Introduction

The history of academic disciplines can be examined from several perspectives by using diverging materials as “evidence”. Archives offer private materials such as personal correspondence and notes, formal and informal records, or documents of the activities of academic societies, for example. The approaches for using such materials vary from comprehensive genealogical excavations to outlining more general steps of progress in scientific action and thinking. Journal articles, edited volumes, and monographs are also important sources for academic histories, as several editions of Geography and Geographers (Johnston, 2004) illustrate. While much of the history writing in geography leans on published materials, this approach is not without problems and often leaves critical questions unanswered. For example, why something was (or was not) written and published, or why something was published in some particular language, for example, English.

Autobiographies are useful in mapping such motives, especially if they reveal how scholars interpret and position their work in the wider time-space matrix of power relations and in relation to events, episodes and social networks that have stimulated their work. They also express how researchers see their work as contributing to or challenging the dominant theoretical wisdom (Johnston, 2019; Moss, 2001a, b). Autobiographies are admittedly subjective and selective, so it is critical to be aware that knowledge is not just collected and neutrally reported by scholars but actively produced and often contested (cf. Purcell, 2009). Consequently, autobiographies can be problematic if authors unreflexively or even purposely misrepresent the past and combine history, memory and personal desires (Johnston, 2019). Thus, it is crucial to avoid “self-absorption”, “navel-gazing” (Moss, 2001a), or “great man” (sic!) approaches (Purcell, 2009) and to be attentive to what is presented as evidence.

Biographies and autobiographies have a long but thin history in geography. The International Geographical Union’s (IGU) History of Geographical Thought Commission launched the Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies series in 1977, yet the initiative had been made already in 1969. Likewise, biographies were significant in Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geographic thinking. Hägerstrand and Anne Buttimer (1988) interviewed and videoed in their International Dialog Project (since the late 1970s) scholars who have contributed to major transformations in geography. Allan Pred (1979) followed an autobiographic approach when reflecting on the networks influencing his work. Moss (2001b), for her part, edited a useful collection where several geographers told their stories. Autobiographies have also recently been revived in Nordic geography (Michael Jones, 2018; Holt-Jensen, 2019).

This chapter is an autobiographic reflection of my academic path, its critical episodes and the social relations that have both framed and inspired my work with socio-spatial theory. The key focus is on the institutionalization of regions (Paasi, 1986a), a theory that I outlined during the 1980s in the context of ongoing socio-spatial theory debates in geography. Socio-spatial theory refers here to the perpetual (re-)conceptualization of the dialectics between social and spatial relations, and, in this chapter particularly, how regions, borders and identities are socially constructed. Since “no self exist in isolation” (Purcell, 2009, p. 235), I will discuss the contexts, people and events that have influenced my theoretical work on this topic. I will use my calendars, notebooks and personal memories in shaping the time-frame for these developments. I will also lean on my correspondence with Finnish and international scholars.

The chapter is structured as follows. The first sections discuss how I became a geographer, ending up at a peripheral university and how this positionality conditioned my theoretical and empirical work. I then reflect on the influences behind my research and on becoming involved in the so-called “new regional geography”. Next, I discuss the conceptions of theory that inspire my research. I then assess the “travel” of the theory of institutionalization and my subsequent theoretical work on the political geography of borders. Next, I reflect on the role of “mediators” behind the mobility of theories. Finally, in the Coda, I discuss the motives of scholars and look at recent geographical debates on Anglophone hegemony.

Geographer by Coincidence

Sociologist Erik Allardt (1995, p. 10) writes that “It is quite usual that people represent their trajectories and maybe particularly their achievements as significantly more planned and cogitated than they are in reality”. He recognizes three features that influence a life course: coincidences, conventions and decisions. How life advances and is shaped, echoes these three features and their interrelations.

When thinking about academic careers, I am tempted to add a few elements to Allardt’s list. First, research work demands deep commitment and work beyond ordinary working hours. Second, external and internal features of academia matter, for example, the position of geography in natural or social science, its national and local prestige among academic fields, and one’s own work community as a burden or a source of inspiration. Third, being “in the right place at the right time” in relation to available jobs, grants, academic relations, and evolving theoretical prospects, i.e., the geo-historical materialization of Allardt’s “coincidences”. Fourth, general matters related to a life course, such as health and illness or one’s social relations are crucial. Personally, being a cancer survivor for over 13 years has deeply shadowed my biography.

I became a geographer by coincidence. There were several potential subjects to study after high school. One of my high school mates told me that he was studying geography at the new University of Joensuu. Geography was fine in high school but not something I had thought of as a career. As a working-class kid my visions of academic possibilities were narrow, and the only job for a geographer I knew was a schoolteacher. Student time soon revealed that geography was a ticket to many professions. In high school we studied mainly descriptive regional geography. The book required in the entrance exam, however, was more theoretical, introduced models and patterns, thus representing a turn towards positivist spatial science in Finland. My wife-to-be and I prepared ourselves carefully for this exam. We both got accepted and were delighted to start our studies in September 1976. It was soon obvious that geography in Joensuu differed from other Finnish geography departments, which were all situated within the Faculties of Science. Joensuu’s unit was small, part of the social sciences and had a motivated, young staff representing the first academic generation of their family. As a new department it did not have old traditions. There was no need to bow down to totems, there were no portraits on the walls.

