Teaching Geography’s Histories by Following Geographical Practice: A Commentary on Simultaneity in the Nonsimultaneity

The history of geography is a history of geographical practices. In our book Weltbildwechsel (Schlottmann and Wintzer Citation2019), literally “shift of worldviews,” we propose to tell the history of the discipline by considering the manifold ways of engaging with the world: measuring, explaining, conquering, teaching, enlightening, perceiving, designing, differentiating, visualizing, and modeling. Each of these practices denotes a specific way of doing geography, embedded in its historical, social, and epistemic contexts. Rather than offering one coherent, linear, and continuous narrative, this approach highlights the existence of different worldviews enacted within and over time, uncovering simultaneity in the nonsimultaneity. In this commentary we revisit our approach by considering the recent contribution by Kinkaid et al. (Citation2025). We argue that such a historiography opens new pedagogical and epistemological avenues for teaching geography’s histories as plural, entangled, contingent, and at any time practice-based.