Making sense of the world: Formative works, intellectual influences, purposeful leadership

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Abstract

This reflective essay traces my intellectual formation through four influential works that shaped both my scholarship and leadership. Beginning with Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore, I discuss how cultural-historical geography sensitized me to landscapes as expressions of meaning, belief, and human-environment relations. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins’ Food First introduced a political economy perspective that foregrounded questions of power, inequality, and scholarly responsibility in addressing societal challenges. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, alongside related postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, prompted a critical interrogation of Western epistemic dominance and encouraged theorizing from Asia and other historically marginalized locations. Finally, Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered reinforced a commitment to public scholarship, institutional leadership, and the broader societal purposes of academic work. Together, these works illuminate an intellectual journey that moves from interpretation to critique, from epistemic reflexivity to engagement, and from individual scholarship to collective impact. More broadly, the essay reflects on how intellectual influences are situated within wider disciplinary and historical shifts, and considers the responsibilities of scholars in contributing not only to knowledge production but also to public discourse, institutional transformation, and societal well-being.

Keywords

decentring knowledge, intellectual formation, landscape as text, political economy, public scholarship

Discipline

Geography | Leadership Studies

Research Areas

Humanities

Publication

Social and Cultural Geography

ISSN

1464-9365

Identifier

10.1080/14649365.2026.2689056

Publisher

Taylor and Francis Group

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2026.2689056

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