Nik Heynen

I have been interested, as long as I have known what geography is, in the work of Bill Bunge.  After I told some folks at one of Antipode’s Institute for the Geographies of Justice (IGJ) about my  interactions with Bunge, I was invited to write this paper that was just published in Social and Cultural Geography.  It is part of a special issue on “Marginalia” that Christian Anderson and Scott Larson special guest edited.  In addition to essays by our fantastic (and very patient) co-editors, the special issue also includes essays from  Brett Story, Cindi Katz, Vinay Gidwani, and Trevor Barnes.

Below I have also included a 2011 essay Trevor and I wrote in Progress in Human Geography as well as the new preface Trevor and I  co-authored for the 2011 edition of Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution . 

Heynen, N. (2013). “Marginalia of a Revolution: Naming Popular Ethnography and Republishing William W. Bunge’s Fitzgerald.” Social and Cultural Geography. 14 (7): 744–751.

Abstract:

Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I
extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments
of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This
essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and
experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered,
even as he is often not recognized for doing so. An exploration through a pile of notes,
electronic voice files, and faxes helped me to think through lived forms of intellectual
marginalia via the life and methods of William Bunge and possibilities that exist for
recovering his method of ‘popular ethnography’.

Barnes, T. and N. Heynen, 2011. A classic in human geography: William Bunge’s (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, Progress in Human Geography. 35(5): 712–720.

Heynen, N. and T. Barnes , 2011. Fitzgerald Then and Now. New Preface for the Second Edition of William W. Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of Revolution. University of Georgia Press.