Scaling knowledge:: towards a critical geography of critical geographies

This paper provides an analysis of the scale politics involved in the production of social-scientific geographic knowledge. I argue that critical Geographers need to acknowledge that ideas do not circulate unfettered or limited solely by their intellectual value. Instead, we must understand that some ideas are 'attached' intimately to the places in which they originate while others circulate freely without attachment to specific places. Through such simple (dis)locations, geographic ideas get inserted into spaces of academic knowledge production that are shot through with scale politics. Ironically, such scalar processes produce a simple, transparent, abstract and hierarchical space of knowledge production that elides the complex spatial relations that we as geographers are supposed to be so interested in understanding. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.