Introduction: Critical Scholarship, Practice and Education

1Introduction:Critical Scholarship, Practice and Education Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel ­Di Mauro1“Critical geography” is both an approach to scholarship and a practice of scholarship. The term “critical” refers to a tradition of critical theory. An often cited representative of this tradition is the so­ called Frankfurt School. This “school” consisted of a network of researchers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which operated from 1923 to 1933, moved to New York during the Nazi regime, but reopened in Frankfurt in 1950. Although the label “Frankfurt School” is problematic and inexact (Behrens, 2002), it does permit associating some basic ideas with the notion of “critical”. According to Herbert Marcuse (1964: x), a prominent member of this school: “To investigate the roots of [social] developments and examine their historical alternatives is part of the aim of a critical theory, a theory which analyzes society in the light of its used and unused or abused capacities for improving the human condition.”