Working in the Periphery

During the 1980s Joensuu University was located in a “double-periphery”. It was a newly established (1969), small and marginal university in Finland. Another peripheral element relates to language: Finnish scholars need other languages to communicate with international colleagues, typically English or Finland’s second official language, Swedish. During the 1980s, Nordic critical geographers communicated with a mixture of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian in their annual symposia (the predecessor to the current Nordic Geographers Meeting) and in Nordisk Samhällsgeografisk Tidskrift (launched in 1984). I attended a few annual symposia and published several articles in the journal.

Work in the periphery was easygoing in the 1980s. While scholars obviously always hope to contribute to research and have their work recognized somehow (Johnston, 2005), there were not yet “national expectations” that Finnish human geography should be “visible” on the international scene. It was typical to publish in Finnish in Finnish forums. Pressure for “internationalization” emerged much later along with the neoliberal claims from ministries that demanded focusing on international publishing in “top” journals. This strengthened the power of the English language in Finland, as elsewhere, and paved the way for Anglophone hegemony in human geography and other social sciences. This hegemony takes perpetually new forms, as I will show in the Coda section.

I can briefly justify my autobiographic approach against this background by two retrospective remarks, one positive and one less convenient. First, while developed in the periphery and published in the Finnish journal Fennia (Paasi, 1986a), the theory of the institutionalization of regions has been constantly well-received in geography and in other fields. This goes against odds: scholars criticizing the Anglophone hegemony in geography have observed that theories are typically expected to be produced in the academic cores and consumed in the margins, to “flavor” peripheral case studies (Minca, 2000; Simonsen, 2004; Berg, 2004; Müller, 2021; Korf, 2021). Thus, spatial contexts and language differences condition academic communication and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge (Paasi, 2015). Scholars from linguistic peripheries have to adjust to publishing in English, to make their voices heard beyond national borders (Canagarajah, 2002; Garcia-Ramon, 2003; Gregson et al., 2003; Müller, 2021). My Fennia paper fulfilled this basic language criterion (Paasi, 1986a).

Second, and related to the “travel” of my theoretical work, I have often been asked puzzling questions; how and why did I start such theoretical efforts, how did I develop the idea of the institutionalization of regions in Finland or, more annoyingly, why I have remained in Finland or for 30 years stayed at Oulu University? Such inquiries hint at peripheral sites as “unfitting” for theoretical work. However, my intention has not been to formulate a “Finnish theory on regions” but a “theory on regions”. Yet, as I will demonstrate, my theorization does have deeply contextual “Finnish” features that have influenced it.

Becoming Interested in Space and Regions

I finished my M.Sc. in planning geography in the spring of 1979. My subsequent licentiate thesis (1981) represented behavioral geography, focusing on the concepts of space in migration research and on the motives of migrants at various spatial scales. Simultaneously I started to problematize the idea of the region. As a tutor in a field course in 1979, I twice collected data from the same students on how they shaped Finnish sub-state regions. This analysis revealed dissimilar, vague and shifting views of such regions, not a “fixed” grid. This exercise led to my first paper in the Finnish journal Terra (Paasi, 1980), which presented a critique of standardized regional units that were common in so-called space-preference studies developed by Anglophone scholars in the 1960s–1970s.

I was hired as a research assistant in 1981 for a cross-disciplinary research project funded by the Academy of Finland. Unexpectedly, I was free to do whatever I viewed as important. The level of ambition was raised by Antti Eskola, an eminent Marxist Professor of Social Psychology with a scary reputation, whom the Academy nominated to the follow-up group. I focused then on literature related to notions of region and place. We had relevant new books and journals at the university’s library but not old journal issues. Thus, I frequently travelled to the libraries of the geography departments at Helsinki and Turku University to study Anglophone and German geography journals and to make a list of articles dealing with regions, in theory and practice, to order copies later. I also problematized the meaning-making and consciousness related to regional and territorial spaces, scrutinized theories of stereotypes, nationalism, and categorization in psychology, social psychology, sociology and anthropology. Relatedly, I also examined the use and evolution of national, regional and racial stereotypes in Finnish school geography textbooks. This revealed how the content of teaching materials reflected national ideologies and racism, which echoed the shifting national and international political climate (Paasi, 1984a) – what Michel Foucault (1980) would characterize as the regimes of truth.

Along with my interest in geography’s history and in regions, I came across the Finnish Landschaft geographer J.G. Granö, who had worked in Estonia and Finland in the 1920–1930s (Paasi, 1984b). My curiosity arose, since many new views on his ideas since the 1970s displayed presentism, anachronistically understanding his past thoughts through existing concepts. Respectively he was slackly labelled as a representative of phenomenology, quantitative geography, perception geography, etc. I had some disagreement with Anne Buttimer on my critical views. Granö stressed in his Reine Geographie the importance of all senses in the analysis of Landschaft-regions, i.e., not only eyesight. However, his “observer” was not just anybody but a qualified Pure Geographer who examined the world through a well-defined conceptual framework and who rejected emotions. My interest in this continued when I, together with academician Olavi Granö (the son of J.G. Granö), later edited an English translation of J.G.’s Reine Geographie (Pure Geography 1997) for Johns Hopkins University Press (Granö, 1997). For a young novice, J.G. Granö provided a valuable Finnish role-model for practicing novel conceptual thinking that could travel beyond national borders.

