“The end of geography at Harvard was typical of what happened to the field: university officials shut down its geography department in 1948, as CUNY geographer Neil Smith tells it, after being flummoxed by their ‘inability to extract a clear definition of the subject, to grasp the substance of geography, or to determine its boundaries with other disciplines.’ The academic brass ‘saw the field as hopelessly amorphous.’ But this ‘hopeless amorphousness’ is, in fact, the discipline’s greatest strength.”

–Trevor Paglen, artist, writer, and experimental geographer