Paul J Cloke

Hon FRSNZ, FBA, FAcSS, DSc (Bristol)

Paul Cloke HFRSNZ

Aotearoa New Zealand geographers, colleagues and friends were deeply shocked with the devastating news that Paul Cloke had died unexpectedly on Wednesday 25th May 2022. Emeritus Professor of Geography at Exeter University, Paul joined that university in 2005, having been in the Department of Geography, University of Bristol for many years, and previously at St David’s College, Lampeter, where he started his academic career. Paul Cloke's work was characterised by close ties with Geographers and Geography in Aotearoa, and as recently as 2018 Paul was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Canterbury where he was an Adjunct Professor in Geography.

It is a privilege as a FRSNZ and past Vice President of Social Sciences and Humanities in the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a human geographer, to reflect on Paul’s energising entanglement with the country’s academy. His productive links beginning in the early 1980s were recognised with the award of Honorary Fellow in 2005. Within the RSNZ awards framework this status is an unambiguous signal that the recipient has been a dedicated, influential, and successful weaver of connections and networks involving New Zealand researchers and creating opportunities for human geography researchers at all levels to step out into international research careers.

Paul’s illustrious career was punctuated by several key intellectual turning points which increasingly cemented his stature as a forward-thinking international researcher and scholar. What especially distinguished his increasingly holistic and morally and ethically guided intellectual journey from a base of rural studies was the synergistic foundations on which he built his efforts. He started a new and highly influential journal that became his flagship, he published sole authored and edited books (especially in the 1990s and later in the 2010s) that enabled him to reach out to very different academic and policy audiences, and the publication of pathbreaking Human Geography textbooks that have been enthusiastically adopted in many countries

His doctoral studies at Wye College inspired him to direct his early post-doctoral years to resetting the narrow research scene of rural geography initially in the United Kingdom and then more generally. His scholarly eye was sensitive to how to make improvements to life and livelihood in the rural context by revealing barriers to thought and cogently proposing new and insightful directions. In his interview when awarded the prestigious Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Medal in 2022 (Royal Geographical Society www.rgs.org/geography/news/victoria medal -professor-paul-cloke) he suggested that his student experiences and early years as a lecturer in human geography were very much conditioned ‘almost serendipitously ‘ by prevailing orthodoxies present in the period and places he inhabited. He argued for example that his undergraduate degree at the University of Southampton) pervasively introduced him to the notion of planning for a better and more efficient world. His increasing disquiet with this thinking was quickly translated into a steady stream of far thinking publications once he became an academic.

His initial publications from the late 1970s sought to bolster the nascent interest in rural studies. His Index of Rurality for the United Kingdom (Cloke 1977) became a benchmark for quantitative research into rural and still has international currency. It gave much credibility and equivalence to the emerging field of rural studies alongside a well-established British urban geography tradition (Cloke 1979, 1983, 1987).

He was motivated to formulate cutting edge questions that sprung from being able to vision ways out of disciplinary impasses and personally practice interdisciplinary and dialogic research. His agile mind and capacities led him to read vociferously and absorb and synthesise from many sources. He quickly became a spokesperson for rural and human geography political economy in the 1980s and socio-cultural perspectives in the 1990s which were sweeping scholarship both within and beyond rural studies.  

When he proposed and then became foundation Editor of the Journal of Rural Studies for 28 years, he unwittingly set the scene for a career that was to encompass productive and enduring links with New Zealand human geographers. His influence on New Zealand’s expanding geography academy was formative. New Zealand geography had a tradition of the New Zealand Geographical Society supporting publications that documented the country’s national development project. A colonial landscape gaze, for example, was captured by geographer Kenneth Cumberland in the TV series Landmarks, in 1981, celebrating past achievements but leaving hanging the necessary phrasing of compelling societal questions that would excite the generations of students and academics of a growing geography academy.

The arrival of the Journal of Rural Studies was a watershed moment in New Zealand human geography.  The journal was dedicated to the mission of being a catholic interdisciplinary platform, prioritising high standards of publication and debate and seeking to advance conceptual ideas as well as empirical originality. This agenda created an expansionary intellectual space for scholars and researchers from all persuasions and from around the world. The journal gained stature because of Paul’s inclusive academic leadership and the team effort with his wife Viv who was an Editorial Manager extraordinaire for the project. The Journal helped many in New Zealand from social science disciplines to be innovative in land-based research in the country and very mindful of the implications of changing resource uses and investment implications of current and proposed uses. This formed a strong counter current to the productivist ethos dominating agriculture, government and the academy, particularly in New Zealand in the 1970 and 1980s (see both Cloke et al. 1990 and Campbell et.al 2009).

The socio-cultural turn in the social sciences internationally during the 1990s and 2000s was an unprecedented opportunity for a creative mind so capable of seeing the enormous compartmentalisation of disciplinary initiatives and knowledge and the fruitful potential to do bridging work to open up new frontiers. His constant quest to better interpret and work within familiar and unfamiliar worlds saw him probing a diverse set of topics, some informed the weight of the ‘socio-cultural’ turn, others by his deep Christian faith (Cloke 1994, Cloke et al. 1997, Cloke 2004ab). Topics and concepts such as spirituality (and its absence in in most academic discourses), charity, agape, post-secularism, homeless and differential care frameworks amongst religious and lay providers of care, geographies ‘of the other’ and ‘for the other’, ‘out-of-sight and out-of-mind’ spaces of rurality and poverty more generally, and socio-hybridity and non-human agency garnered much following. The central place of issues of consumption within the geographical canon was highlighted with the publication of Globalizing responsibility: the political rationalities of ethical consumption (Barnett et al. 2010) and an Area Review Forum in 2013 on the book. Many of these directions drew on post-structural ideas of relational agency and performativity – signalling his growing penchant for enactive engagement ahead of ‘distanced’, ‘un-situated’ and ‘ungrounded’ commentary.