Towards the Theory and Practice of the Region

Olavi Granö focused on geography’s history and science policy. He became an important mentor for my efforts, as did Bill Mead in the United Kingdom. Both had wide networks in Scandinavia and beyond, and they encouraged active international interaction. I was also in correspondence with some retired Finnish geographers, particularly academician Ilmari Hustich who examined my licentiate thesis and supported my efforts. This was crucial as social theoretical work was not encouraged within the Finnish human geographic community, which resounded mainly with Anglophone positivist research. The local professor in Joensuu appreciated theory but mostly followed thinking á la David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969). As an active local politician in the Centre Party, critical social science, let alone Marxism, was a red cape for him. Perhaps due to his interest in methodology he tolerated dissenting PhD students at the Department. I also studied sociology, social policy, and economics, which all had instructors that supported critical thinking. In social policy, for example, we prepared essays on Ricardo’s and Marx’s value theories and the Frankfurt School’s thoughts. In sociology of knowledge, we studied Berger and Luckmann’s (1976) The Social Construction of Reality that came into the references in international geography only later. This inspired my evolving views on regions and my ideas of theory.

Important interdisciplinary supporters for my efforts were the social scientists and humanists at Joensuu University’s Karelian Institute, but the most significant peers were my first young teachers and later colleagues. Pauli Tapani Karjalainen was a resource geographer who gradually turned to humanistic and existentialist geography and to the questions of geodiversity (Karjalainen, 1986). Perttu Vartiainen was a critical social geographer who had already published a brief monograph on geography’s history and its basic concepts (Vartiainen, 1978). Our small group was passionately devoted to work with socio-spatial theory and it provided support when some Finnish geographers openly mocked our work.

I had thus already worked with the concepts of region, regionalism and territory, and preliminarily analyzed the geo-history of Finnish regions as a research assistant in the Academy. The subsequent three-year research position in the Academy enabled a full-time focus on regions. My application for this job was carefully calculated. The representative of geography in the Council for Natural Sciences (sic!) was a pragmatic professor, again deeply involved with party politics (he was later an MP for the Centre Party). He was no devotee to theoretical, let alone critical geography. The representatives of academic disciplines in the councils, nominated by the state government, made funding decisions. No external experts or international panels were used, which are currently the order of the day. My plan focused on regional identity and its potential for regional development. Knowing the practice of decision-making in the Academy, I deliberately left out critical background literature to make the plan look as “neutral” as possible, drawing mainly on behavioral and humanistic geography. In order to study the rise of provinces and regional identity, I outlined an extensive content analysis of regional newspapers, a survey of citizens living in four provinces, and a plan to also widely use other useful materials. I got the funding and promptly turned to critical theoretical ideas on regions that were evolving in geography and social theory, and brought new literature together with the old stuff on regions. I also gradually got reprints from international geographers working actively on place and region. Empirical work started in tandem with the theoretical endeavors.

Emerging “New Regional Geography”

Academic keywords may remain even if the understanding of them changes (Paasi, 2011). Correspondingly, the lexis on regions transformed during the 1960s and 1970s. Old-style concepts of the region were largely replaced by abstract spatial thinking, highlighting functional nodal regions. Traditional approaches still hovered in North American cultural geography, in the geographies of education, and in many states in continental Europe where new positivist geography was just entering the discipline (Paasi, 2011).

In the middle of the still-dominant positivist approaches and the evolving humanist and Marxist critiques, Gregory (1978, p. 171) wrote that “Ever since regional geography was declared to be dead … geographers, to their credit, have been trying to revive it in one form or other... This is a vital task”. Accordingly, the challenge was to study the constitution of regionally embedded social formations, articulations and transformations. Concurrently Massey (1978, 1984) outlined methodological approaches from a Marxist perspective and argued that the region should not be taken as pre-given, but as a dynamic entity related to the spatial divisions of labor. Regions emerged from uneven economic development and consecutive, overlaying rounds of investment and capital accumulation expressed spatially. She suggested that the analysis should start from accumulation rather than from regions or any pre-specified regionalization of space (Massey, 1978, p. 116).

I had studied Gregory’s (1978) book as part of my licentiate degree in 1979. In spite of his appeal, it took years before the label ‘new regional geography’ was proposed by Thrift (1983). Thrift maintained that a non-functionalist critical social theory must take into account not only compositional but also the contextual determinations involved in the constitution of subjectivities. Hence, besides the focus on a compositional regional geography there was a need to advance a contextual regional geography. The region, for Thrift, was a sort of interaction structure, an “actively passive” meeting place of social structures and human agency that is made of a number different but associated settings for interaction. This idea of “stretching connections” (also Pred, 1984; Paasi, 1986a) anticipated the type of relational thinking that emerged in the 1990s, and for many still guides contemporary debates on regions (Paasi et al., 2018).

Anthony Giddens (1984) became influential in geography, perhaps partly because he leaned on Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography, partly because he showed the value of its key concepts for general social theory. Thrift’s approach had two components, locale and social action, both key elements in Giddensian thinking. As to Thrift’s (1983) extensive discussion on social theory, and its role as a stimulus for theorizing structure and agency, it did not inform explicitly how to re-conceptualize the region. It thus became less dominant in regional thinking, as it became as a source for general social theorization in the field of geography. Yet, Thrift was also later interested in new regional geography, as he was the first author of the Region and Place reports in Progress in Human Geography in the early 1990s.

