Murchison Award recipient - Professor Noel Castree

Professor Noel Castree has been awarded the 2023 Murchison Award for his substantial and highly influential published work about the relationships between contemporary societies and the physical environment. We spoke to Noel about his career highlights, how geography has shaped his career, and advice for those wanting to go into the field.

 

What are you most proud of in your career to date?

Writing a set of books that map complex landscapes of geographical thought and provide readers with routeways where they might otherwise get lost. My forthcoming book is called What future for the Earth? and it’s easily the most ambitious and demanding book I’ve written in my nearly 30-year career. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to make sense of our fascinating, often troubling, world. While it’s said that fewer people now read books, the thought process involved in writing one is exceedingly rewarding and positively impacts other aspects of an academic life, such as teaching degree students.

 

How has geography shaped your career?

Geography provides an exceedingly rich ecosystem of knowledge and practice. Few disciplines cram so much into one domain. I was drawn to it because of my early interest, in the 1970s, in how people interact with, benefit from, and often degrade the physical environment. Once at university I realised what extraordinary resources lay within such a wide-bandwidth discipline spanning science, the humanities and parts of the arts; I’ve never looked back. Geographers’ diverse endeavours never cease to stimulate head and heart. I feel very lucky to have been able to shape the discipline, in a modest way. Geography today is even more vibrant and exciting than it was when it fully captured my imagination in the mid-1980s.

 

Why is geography so important and how do you think it will evolve in the future?

People often argue that geography should integrate knowledge about the environment with that about societies, acting as a bridge linking diverse forms of understanding and thereby engendering joined-up policy and practice. While that matters, geography’s heterodox character usefully resists integration drives and reminds us that there are many legitimate ways to comprehend the world. Moving forward, geography can help societies multiply options for the creation of a more diverse, tolerant, egalitarian and cooperative world that takes a much less instrumental approach to the non-human realm.

 

What advice would you give to someone wanting to go into a career in geography?

Make the most of geography’s intellectual diversity, its ability to link analysis with evaluation, and its mix of methods and data sources. While focus and specialisation are important, novelty and creativity come from moving around geography’s rich ecosystem with an open mind. Balkanisation is unhelpful; geographers should be able to transgress seeming borders and aspire to be polymaths to a certain degree. I find myself learning useful things in places people would never associate me with, such as journal special issues about agent-based models or conference sessions about participatory mapping. Geography is becoming less ‘academic’ than when I was a university student, so I’d also advise seizing the opportunity to do applied, relevant and political research that connects meaningfully with communities, governments or new social movements.