On Henry Yeung's Theory and Explanation in Geography

Theory and Explanation in Geography begins with two important questions for the discipline. How can Human Geography thrive in an uncertain time of post-pandemic, climate crisis, and growing economic and social inequalities? And how can Geography reach out to influence the wider social and natural sciences? For this book, the answer lies in a form of theory that is explanatory, focussed on causes, based on ‘mechanism-based thinking’ of a non-deterministic flavour, and mid-range theories (e.g. operating mid-level between capitalism's reconfigurations and everyday life). The book is a call for greater clarity on what ‘really “makes things happen”’ (132). It is a case for theory that possesses what the book calls ‘practical adequacy’, both in explaining issues and for being useful for social intervention and change. Better explanatory theory will make Geography more relevant, the book suggests, and more influential in both other fields and in non-academic contexts.

But this kind of theory, the book argues, is rather lost, or at least marginalised, by what it describes as the ‘excessive fragmentation’ of ‘approaches and concepts’ in Human Geography (108). There are, the book suggests, too few substantive theories explaining geographical phenomena. Over the past two decades, Human Geography has become dominated by approaches that focus on describing and interpreting all kinds of everyday practices, contexts, events, and relations. There has been a fixation with processes, including those connected to the network, the affective, the performative, multiplicity, and so on. The discipline is dominated by post-structural, post-phenomenological, and post-humanist accounts, which have largely replaced the previous dominance of critical realism, the well from which the water of mid-range explanatory theory might spring.

While there is a particular preoccupation in the book with poststructuralism – especially actor-network theory, non-representational theory, and assemblage thinking – other areas of thought are also found to often be wanting of explanatory theory. Some feminist thought influential in Geography is described as ‘interpretive, exploratory, imaginative or even speculative’, embracing ‘ontological contingency’ and disavowing the ‘more causally explanatory feminist-Marxist approach in the 1980s and early 1990s’. Postcolonial thought in Geography generally does not present a ‘coherent theory’ of explanation, instead offering conceptual strategies and methodological approaches, and only occasionally more explanation-focussed work. Other areas too are held to account: dialectics in Marxism and explanations of neoliberalisation, for example, are both found to be frequently fuzzy about causal mechanisms that would better explain geographical change and conditions.

It is important to say that the book is not dismissive of these various theoretical preoccupations over the past two to three decades, and that they are engaged with in an often generous and rigorous way. But, nonetheless, many of these research areas and debates, not all, are positioned in the book as insufficiently normative, vague on causality, overly descriptive, sometimes too preoccupied with their own conceptual languages and meanderings, and not sensitive enough to the politics of difference, power, and social inequality. There are suggestions of ‘career enhancing’ esoteric theory, criticisms of work that is ‘merely reporting’ on the lives of excluded subjects, rather than developing theories or practices that could generate change, and pops at ‘textual gymnastics’ which lack ‘clear-headed explanations’. As the book puts it at one point: ‘Clever words alone do not make politics’. These kinds of occasional statements in the book are difficult to square with the larger positioning of the text as open to plurality and different approaches.

There is much to admire in the book. I enjoyed its clarity, it's sense of mission, its commitment to the discipline, its boldness in taking on big questions about the very nature of how Geographers do what they do. It has a clear North Star. We have in this text an excellent outline of a particular way of doing theory. In what follows, I outline areas of difference I had with the book. Three in particular, relating specifically to the range, status, and distinctions of different forms of theory.

The first is how this book approaches the theoretical range of contemporary Human Geography. Where this book sees ‘excessive fragmentation’, I see a discipline that is characterised by an exciting scope, a generative diversity of theoretical work, and conceptual experimentation. I was reminded of this just recently while attending the 2024 royal geographical society annual conference. I left with a strong sense of the sheer empirical and conceptual range of what is being done in the field today as healthy and inspiring, including a diversity of methodological approaches. I met two colleagues from other fields – one from Sociology, another from Architecture – who found the array of talented scholarship on show to be genuinely remarkable.

That, it seems to me, has been a significant strength of Human Geography over the past few decades. It is the product of a disposition of openness, a willingness to venture into different conceptual and methodological territories, and a desire to express geographical issues and concerns as they surface in a wider range of issues and concerns. What the theoretical innovation and multiplicity of the past few decades have brought is new ways of identifying and talking about political problems, social worlds, forms of environment and nature, and economic change. It has expanded the assortment of actors, situations, and practices we explore; it has opened up new conceptual, ethical, and political questions; it has given rise to a new spirit of experimentation with methodologies and forms of representation; it has encouraged many Geographers to develop new participatory or coproductive approaches; and it has opened up new collaborations with other disciplines. (A note: I am referring in particular to Anglo-American Human Geography – there are important differences globally around the epistemic and institutional configuration of the discipline.)