The year after, Pred (1984) theorized place (or region) as a historically contingent process. “Place” was at that time largely earmarked by humanistic geographers and social theoretical ideas of regions were still embryonic. Pred combined heterogeneous elements, such as structuration theory, time-geography, biographies, socialization, division of labor, and the Vidalian thoughts on local milieus in framing the ways of life (genre de vie). Pred’s concrete examples focused on the historical geography of Sweden. Guelke (1985), however, soon argued that in spite of his emphasis on place and region as historically contingent process and his use of novel terminology, Pred was studying an old problem that in fact had been tackled earlier by historical geographers. Nevertheless, Pred undoubtedly tried to push forward a critical, emancipatory perspective of social theory instead of mere technical historical geographical analyses or descriptions.

Getting Involved with New Regional Geography Debates

Thrift’s and Pred’s work on regions in the 1980s, together with many other texts, inspired me to re-think regions. My intention was not to formulate a new version of regional geography or to prepare a “Finnish theory” of regions. Rather, I wanted to both theorize and do concrete research on the emergence of regions so that theory and concrete research would critically nourish each other and help to create relevant conceptual invariances that were not bound exclusively to some specific context.

These efforts were motivated by some problems or restrictions that I recognized in Pred’s approach. The first was to understand region and place unreflexively as the same entity. I saw region and place as abstractions of material and symbolic entities that become realized/materialized in the relations between individual and social action and social structures. I wanted to analytically theorize their differences in order to demonstrate how they could display different realms of socio-spatial practice and consciousness. Respectively, individual socio-spatial experience could be best appreciated by conceptualizing place in relation to experience and identity, whereas the region should be approached as a process, a dynamic set of social institutions, discourses and practices, exemplified in social or collective consciousness and identity (narratives). Place was hence related to an individual’s biography or life history and the region was a process originating from and occurring through numerous institutions – biographies may also stretch across regional borders. Secondly, Pred did not theorize where the region actually comes from. For him, the region seemed to be a terrain that is in a state of becoming, moves in time and where social processes and activities occur. This idea resonates with Hägerstrand’s way of illustrating time-geography with time-space cubes that depict a plane where movements and paths occur. If the region is both a process and an “end product” of a social construction, as I saw it, it must have a beginning and an end. In this process a region becomes institutionalized but can also become finally de-institutionalized (Paasi, 1986a, b, c, 1991). This is the case with all regions and territories.

Local Stimulus

I had published on the evolution of the concepts of space, region, and place in various national traditions and reflected on the social construction of regions, especially how they are epitomized in media and novels (Paasi, 1983, 1984c). One context-bound stimulant that I identified through my theoretical exercises was Heikki Kirkinen (1927–2018), professor of history and the rector of Joensuu University. He frequently wrote in the regional newspaper Karjalainen on how “our” Northern Karelian community and its regional identity are significant and how “we Karelians” do this and that. Without yet being familiar with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), my irritation with Kirkinen’s regional-cultural “propaganda”, as I saw it, and his identity-building efforts forced me to think about the role of individual actors and social institutions, such as regional newspapers and other media, voluntary associations and even novels in the making of regions and regional imaginaries (Paasi, 1984c, d). Likewise, this required me to think their role in how an imagined “us” is created by producing and reproducing ideas of a (bounded) regional community or regional identity (Paasi, 1984d, e). The mobilization of an anthropomorphic, fetishized language presenting the region as an actor or “performer” seemed to be typical in the process in which regions, borders and their meanings are constructed. I later labelled such institutional territorialization of meanings as spatial socialization (Paasi, 1996, 2021).

I interviewed Kirkinen (2008) 25 years later and he told me how he became interested in regional identity. While he was visiting professor at Sorbonne in the 1960s, regions came to the fore for him when French colleagues queried about Finnish regions and culture, and particularly when he returned back to his birth region Northern Karelia to start as a professor in Joensuu. He was an important regional advocate and had a tribalist, almost primordial idea of regional or provincial cultures and identities. He saw provinces as entities rooted partly in biology/genetics. He did not regard himself as a regionalist but was interested in broader cultural evolution and depressed marginal areas.

How to Move Forward?

Thinking about media spaces and the activities of regional actors confirmed to me that regions and their structures of expectations are socio-cultural constructs evolving as part of the spatial division of labor. This required to “locate” the origins of regions in geohistorical processes, social practices and discourses that constitute the heterogeneity and dynamism of the process that a region actually is. I soon started publishing on this topic in Finnish anthropological and geographical journals and wrote a couple of monographs (Paasi, 1984a, b).

Next, I began to outline the conceptual framework and an idea for a PhD monograph that would focus empirically on the making of four selected Finnish provinces. Again, a formative coincidence took place. Olavi Granö invited me to a conference on “mentality research” in Turku, Finland, organized by the Swedish Delegation for Long-term Motivated Research (SALFO) in June 1985. The conference brought together Finnish and Swedish historians, ethnologists and geographers. I presented the idea of the institutionalization of regions for the first time in English. Torsten Hägerstrand, the chairman of SALFO, was in the audience and suggested after my talk that I should write, in English, a proper article on my theoretical idea and expand my discussion on regions. Inspired by his encouragement, I started to outline an extended version of my paper, in parallel with my ongoing empirical work.

