postmodernism and constructivism caveats

p268-269 On some basic level, all social sciences since at least Durkheim have or at least should be constructivist in their self-understanding (see also Hacking 2000). That is, accept the idea that the social world is a humanly constructed (i.e., not naturally or essentially given) reality, that our very methods of data gathering, categorization, and representation themselves construct in a certain way. It accepts that social scientists are a part of the social world they are constructing knowledge-- and techniques of knowledge gathering-- about. But it is no less real for that, and no less true when successful, especially if these techniques are embedded in a socially shared habitus of scientific practice (as opposed to literary, journalistic, political practice, etc.), that sustain the autonomous social power of recognized academic work (see (Bourdieu et al. 1977).

What a constructivist empiricism might enable is a rethinking of migration theory that helps us rebuild a more politically autonomous and scientific form of studying the subject, while not letting go of the incontrovertible need for a less disciplinary and more global approach. The point here is that we do not want to endorse procedures or methods that remove for us the very material "fact" that migration is something that happens when a real (physical) person moves in real (physical) space. While one can accept the point that Susan Hardwick might make, that all geographies in the end are collective social representations of space, which are thus socially relative and mental in nature, it would go too far to suggest that space itself is a wholly subjective or mentally constructed fiction. People move, and the material physical distance of those moves matter, as do the physical borders that separate different social units in space and define what counts as spatial movement. The postmodern cultural turn in population geography, in rejecting the "objectivist" or "positivist" old geography, unfortunately has tended to want to collapse all material space into socially constructed space, thus in a sense negating geography's most interesting and valuable contribution to the social sciences.