The continuing enchantments of humanistic geography

This short article responds to David Seamon’s autobiographical account of his journey in humanistic geography through reflection on our own journeys into human geography. Drawing inspiration from Anne Buttimer’s work on the practice of geography, we begin by using our childhood experiences of place, undergraduate studies, doctoral research, and a 2013 paper that called for a (re-)enchantment of human geography to share our sense of continuities rather than ruptures with respect to humanistic ways of thinking. We follow this material with a discussion of our neurodivergent experiences of academic space, bringing to the fore the absent presence of neurodiversity in a focus on people and human agency and the potential of early humanistic geography to better account for neurodivergent modes of experience. In conclusion, we consider the continued value of ‘humanistic geography’ and the potential of ‘humility’ for future geographical work.