After finishing the draft in the autumn of 1985, I was in contact with Hägerstrand and asked if he would be interested in commenting on the text, which was now 80 pages long. He answered that he was not actually well aware of new theoretical ideas on regions, but that Allan Pred was in Stockholm and that he might be interested in reading it. Hägerstrand’s encouragement lowered the threshold to contact Pred (Hägerstrand, 1986). After Pred said yes, I sent the text to Stockholm and explained my theoretical intentions. Pred shortly replied that he had several remarks, so it would be best to travel to Stockholm to discuss these with him (Pred, 1985). I did and was very pleased with his helpful attitude in a situation where a young guy from a peripheral Finnish university challenged some assumptions of his theory that had come out only one year earlier (Pred, 1984). He had some comments on the text and new literature that it might be useful to check out. This one-day event was my only real “PhD seminar”. When I finally submitted the text to Fennia, I did not receive written comments from Finnish reviewers, only the editorial decision: accept.

The Concept of Theory

My theoretical exertions were stimulated by two books. Firstly, David and Judith Willer’s (1973) book which compared empiricist to scientific concepts of science (Paasi, 1986b). Empiricist science does not reach the level of theory since its concepts (often labelled as “theory”) are actually empirical categories bound to observed events. Respectively, theory is a set of propositions, or an organizational framework, that can be tested repetitively in new settings by using new data. Scientific science, they wrote, functions on a genuine theoretical level: the real basis for defining concepts are not specific empirical observations related to substances, but relations that the concepts show to each other.

A greater inspiration for me, however, was Andrew Sayer’s (1984) critical realist approach, which had some parallels with Willers’ approach. Sayer stresses conceptualization rather than using existing theoretical understandings as an ordering framework for empirical observations. The primary task of theorization is to conceptualize directly and indirectly observable features of an entity or an object of study. Existing theoretical wisdom is there, of course, backing theorization but not limiting it. In this vein, the study of the numerous concepts of regions created earlier in geography and other fields provided important backgrounds for my efforts, but theorization should move beyond them. Research should be constantly theoretically informed and observations theory laden. Methodologically this approach calls for the construction of abstractions, movement from the abstract to the concrete and from the simple to the complex in the identification of a phenomenon (cf. Beel & Jones, 2020). Relevant abstractions must be conceptualized in relation to each other, not generalized from empirical phenomena in the spirit of empiricism.

The challenge, then, was to identify and conceptualize a set of abstractions that are critical of the institutionalization of regions that occurs in institutional practices and discourses (in the fields of economy, politics, culture, media, or governance) where the assemblies of domination and power, signification, meaning-making and legitimation (Giddens, 1984) structure and are structured by this process. I recognized four processual abstractions (“conceptual invariances”) as critical ones, that is territorial, symbolic and institutional shaping, and the establishment of the region in the regional system and social consciousness, i.e., accomplishing an identity. Such processes occur as part of the spatial divisions of labor, in the matrix of cultural, economic, and political power relations. Contrary to a mundane understanding, regional identity must also be conceptualized by outlining relevant abstractions that can be examined empirically by using diverging materials, such as media discourses, questionnaires, novels, and data describing the diffusion of organizations and associations. The first step was an analytical distinction between the identity of a region and the regional identity of people (regional consciousness), which led to more nuanced categorizations (Paasi, 1986a), for example, to recognizing the hierarchical structure of regional consciousness, the ideal (mediated) and factual (concrete) dimensions of regional community, the internal and external images of the region or how scientists modify the images of regionality.

Correspondingly, the dimensions of regional institutionalization can be separated merely analytically (Paasi, 1986b). Borders are established in social practices in such spheres as economy, politics, governance, media and education, and rather than mere physical lines seen on maps, borders are significant as shifting social institutions, symbols and tools mobilized in social classification. Similarly, the oft-contested symbolism of regions is created in institutional practices that are critical in the reproduction of territorial and symbolic shapes. Regions, their boundaries, symbols and institutions are hence not the results of autonomous and evolutionary processes but are instead expressions of power relations and a perpetual struggle over the meanings associated with space, representation, democracy and welfare. The keyword here is practice.

Finally, in late 1986, I defended my thesis. It consisted of a synopsis, the Fennia article and a 350 pages long comparative analysis of the institutionalization of four Finnish provinces, written in Finnish. No more than six months after defending my thesis I applied for my current professorship in Oulu, but also soon started working as a senior assistant in Joensuu.

Reception of the Theory, Further Networking and Move to an Increasingly Competitive Work Environment

The label “new regional geography”, launched by Thrift (1983), became popular two years later through Gilbert’s (1988) review. For some scholars, new regional geography was a project ‘coming from the left’ (Sayer, 1989), but Gilbert recognized three approaches. Firstly, a ‘materialist’ approach, focusing on the political-economic basis of regions and the spatial organization of social processes associated with a specific mode of production. It stresses capital circulation within such processes. Secondly, the region is approached as a setting for social interaction that is critical for the production and reproduction of social relations. The social, cultural and spatial are understood as constituents and outcomes of each other, as emphasized in Gregory and Urry’s (1985) collection. Thirdly, regions and places are approached as significant in cultural terms that accentuates spatial identities.

