Internationalization and uneven global geographies of knowledge production and exchange in geography

This chapter critically analyzes internationalization moments in the discipline of geography to assess its international and intercultural diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Comparing spatial inclusions and exclusions of geographers and geographies at two international conferences in geography, organized by the International Geographical Union (IGU) in Glasgow 2004 and Paris 2022, reveals that these events were less centered on Anglo-American internationalisms than previous events in the 1980s and were shaped by different multicultural internationalisms, resulting from longer-term global economic shifts and volatile influences on geographers’ conference participation, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic crisis, and war action in Europe. In this chapter, I draw on triadic thought as a spatial theory to argue that international knowledge exchange in twenty-first-century geography has experienced geographical decentralization, sociocultural diversification, and epistemic downscaling, but there remains a great need for creating more spatial justice in geography from diverse international perspectives.