Knowlton School Distinguished Professor and Section Head of the City and Regional Planning Section Jennifer Clark has published “Susan Christopherson: On (Still) Being Outside the Project” in Contemporary Economic Geographies: Inspiring, Critical and Plural Perspectives. The book highlights “the contributions of global scholars [to] showcase fresh ways of approaching economic geography in research, teaching and praxis.”

To say that one person changed the way we think about the way we operationalize economic geography obfuscates the collaborative and iterative ways in which change actually happens in academic disciplines. Considering the contribution of any individual to an academic discipline involves asserting a deterministic role that almost certainly overstates the causality between the individual work and the collective change. Indeed, change is a both a process and a project and project involving many hands. Thus, naming Susan Christopherson’s unique and specific contribution to economic geography must reflect a core argument in her work itself: economic geography is a team sport and further to note that Christopherson played it that way.

That said, Christopherson made a substantial individual contribution to economic geography. This contribution was especially remarkable given that she participated in economic geography from a position literally ‘outside the project’ as a Professor of City and Regional Planning rather than within a Geography department.

Read more at Bristol University Press