Gilbert (1988) provided the first major international response to the idea of the institutionalization of regions. She appreciated my geo-historical approach when discussing the future of regional geography. Her encouraging review came out just before I was about to travel to a conference on community studies in Edinburgh, in 1988. More important than the conference was a chance to meet some British geographers in London, Loughborough, and Newcastle before the conference.

In 1987 I participated at the Nordic Symposium on Critical Human Geography in Sweden where the keynote was given by Ray Hudson, a renowned Marxist economic geographer with a longstanding interest in the places of production and the production of places (Hudson, 2001). During my visit to UK in 1988, a letter had come from Jim Lewis (1988), who wrote that his colleague Hudson had proposed me as a session speaker to the conference of the Institute of British Geographers in January 1989. I naturally accepted and participated in a session organized by Nigel Thrift and chaired by David Sibley. The venue was packed, doubtless because of regulation theorist Alain Lipietz. The last speaker, coming from peripheral Finland, had to witness an almost theatrical loss of audience.

In the conference I met sociologist Mike Savage and geographer Simon Duncan, two emerging figures in locality studies in the United Kingdom. Such studies both theorized and scrutinized empirically industrial restructuring in selected localities, thus resonating with the new regional geography. The approach stimulated a wide theoretical discussion on the limits of locality studies, although the locality concept itself soon disappeared from geographical debates. Savage visited Joensuu later in the spring, presented in a local conference and we continued our dialogue on regions and localities. I also wrote a conceptual paper to the journal Sosiologia to introduce locality studies to Finnish sociologists (Paasi, 1989).

I finally started as professor at Oulu University in August 1989, after responding to seven complaints from altogether 14 applicants. Appellants criticized me for being too young and inexperienced – and for being a social scientist! The move to Oulu was a shock, because geography was located in the Faculty of Science. In research the key thing that mattered were publications classified in the Web of Science (WoS) and their impact factors. According to the faculty’s criteria, geography’s output was pure zero. This forced geographers to pay serious attention to internationalization. Yet the faculty’s policy was a nightmare until the department slowly became more “competitive”. Publishing language inexorably changed into English. This situation aroused my interest in inequalities in academia and in the use of power, often by dominant fields. This theme became topical at the turn of the millennium in the debates on Anglophone hegemony in geography, which I also participated in later. I will return to this issue in Coda.

My work with socio-spatial theory continued. In the autumn of 1989, I was invited to contribute to a special issue on localities in Environment and Planning A, edited by Savage and Duncan. My paper Deconstructing regions: notes on the scales of human life further theorized the idea of regional institutionalization (Paasi, 1991). Other authors were renowned scholars, such as Doreen Massey, Andrew Sayer, Kevin Cox, Andy Pratt and Peter Jackson. Some papers aimed to contest the economism of locality studies and to outline more culturally sensitive discursive approaches. The Deconstructing article has since “traveled” widely across disciplinary, linguistic and national borders. Perhaps because it provided a conceptual framework for “regions” rather than localities, perhaps, because political scientists, historians and many others were just beginning to find regions interesting, or perhaps, because there was an acute need for socio-spatial theory in the critical studies of bounded spaces.

Theorizing the Political Geography of Bounded Spaces

After defending my thesis in 1986 I was, however, dissatisfied: my survey materials did not tell much about the personal place-dimension of institutionalization that I had theorized in the Fennia-paper. The results of my survey were too general, researcher-led and far from people’s everyday experiences. In the spring of 1987, I started a new project that would study institutionalization from the viewpoint of everyday experiences and “place”, with in-depth interviews, documents, novels, archive materials, etc. I focused on a small border municipality, Värtsilä. Before the Second World War, a major iron factory, the Wärtsilä Company, was in this place, which had arisen in the early nineteenth century along with the emerging spatial divisions of labor. As usual, the firm dominated local practices from work and health care to the wider social life. After the Second World War, the locality was divided by the new state border when Finland was forced to cede Karelia to the Soviet Union. Over 400.000 Karelians moved elsewhere in Finland. This context raised my interest in political geography, geopolitics and borders (Paasi, 1990).

Interviews showed that the new closed state border was a critical element in local consciousness. Generation was an important social category that divided the spatial imagination and memory of local people (cf. Mannheim, 1952). Its role was highlighted because the old community remained behind the new border. Many old people still identified emotionally with the old community and had memories of an idealized community life. For generations born after the war the border was a geopolitical fact, often with no deeper emotional role. People’s memories thus varied according to their biographies. I concluded that perhaps we should understand place not as a location-based category but rather as something related to the unique assemblages of memories and experiences that each of us develop during our life-histories in different localities and which we ultimately bring into grave when we pass away (Paasi, 1991, 1996). This interpretation aroused some interest among American psychiatrists who contacted me (Fullilove, 1996).

