This conference symposium focuses on the theme of ‘Geography and its publics’. Throughout its history, geography has been utilized to serve wider political, economic, social and cultural interests. Modern nation states, for example, employed cartographers to document geographical features as a basis to information for statistical intelligence and military operations. In the nineteenth century, business and government interests supported the foundation of geographical societies for the co-ordination of exploratory projects, reports of whose work often enthralled or enraged the general public. Since the institutionalisation of geography at the end of the nineteenth century, audiences for geographical knowledge have multiplied and diversified, reflecting a growing awareness of the production and application of geographical knowledge.

This conference symposium brings together scholarship on the nature of geographical knowledge in relation to geography’s publics as it is discussed in nine countries on four continents. The symposium is organised around three sub-themes of two sessions each, namely ‘Multiple publics’, ‘Geopolitics and exploration’, and ‘Geographical education and knowledge’. These sessions address a range of private and public workplaces in which geographical knowledge has been made and used as well as other settings, formal and informal, in which geography has been communicated to the wider public, mainly to shape people’s geographical imaginations and understanding. Key questions address the utility of geographical knowledge, the processes and practices that transfer geographical knowledge between different epistemological realms, the nature of a public for geography, and the wider impacts of geographical knowledge on society.