{"id":35221,"date":"2026-05-15T08:48:50","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/?p=35221"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:49:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T06:49:15","slug":"is-there-a-geographer-on-our-daily-talk-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/en\/is-there-a-geographer-on-our-daily-talk-shows\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a geographer on our daily talk shows?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Image created by AI.<\/p>\n

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License Creative Commons <\/a><\/p>\n

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Albert P\u00e9rez Bea<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Can a student complete batxillerat<\/em> (upper secondary education) without knowing what the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution<\/strong> were? Quite clearly not. Another matter altogether is the depth at which these topics are taught, and the particular forms of knowledge and competences demanded within today\u2019s \u2014 frankly absurd \u2014 framework of prescriptive pedagogy. History teachers, at least in the fourth year of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) and in the second year of batxillerat<\/em>, may spend entire weeks on such questions, especially if they teach them with genuine passion, all while remaining perfectly faithful to the official syllabus.<\/p>\n

But can students from that same batxillerat<\/em> arrive at university unable to locate the G20 countries on a map, or incapable of interpreting a population pyramid and understanding its implications for the future of pensions? Here the answer is, with almost effortless naturalness, an emphatic yes. In an age when any smartphone equipped with Google Maps can tell us how to reach virtually any corner of the planet, actually knowing where those places are seems to have become an optional extra \u2014 decorative rather than essential.<\/p>\n

This is hardly accidental. Geography<\/strong> \u2014 the discipline that links space, society and economics \u2014 has for years occupied a marginal place within upper secondary education, frequently reduced to an optional subject within curricula increasingly geared towards supposedly \u201cpractical\u201d outcomes. Geographers, already a dwindling species, watch this trend with a mixture of irony and resignation. At the very moment when technocracy and degrees \u201cwith stronger career prospects\u201d are endlessly celebrated, it continues to be overlooked that geography provides some of the most important tools for understanding the complex \u2014 and professional \u2014 world in which we actually live. Indeed, perhaps the real surprise is not that there are so few geography graduates, but that almost all of them nevertheless end up finding their place within a few years. Who would have imagined it? It turns out that understanding the world is still useful after all.<\/p>\n

Whenever pupils in ESO or Batxillerat<\/em><\/strong> hear the word \u201cgeography\u201d, they tend to imagine the same thing: countries, capitals, mountain ranges, rivers and so forth \u2014 a dreary encyclopaedic catalogue of names to memorise. Geography teachers themselves, often tasked with teaching both history and geography as effectively as possible, quickly realise the extent to which the subject is burdened by this narrow and excessively academic conception, while the more recognisably \u201chuman\u201d dimensions are quietly left to history. What is needed, in good faith and without dogmatism, is to recover a more stimulating and intellectually alive vision of geography: the understanding that without it we can scarcely make sense of any of the issues dominating today\u2019s bewilderingly complex news agenda.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to a simple question. Can the reader \u2014 and thank you, incidentally, for having reached this point \u2014 think of a single geographer regularly present in our national culture of televised punditry? Take a moment\u2026 I shall venture the answer before the article is over: even now, as you read these lines, no name has yet come to mind. Precisely. Among the commentators and professional know-it-alls crowding television schedules and the underworld of social media, it is remarkably difficult to find a single geographer from this country who is genuinely well known or publicly influential<\/strong>. I challenge readers once again to name one before reaching the end of this article.<\/p>\n

A few kilometres further north, however, beyond the Pyrenees, things look rather different. In the French Republic \u2014 though discussing standards there would require another article entirely \u2014 geographers appear regularly on television discussion programmes alongside politicians, historians, lawyers, journalists and economists. The same is true across the Anglosphere and in Italy, countries where the education system has reserved an important place for the study of Geography within schools, lyc\u00e9es<\/em> and licei umanistici<\/em>. North and east of here, geography and geographers are routinely regarded as indispensable participants in any serious public debate. And there is no shortage of such debates today: geopolitics, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, demography, food policy and water resources \u2014 and one could continue almost to the point of exhaustion. Virtually every major issue of the twenty-first century possesses an unavoidable geographical dimension. Yet in this country we persist in talking endlessly about the world while rarely locating anything properly within it \u2014 and almost never consulting the resident geographer.<\/p>\n

