Speculate

To speculate is to invite a manner of thinking seemingly at odds with critical, reliable research. Bereft of criticality, speculating might be seen to be entirely at odds with a recent drive towards the creation of research that seeks to make a difference to the conventions that define geographical knowledge production. Yet, if speculative research is enjoying a prominence in cultural geography, part of the reason may be because it poses questions about the outside of thought: how to expose thought to all that is disqualified from the current epistemic boundaries of geographical thinking? And in so doing, how might conceptual abstractions either heighten or pacify a subject's sense of difference and the alternative in thought? Approaching these questions, we chart some imperatives of speculative thinking for cultural geographies, including: (1) a commitment to thinking the alternative , and (2) of engaging with forms of sense beyond the human sensorium.