John Agnew
jagnew@geog.ucla.edu
University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA (USA)

Abstract:

The problem of “foundations” is a crucial one for any field, particularly perhaps one with as varied a possible repertoire of elementary sources as the study of world politics. In this paper, I want to draw attention to some different ways of thinking about how and where knowledge is produced; how knowledge circulates can be used to inform understanding about geographies of knowledge of world politics. Such geographies, however, are not ends in themselves. The point is to understand the ontological bases of knowing from perspectives that do not privilege a singular history of knowledge associated with a specific world region or of conceptions of knowledge that implicitly or explicitly presume their self-evident universality.

Keywords: Knowledge, world politics, geographies.