By Bryan Zandberg
Ever since he joined the Department of Geography in 1983, Professor Trevor Barnes has tried to do more than expand the minds of his students. He has tried to expand the narrow focus of his own discipline. “I always want to say to my students, ‘Where do ideas come from?’” Barnes explains. “They don’t just come like lightning out of the blue sky, but they come from particular kinds of practices, which are bound up with culture, with politics, with cultural division.”
Origins of Geography
Barnes says we need to look no further than the first geographers for an example of what he means. During the 19th century, when the colonial powers were scrambling to lay claim to vast swaths of Africa, rulers turned to geographers to survey and understand the wealth of the land — and more often than not to fight wars over their respective empires. “That’s where the discipline gets going,” says Barnes, who started out as an economist — a field he says he found too “narrow, purified and abstract” — before going into economic geography.
“Geography is so much about variety, diversity and context that it just doesn’t fit with the notion that there are these essences, that there are these unimpeachable cores,” he says.
Research and Recognition
Beyond the classroom, Barnes has been a leading figure in re-theorizing economic geography through a close analysis of its underlying values. He has shown how dominant social attitudes have influenced the work of geographers just as much as rational scientific practices. The results have earned Barnes many distinctions, including the Presidential Award of the Association of American Geographers in 2006.
These days, his research focus on the topic of creative cities — urban centres such as Vancouver that are moving beyond an industrial economy. He is especially interested in how they vie with each other to lure an educated workforce in the information age. Aside from his interest in modern cities as a subject of research, he says it’s also a subject he likes to teach. “I think that’s the course that students enjoy most, because it’s about them and their lives; they can step out of the classroom and they’re there.”
Challenging Students
But Barnes also likes to leverage the shock value of the dramatic changes he sees unfolding in the world’s economy.To get his students thinking about globalization and consumer culture, for example, he tells them how Wal-Mart imports about 15 per cent of China’s total manufactured output. China, he reminds his students, is the biggest manufacturing country in the world.“You almost hear this collective sucking in of breath, when you say a fact that they didn’t know before.”
Still, facts by themselves don’t make a good course, nor are they going to help students understand a complex, changing world. “They have to be placed within a larger context,” he says, which is where his particular perspective comes into play.
“My stories tend to be critical. I mean, I’m on the left, politically, so I’m suspicious of what goes on in the name of capitalism. And so I try to raise those issues about some theme below the surface.”
