that have both inclusive and exclusive components and regressive and liberatory moments. Thus, we make the
point that Geography, including the content of geographic thought, has been contingently related to the rise of a
discipline that is in some sense understandable as a kind, or kinds, of “movement politics” (at scales from the body
to the globe) that brings into being the (contested) content of its thought. We begin to elaborate the specifics of
these matters in the following sections. As we begin to contemplate geographic thought more specifically, we are
mindful of the social as irreducibly spatial and power-laden and of individuals as irreducibly social.
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