For a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious scientific geography

Contemporary geographic thought finds scientific approaches triangulated by critiques launched by various political economy, feminist, and poststructuralist positions. In aiming their conceptual arsenal at fixed understandings of scientific geography, however, such critiques run the danger of essentializing their intended target. Moreover, in the consequent stabilization of the trajectories taken by those critiques, the process of criticism itself becomes unreflexive exercise. In this paper we deploy the resources of poststructuralism to achieve an antiessentialist reading of scientific geography that moves beyond mere repudiation and seeks instead to identify a redemptive moment within this constellation of ideas and practices. To do so, we draw upon a modern-day parable - Mary Poppins - whose film version we read as offering a panorama on theoretical division in geography. Though ostensibly a story about an all-too-perfect nanny, the film's key protagonists serve as allegorical figures animating our analysis. Fortunately for all concerned, the banker/patriarch comes to the realization that he too can counntermand rather than reproduce the fixed spaces of everyday life.