Why the history and philosophy of geography matter: Louise Michel's radical, anticolonial, and pluralist geographies Federico Ferretti y Alma Mater Studiorum Universit a di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Educazione “G.M. Bertin”, Studio 70, Via Filippo Re 6, 40126 Bologna, Italy article info Article history: Received 7 April 2022 Received in revised form 10 March 2024 Accepted 11 March 2024 Keywords: History and philosophy of geography Critical geography Decoloniality Feminism Anarchism abstract In this short paper, I contend that the history and philosophy of geography should be considered as an indispensable scholarly field to nourish both theoretical speculations about geography and ongoing scholars' political and social engagement towards critical, radical, decolonial, feminist and antiracist geographies. I argue that rediscovering ‘other geographical traditions’ is paramount to these scholarly and political agendas. After briefly summarising my political and theoretical references, I discuss the example of the work of anarchist, feminist and anticolonial activist Louise Michel (1830e1905) to make the case for the inclusion of new figures and ideas in the field of new decolonial, multilingual and pluralist histories of geography. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). In this short paper, I first and foremost aim to launch a militant plea, which endorses historical and theoretical approaches to ge- ography. This plea is also a liberating challenge to charges that his- torical and cultural geographers, historians of geography and critical scholars in general face daily in most geography departments around the world. Explicitly or implicitly, we are constantly told that we are irrelevant, that while we chatter the real income comes from others doing concrete things such as GIS and similar, that nobody un- derstands what we say and that, at best, what we do is nice and interesting, but ultimately a luxury that the neoliberal university cannot afford. I would instead argue that it is time to say boldly that, if all our overt or implicit detractors are where they are it is because, one day, someone fought to make geography a scholarly discipline with epistemological statutes and prestigious genealogies. My main argument is that fostering the relevance of geography today does not mean pleasing marketing logics by offering medi- ocre notions of ‘employability’ for paying customers in our classes. As Johnston and Sidaway suggested of Anglo-American de- partments in the second half of the twentieth century, when ‘dis- ciplines and scholars had to prove their relevance and sell their skills in the market-place [then] academic freedom was … cur- tailed, simply by denying it resources’. 1 Similar processes are currently ongoing within and beyond the anglosphere, in the framework of dominant neoliberal ideas accepting market's dogmas on the commodification of knowledge. In contrast, I contend that the relevance of geography is in its capacity to foster consciousness of social issues and to help in- dividuals to acquire their own critical tools to transform society by gaining more justice, equality and inclusion. For this, the history and philosophy of geography (hereafter HPG) is indispensable, because without their historical frames radical and critical ap- proaches would not make sense, and geography would become uncritical learning of technical skills. For relevant and engaged histories of geography To this end, it is paramount to adopt epistemic pluralism and to refuse dogmatic stances such as the adoption of universal models against which people and places are normalised. This is shown by scholarship arguing for the need to use theory as a toolbox rather than as a unique model. 2 Decolonial and pluriversal critiques of epistemicides also value forms of knowledge that are different from Euro-centric theories. 3 As the term ‘epistemicide’ mainly refers to the colonial and postcolonial destruction of different ways of E-mail address: federico.ferretti6@unibo.it. y https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/federico.ferretti6. 1 Ron Johnston and James D. Sidaway, Geography and Geographers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 32. 2 Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley, 2013); Claudio Minca, ‘Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography’, in International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography ed. By Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), pp. 363e72. 3 Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (eds.), A World of Many Worlds (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Episte- mologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.03.004 0305-7488/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Journal of Historical Geography xxx (xxxx) xxx Please cite this article as: F. Ferretti, Why the historyand philosophy of geography matter: Louise Michel's radical, anticolonial, and pluralist geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2024.03.004