The significance of the Russian border took me to a survey of geographic border literature. Borders were typically seen as concrete manifestations of state sovereignty, contextuality was often understood as actual border landscapes, cultural and emotional meanings of borders were regularly disregarded, and studies were often descriptive and practical. I found more sensitive approaches in anthropology and cultural studies. I outlined an approach where borders could be theorized as processes, institutions and discourses embedded in the wider institutionalization process of territories, the socio-spatial production of space, and the spatial socialization that made them meaningful. Respectively, borders were not only “edges” but stretch widely over (and often beyond) a territory in social practices, discourses and symbolisms, and manifest themselves variedly in (national) landscapes, media, art and narratives (Paasi, 1996).

Thus, the motivation to study the institutionalization of Värtsilä as a place and a region turned into a multiscale project where the geo-history of this unit and its “becoming” was examined as part of the wider institutionalization of the Finnish state. Rather than neutral lines, I saw borders as critical spatial elements in the nation-building process, socio-spatial consciousness, collective memory and contested identity narratives, as theorized in Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (Paasi, 1996). Making this book took eight years and, in the meantime, major geopolitical upheavals occurred. After the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed and I was fortunate to document this process through conceptual horizons and concrete materials at (and across) various scales, from daily life to a global sense of place. The timing was excellent since border studies were just arising around the world.

Several readers went through the manuscript, one being Mike Savage, who was skeptical of a book about the context of the Finnish border being of interest to publishers in the United Kingdom, perhaps implying a question concerning where theory is expected to be produced (core) and where limited case-studies should come from (peripheries). Peter Taylor (1991), however, was sympathetic to the book’s geohistorical approach and eventually it was accepted and published in Wiley’s Political Geography series. In his Series Editor’s introduction to the book, Taylor highlighted its value for studies on nationalism. His introduction and the encouraging reviews by Agnew (1996) and several border scholars perhaps helped to recognize it also as a conceptual contribution rather than a peripheral case study.

Work on border issues continued. I had met David Newman, a UK-Israeli border scholar in a conference on borders in Basel in 1994. We shared an idea that border studies needed theoretical vigor. Soon after my book was published (1996), he came to Oulu for a week, during which we wrote the “Fences and Neighbours in the Postmodern World”-article and submitted it to Progress in Human Geography. I finished my part of the revisions as a visiting scholar at UCLA, where I had an opportunity to discuss the text with Nick Entrikin and John Agnew. The paper was accepted and came out in 1998. It expanded the evolving conceptual ideas on borders into an interdisciplinary research agenda (Newman & Paasi, 1998), which conceivably explains its very widespread circulation across academic fields and national borders. With these two works I apparently got the label “political geographer” instead of earlier “new regional geographer”. I soon wrote on borders, but incessantly also on regions, territory, identity and nationalism to journals and edited collections published in the fields of (critical) geopolitics, political geography, political science, and human and cultural geography, for example.

My interest in borders, regions, territories and identities has moved between several themes, but these keywords and their relations are constantly at the core. I have re-worked them towards diverse thematic and conceptual contexts (border studies, identity research, nationalism studies, planning theory). As to regional theory, a particularly stimulating task was to write three reports on region and place in Progress in Human Geography. This provided a good chance to reflect topically on conceptual issues related to regional worlds/words, regional identity and scale. My border research has focused on expanding our understanding and critique of the given status of state borders and how borders are mobilized in identity building and resistance. More recently ethical issues related to borders, activism and mobilities have come into focus (Paasi et al., 2019). Similarly, spatial planning, hard and soft regions and regional mergers have provided a useful context for reflecting on the meanings and functions of borders and identities at various scales (Paasi, 2013; Paasi & Zimmerbauer, 2016; Zimmerbauer & Paasi, 2020). These works confirm that “political” and “regional/territorial” are two sides of the same coin and that the key for understanding the regional and territorial modalities of space and their relations is social practice. Several tendencies around the world have shown the incessant significance of regions and regionalism: neoliberal globalization, the rise of supra-state regions, devolution, regional mergers, etc. There is a need for critical polymorphic approaches where the territorial and the relational are understood as intertwined and constantly transmuting (Paasi, 2021; Paasi & Metzger, 2017). The same need to recognize multiplicity should characterize border studies.

Reflective Interpretation: Brokers and Boundary Spanners

I commenced this chapter with an observation that the theory of institutionalization has travelled widely across national borders, even if outlined in a linguistic and academic periphery. In this section, I will discuss what is required from theories to travel from peripheries towards cores. While various indexes are today available to trace publications that have traveled widely, a human element is significant in making publications visible across borders. Seemingly, boundary spanners are needed in the academic landscape dominated by the Anglophone hegemony, that is, actors who support the mobility of knowledge across national and linguistic borders and, contrary to gatekeepers, operate as knowledge brokers and transfer knowledge produced in peripheries to wider audiences and cores (Jöns & Freytag, 2016). De Pater (2019) discusses why some non-Anglophone studies have been recognized in international debates and suggests that this requires “mediators” (bemiddelaar). He recognizes Allan Pred as one example. Pred translated Hägerstand’s Innovationsförloppet ur korologisk synpunkt (1953) into English (1967), which introduced the book to a wider audience, and he “updated” the keywords in the title to reflect the conceptual development in geography (term “chorological” was thus replaced with “spatial process”) (Paasi, 2011). Similarly, de Pater names Pred, Thrift and Giddens as mediators of Hägerstrand’s time-geography.

