3 - Susan Christopherson: On (Still) Being Outside the Project

Summary

Introduction

To say that any 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 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. For most of her faculty career Christopherson sat beyond the formal boundaries of the Geography discipline or its academic departments. And this liminal status has particular significance because it was not unusual for women in US economic geography at the time (and nor is it now) to hold positions in departments of public policy or urban planning rather than geography. Economic geography has closely guarded its membership rolls – and continues to – creating hard boundaries between insiders and outsiders.

Susan Christopherson's contribution to the discipline of economic geography involved expanding the field to include a broader set of epistemologies, methodologies and sites of inquiry. In other words, Christopherson challenged both what counts as an economic geography question and what is considered an economic geography explanation. Christopherson was part of a cohort of academics who pushed the analytical focus beyond the formal functions of traditional economic actors to unpack how institutions and intermediaries operate within regional and national economies to produce different spatial outcomes. And her work exhibited a sustained concern for labour.

Christopherson's work brought contingent and precarious labour into focus before it was a central concern of the discipline. And her work sustained that focus on labour and labour markets across a variety of sectors and industries, including film and new media, energy, high technology, and manufacturing.