Creativity and Geography: Toward A Politicized Intervention

Whether geographers have engaged directly or indirectly with artists and writers and their creative products or have themselves produced artistic or literary work, there is no dearth of evidence for both the somewhat regular appearance and the frequent dissolution of these engagements. If the relationship between geographical knowledge-making and creative practices has an extensive history, creative expression produced by geographers has not been much examined for its potential for and as a form of political critique. The political critique of new cultural geography therefore marked a significant shift in the nature of the interpretive approach geographers took to a variety of creative practices and how their products were understood to go to work in the world. The distinguishing feature of this special issue of the Geographical Review is an overt politicization of this "creative (re)turn" in human geography. In an effort to present the kinds of working practices contemporary geographers have been engaging with as creative practitioners and collaborators and those who blur these discrete groupings.