Engaging Geographies: Negotiating Positionality and Building Relevance

As a discipline and field of knowledge, South African geography has been defined in and by critical societal debates, highlighting how, as geographers, we produce knowledge and teach to address societal imperatives. Inspired in our own and others’ research practice engaging in collaboration between the university and activist groups and knowledge co-production between universities and local authorities, we reflect on the varied engagements, commitments and movements of scholars and practitioners across South African geography. How do these approaches to research through co-production and collaboration navigate postionality and expertise, enriching the research process? In reworking the process of generating knowledge, what alternate kinds of knowledge(s) are produced? Through exploring these questions in this paper, we reread the ‘turn to development’ and our commitment to applied geographical work, not as the degeneration of theory production, but as an opportunity to reflect on what is theoretically and empirically rich in the commitment to relevance in contemporary South African geographical work.