Arguably Paul Cloke was one of the most lateral thinking, versatile, original, and compelling human geographers of his generation. During the 1990s he mounted parallel conceptual and practical projects, all aimed at giving human geography contemporary standing as a vibrant, world-aware and socially centred and grounded subject at the university level. His primary vehicle was a remarkable series of co-authored high impact textbooks for undergraduate and graduate classes. Starting with Approaching Human Geography (1991), followed by the highly popular and widely acclaimed Introducing Human Geographies (1999, 2005, 2013, with a revised edition well advanced at his passing). The tour de force, however, was Practising Human Geography (2004), praised by one North American reviewer for its powerful and illustrative engagement with ‘why methodology matters, and why it is so hard’. The texts have set in motion intergenerational effects. This of course was Paul’s ambition, to lay the ground to radically transform human geography into a continually emerging and discriminating knowledge arena about broad societal questions, policy directions and choices, the ethics and moral dimensions of individual and group behaviours, and be capable of revealing new investment pathways which would attract on-going attention.

Cloke’s frequent research visits to Aotearoa New Zealand when he undertook both lecture tours and field work and ongoing collaboration with Prof Harvey Perkins (Lincoln University) who had a visiting Post-doctoral Leverhulme Fellowship at St David’s College, Lampeter, University of Wales in 1986, extended his research reach into tourism as an emerging and influential ‘rural’ activity. Papers on adventure tourism (Cloke and Perkins, 1998, 2002, 2005) were matched with outward looking research funded in 2004 by the British Academy on how Aotearoa New Zealand tourism was represented in the United Kingdom media.

At the time of his passing Professor Cloke and University of Canterbury colleagues were close to finalising a major project on the 2010-13 Canterbury earthquake sequence. Cloke et al. (2023) The Post-Earthquake City: Disaster and recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand offers lessons for understanding disaster recovery in crises. It illuminates opportunities disasters create for both the reassertion of the familiar and the emergence of the new, highlights the divergence of lived experiences during recovery ad considers the extent in which a post-disaster city is prepared for likely climate change. The project is being carried to completion by Prof Eric Pawson (University of Canterbury).

Selected references

• Barnett, C. Cloke, P. N. Clarke, A. Malpass (2010) Globalizing Responsibility. The political rationalities of ethical consumption. London, Wiley-Blackwell
• Campbell H. Burton R. Cooper M. Henry M. Le Heron E. Le Heron R. Lewis N. Pawson E. Perkins H. Roche M. Rosin C. and White T. (2009) ‘Forum: From agricultural science to biological economies?’ New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research, 52, 91-97
• Cloke, P. (1977). An index of rurality for England and Wales. Regional Studies 11, 31--46.
• Cloke, P. (1979). Key Settlements in Rural Areas. London: Methuen. 
• Cloke, P. (1983). An Introduction to Rural Settlement Planning. London: Methuen.
• Cloke, P. (1989). Rural geography and political economy. In Peet, R. & Thrift, N. (eds. ) New Models in Geography: The Political Economy Perspective, vol. 1, 164--197. London: Unwin Hyman.
• Cloke, P, Le Heron, R and Roche, M (1990) "Towards a geography of political economy perspective on rural change: the example of New Zealand", Geografiska Annaler, 72B, 1, 13-25.
• Cloke, P. C. Philo, D. Sadler (1991) Approaching Human Geography. An introduction to contemporary theoretical debates, Paul Chapman, London
• Cloke, P. (1994). (En)culturing political economy: A life in the day of a ‘rural geographer’. In Cloke, P., Doel, M., Matless, D., Phillips, M. & and Thrift, N. Writing the rural: five cultural geographies, London, Paul Chapman, 149-90
• Cloke, P., Milbourne, P. and Thomas, C. (1997). Living lives in different ways? Deprivation, marginalization and changing lifestyles in rural England. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 22, 210--230.
• Cloke, P and Perkins, H. (1998) “Cracking the canyon with the awesome foursome: Representations of adventure tourism and New Zealand” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 2, 185-218
• Cloke, P. and Perkins, H. (2002) Commodification and adventure tourism in New Zealand tourism, Current Issues in Tourism, 5, 6, 521-549
• Cloke, P. (2004a). Deliver us from evil? Prospects for living ethically and acting politically in human geography. In Cloke, P. (ed. ) Envisioning Human Geography, 210--228. London: Edward Arnold.
• Cloke, P. (2004b). Exploring boundaries of professional/personal practice and action: Being and becoming in Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town. In Fuller, D. & Kitchin, R. (eds. ) Radical Theory/Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy? 92--102. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press.
• Cloke, P., Cook, I., Crang, P., Goodwin, M., Painter, J. and Philo, C. (2004). Practising Human Geography. London: Sage.
• Cloke, P. Crang, P. Goodman, D. (2005) Introducing Human Geographies. London, Routledge
• Cloke, P. and Perkins, H. (2005) Cetecean performance and tourism in Kaikoura, New Zealand’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 6, 903-924
• Cloke, P. Crang, P. Goodman, D. (2013) Introducing Human Geographies. London, Routledge
• Review Forum 2013 Globalizing responsibility: the political rationalities of ethical consumption, Area, 45, 2, 256-263
• Cloke, P. Conradson, D. Pawson, E, Perkins, H. (2023) The Post-Earthquake City: Disaster and recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Abingdon, Routledge

Richard Le Heron with assistance from Michael Roche, Harvey Perkins and Eric Pawson