De Pater also discusses the wide reception of my Fennia-article, names Ron Johnston as a mediator and suggests that his discussion on institutionalization theory in A Question of Place (Johnston, 1991) led to the international discovery of this paper. This may be, but the concurrent positive commentaries by others (Gilbert, 1988; Murphy, 1991; Taylor, 1991) were undoubtedly significant too. Likewise, “Deconstructing regions” (Paasi, 1991) seemingly started its travel after Reynolds (1994) introduced it extensively in Progress in Human Geography. Gordon MacLeod and Martin Jones (2001), representing a new generation of British regional theorists, were also important mediators. Jones (2018, 2021) has been one of the most energetic regional theorists and has advanced socio-spatial theory and the “New, New Regional Geography”. This shared interest in regions led to a cooperation between Jones, John Harrison, and myself. Harrison was a former doctoral student of Jones at Aberystwyth University, where Jones held a visiting professorial position, at the same time as he was a docent at Oulu University. We have emphasized the need for a consolidated regional geography after a long period of fragmentation (Jones & Paasi, 2015; Paasi et al., 2018). It remains to be seen whether this suggestion will find wider support from the geographical community.

As to earlier mediators in Norden, Hägerstrand was the initial broker in Lund. He asked me to send Fennia’s reprint to historian Sven Tägil, who used it in his Organizing European Space (Jönsson et al., 2000). Historian Torsten Malmberg, the author of Human Territoriality, soon wrote to me that Tägil introduced the Fennia paper to him. I soon after this received reprint requests and invitations to speak in various meetings for Nordic geographers, historians, and ethnologists. This opened the first steps to internationalization, visits to various departments and the path to interdisciplinary Nordic projects and conferences on regions, identity and regional development organized by Nordic Institute of Regional Policy Research (NordREFO), for example. Territories, boundaries and consciousness and “Fences and neighbors” opened connections and frequent visits beyond the Nordic context.

Coda: Thymos and the Need for Recognition?

Why do we do research, search for new knowledge or try to internationalize in the journeys of our careers? Science studies stress the individual and institutional motives of scholars. Institutional motives are today increasingly directed by university managers and state ministries towards “competition”. These are neoliberal tendencies and are often resisted by scholars but nonetheless seem to dominate academia around the world. Individual motives intermingle with institutional ones. Scholars like Bourdieu (1975) had a very calculating view of science as a competitive social field where the activities of researchers are political investment strategies directed towards the future. Cronin (2005) writes that the growing significance of symbolic capital in academia has resulted in a “political economy of citation” (p. 5) and the “economics of fame” (p. 130), i.e., visibility. Thus, the question of recognition, a crucial category for current psychology, identity studies, and political science or international relations theory comes to the fore.

Already Plato had divided the “soul” into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Accordingly, thymos means that people want other people to recognize their or their reference group’s worth (Brooks, 2006; Fukuyama, 2020). In geography, Johnston (2005, p. 2) has stressed the motive of academics to be recognized: “Along with the charisma/status of publishing in a prestigious outlet, however, there is an issue of audience. Academics want their papers to be read and then cited, to be used as exemplars in later works.” Increasing individualization in the contemporary world accentuates maybe even more such desires and social media has reinforced this. As the context for academic “competition” – rankings and evaluation cultures – has gradually expanded from the local and national scales to the international scale, it is very likely that researchers’ Thymos also adjusts to this rescaling. This may raise both individual and institutional claims for one’s publications to be recognized similarly as those of peers or, echoing methodological nationalism, expectations that studies and theories published in a certain national context should also be recognized in other contexts. Articles by Jöns and Freytag (2016), Korf (2021) and Müller (2021) demonstrate that this issue is real when the pressures for internationalization characterize current academia.

Demands to publish in top (Anglophone) journals listed in the WoS have also rapidly developed in non-English speaking countries. I noted above how I faced the unequal use of tools like Web of Science when I started at Oulu University 32 years ago. This led me not only to efforts in terms of “internationalizing” my own research but also to scrutinize empirically how representative the journals in WoS are (Paasi, 2005). Only a few geography journals published outside of the Anglophone world were covered in WoS at the turn of the millennium. Since then, more non-Anglophone geography journals have been listed, making it easier to “satisfy” the claims for internationalization put forward by universities and ministries. Such external claims combined with individual ambitions probably mean that evermore often scholars aim to publish in “top journals”. Consequently, non-Anglophone scholars today publish increasingly in major Anglophone journals. But mere publishing is apparently not enough. Thymos is the psychological origin of political action (Brooks, 2006). Thus, requests have arisen that research and theories produced also outside of the Anglophone core should be better recognized and cited (Korf, 2021; Müller, 2021).

Simultaneously the number of researchers is mounting and numerous researchers will face the problem stated fairly arrogantly by Fuller (2002, p. 177), “the main reason most academics cannot muster the attention of their colleagues to read their works has more to do with the fact that they write too much that interests too few”. This issue is highlighted because international publishing space is not homogeneous but provides uneven publishing opportunities and impacts on how publications find readers. Where you work, still makes a difference, especially in the social sciences. Fortunately, in some areas like border studies internationalization has rapidly progressed and since the English language is widely used, this makes transnational communication easier. Further, due to the mobility of scholars and the internationalization of this field, there is perhaps no need to try to “locate” cores and peripheries. Yet this does not remove structural inequalities that exist in gender, generational and ethnic relations in the evermore precarious academia.