Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of 'development studies' proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represented both the extremes of anti-democratic neoliberal governance, as well as diverse and creative tactics aimed at building alternative alliances and social movements. The strength of recent critical development studies lies in its capacity to connect analysis of the violence and exclusion characteristic of both old and new imperialist geographies with practical and normative commitments to the creation and sustenance of spaces of political possibility. In making this call, we seek to expand the conversations of critical development scholars by paying particular attention not only to senior scholars in the field, but also to some important new research by emerging scholars.