Forging a Path through Life and the Changing Landscape of Geography

This chapter recounts the mixture of luck and conscious decision-making that led a working-class boy to forge a career as a university ‘society-environment’ geographer. It narrates how circumstances of family and location, shaped by wider geohistorical forces, nudged the author towards a pathway scarcely imaginable 40 years earlier. The chapter begins in deindustrialising northern England in the 1970s, where overseas economic competition, rising unemployment and high interest rates were impacting the lives of working people. It then recounts the author&s;s moves to Oxford, then to Vancouver and then to Liverpool over a 10-year period. These moves, it is shown, involved a close interplay between the author&s;s academic activities and sense of self. This relationship grew stronger over time, during the author&s;s years in Manchester, Wollongong (Australia) and Sydney. The freedom to research and to teach with relatively few restrictions, it is shown, dovetailed with the author&s;s changing sense of self across more than four decades. In short, for the author geography has not only been a mind-expanding discipline but has enabled a journey of constant self-reflection and personal evolution. To live an examined life is to live an interesting life, and for the author both the wider discipline of geography and particular geography departments in three countries have underpinned this.