Locating the Public, Dislocating Knowledge Production: An Introduction to Public Economic Geographies for the Twenty-First Century

Driven by concern with the quintessentially political decisions made in the interest of “the economy”—and the widely disparate outcomes produced in the process—the project of public economic geography is interested in how knowledge production in economic geography can be imagined to produce more just outcomes. This is an introduction to a Focus section in which four interlocutors reflect on what economic geography could look like if it engaged more directly with the politics of knowledge production. A public economic geography seeks to dislocate, spatially and figuratively, conventional academic considerations of expertise and audience, while also explicitly locating itself in a public purpose for publics both inside and outside the academy. Three themes informing this project emerge from the contributors’ reflections: revealing (making public) economic knowledges, reimagining economic relations, and reeducating ourselves and our publics about normative economic concepts and the performance of academic authority. Together, these contributions point to some fundamental moves toward a more “public” orientation within the subdiscipline.