Would that epistemic, methodological, and political diversity have been possible without the ‘excessive fragmentation’ of the past few decades? I very much doubt it. Of course, there are all kinds of questions to ask about what these diverse theoretical developments open and close off, from the epistemic to the explanatory, political, and methodological, and Yeung's book raises some of those questions. But once we characterise this as excessive, we are drawn into the territory of potentially undermining that experimentation and dialogue.

My second point is to do not with the range of theory, but the status accorded to forms of theory in the book, at least in my reading of the text. By the end of the book, I was left with the sense that theory which is not normative and explanatory doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It might not even be theory. At one point, for example: ‘Practically adequate theories cannot be (just) about change in our mental constructs nor perceptual operations – that is a self-indulging kind of intellectual luxury in the ivory tower’. There is the risk in this line of argument that we’re left feeling as if we have a choice: either you do theory that is explanatory, mid-range, useful, and makes a change, or you do less adequate theory, however interesting it might be, which risks becoming self-indulgent intellectual privilege.

Theoretical work which doesn’t fit the explanatory mid-range theory position – work which, for example, seeks to experiment with new concepts or ideas, or which is simply about pursuing a curiosity, or which aims to develop an understanding of what is going on or illuminate the nature of a place or event or condition – are left appearing potentially less valid. If explanation or social change are the yardsticks by which we should judge theory, how does that help to encourage other kinds of theoretical experimentation? And anyway, is it not the case that we use different kinds of theory at different times for different purposes? I can think of cases where I’ve used theory in an explanatory way, but I can also think of cases where I’ve used theory in an illustrative way, or theory in a descriptive way, or theory in a speculative way, or theory as a way of seeing something differently or disrupting how a problem is understood, and so on. Rather than trying to adjudicate as to which forms of theory are more useful than others, in practice it is the context and the issues at stake that throw that question into clarity.

I have my reservations here not just because I see value in an explicit defence of theory without an express utility, but also because in any case, it is not always immediately clear whether a theory is useful or not. Theory might start out life as seemingly disconnected from a particular problem, seemingly useless, but then later – perhaps even years down the line – become translated and changed in ways that make it ‘useful’. It is possible that a theory that does not seem practically useful now, might become so later. Who knows? The world is a messy and unpredictable place. But if we have decided early on that a theory does not have ‘practical adequacy’, then perhaps the work of experimenting with it and developing it would not happen. The relationship between the seemingly ‘practical’ and the purportedly ‘experimental’ is one that I think we should be hesitant in pinning down, lest we lose sight of their inherently mutual and sometimes fraught relations. There is more to say here, of course, not least about the term ‘useful’, a term that not only demands careful reflection but which is very much one particular way of thinking about theory.

If the first two points are about the range and status of theory, my third and final point follows on, and is concerned with the distinction between explanation and description. This is another set of big questions upon which much ink has been historically spilled, but I would want to pause a little longer with description and ask what it can offer in its different forms. To pause, for instance, with the potential of forms of theory that seek to find explanation through thick description of chains of events and processes, from forms of non-reductive description inspired by Anthropology's influence in some areas of Geography, or approaches like actor-network theory. While these areas of work are encountered in the book, the potential of description for conceptual, political, and ethical work is given less breathing space.

Sometimes, the politics of knowledge lies in simply describing – in the potentially powerful work of bringing conditions, lives, processes, and stories to light, particularly in relation to forms of oppression, exploitation, and marginalisation. These different forms of descriptive work might have distinct ways of identifying causal mechanisms – for example, they might be less explicit about how they establish causes, or they might want understand the limits of identifying key causes in order to expand the possible sources of change – but that does not mean that theoretical understanding and potentially even social change cannot emerge from them. If we look beyond Geography – to Urban Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies, for instance – we can find evidence of other fields being influenced by how Geographers have opened up conceptual and political questions in the careful work of describing all kinds of everyday spaces, conditions, and lives. And, beyond the academy, the long history of investigative journalism has surely shown how explanations of what happened and why can emerge through the ‘drip drip’ of detailed, careful description.

The book, then, is a provocative and enjoyable read. Notwithstanding these reservations and disagreements, it is an impressive elaboration of a particular way of thinking about theory and what it can do in and for Geography, presented in a rigorous, confident, and generative way.