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France and the rise of Christophe Guilluy the provocateur<\/strong><\/p>\n

In twenty-first-century geography, two major spheres of influence can broadly be identified: the academic world and the sphere of public intellectual debate. The former includes figures such as David Harvey, Nigel Thrift and Michael Goodchild<\/strong>, all of whom have profoundly reshaped the discipline from within. Harvey revitalised urban theory and the critique of capitalism; Thrift introduced cultural and post-representational approaches; and Goodchild helped define geographical information science (GIScience). Their work is theoretical, methodological and globally influential within universities.<\/p>\n

Alongside them, however, stand figures such as Emmanuel Todd and Christophe Guilluy<\/strong> in France, thinkers who have exercised enormous influence over territorial and social debate while largely operating outside conventional academic structures. Todd interprets family and cultural systems as deep geostructural foundations of political behaviour, while Guilluy became famous for his idea of \u201cperipheral France\u201d, the widening fracture between global metropolitan centres and neglected territories.<\/p>\n

If the former group shape geography\u2019s scientific development, the latter shape its public imagination. The interaction between these two poles \u2014 analytical rigour on the one hand, narrative power on the other \u2014 reminds us that contemporary spatial thinking is forged not only within universities, but also in the wider arena of social and cultural debate.<\/p>\n

Three names dominate contemporary French discussions about territory and society: Christophe Guilluy, Emmanuel Todd and Jacques L\u00e9vy. Each offers a distinct interpretation of France\u2019s social and spatial transformations, and the tensions between them reflect broader disagreements within the social sciences themselves. France, a country permanently engaged in argument with itself and structured for centuries by a deeply Cartesian intellectual culture, simply cannot conceive of public debate without according geography a central place. There is always a geographer in circulation within French public life \u2014 a bestselling author capable of exposing many of our own all-purpose television pundits for what most of them really are. I shall leave the appropriate adjective to the reader.<\/p>\n

Guilluy rose to prominence through his thesis of la France p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/strong><\/em>, according to which \u201cterritorial divides now shape social divides\u201d. His argument opposes the great globalised metropolises \u2014 which in France largely means Paris and little else \u2014 to a neglected periphery inhabited by displaced working and lower-middle classes. His language is direct, accessible and politically explosive, which explains the enormous impact he has had in the media and in interpretations of movements such as the gilets jaunes<\/em>. Unsurprisingly, many academics accuse him of reducing a far more complex reality to an overly rigid dichotomy.<\/p>\n

Todd, by contrast, works on a much longer historical timescale. His famous claim that \u201cfamily structures explain ideologies<\/strong>\u201d captures his broader method: understanding political and social behaviour through deep demographic and cultural continuities. Territory, in Todd\u2019s framework, is not merely an economic space but the visible expression of long historical inheritances. He has advanced strikingly provocative hypotheses \u2014 among them the prediction of the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse ten years before it occurred \u2014 though critics accuse him in turn of risky generalisations and methodological heterodoxy.<\/p>\n

L\u00e9vy represents yet another tradition: a more formal, rigorous and academically grounded geography. His assertion that \u201cspace is a complex social construction<\/strong>\u201d encapsulates an approach centred on networks, mobilities and interactions. He rejects simplistic binaries such as centre versus periphery and insists instead that \u201cglobalisation multiplies the ways of inhabiting the world\u201d. From this perspective, he openly attacks Guilluy, accusing him of constructing \u201ca narrative more ideological than scientific\u201d.<\/p>\n

Together, the three men embody three ways of reading the contemporary world: Guilluy through a forceful but simplifying narrative; Todd through structural and historical explanation; and L\u00e9vy through complex and relational analysis. The tension between them reveals a central dilemma of contemporary social thought: how to interpret territorial transformation without sacrificing either analytical rigour or the ability to describe lived social experience.<\/p>\n

Let us consider a few characteristic formulations from Guilluy \u2014 \u201cthe provocateur\u201d, who in this country would almost certainly be dismissed as a fascist before the debate had even begun; we all know how these things work here.<\/p>\n