Any history of science has its own geography as well. Geographers of science have tried to put science in its place. They study the socio-spatial settings in which scientific knowledge was generated, displayed and legitimated. For them, science is socially constructed in spatialities and temporalities. The main question should to be “how” spatialities are constructing scientific knowledge via its “causalities”. Geography of science is not just about special places, locations, and regions in which scientific knowledge is unequally produced/consumed and circulated or how the use of scientific knowledge can lead to the production and reproduction of unique places and spaces. Geography of science is also about a variety set of spatial causalities through which scientific knowledge can be formed and transformed. This also means that the innovative knowledge or ideas development takes place not only in the spatial contexts but because of the spatial causalities which rise from the myriad interlinkages and interdependencies among places. These imperatives of spatial significance operate across many spatial scales from the body to the global. Hence, in our increasingly glocalized world, we must seek knowledge in spatial encounters and betweenness of places, not merely within spaces and places.

When I first encounter this brilliant idea from historical geographer Charles Withers that, “if we can have a history of science, a philosophy of science and a sociology of science, why not a geography and, even, a historical geography of science?” [1] (p. 9) it seems to me really like an undiscovered continent. The first lesson I learned through this journey was that historians of geography have failed to attend to the spatial components of their tradition's history in one sense; that is the history of geography has frequently been written with little reference to the placing of geographical knowledge in its various spatialities or putting science in its place; Because we always act on this widespread assumption that securing credibility and achieving objectivity required “placelessness” [2, 3, 4]. On the other hand, to be modern is to be beyond geography, but to paraphrase historian of science Bruno Latour, if aspatiality is modernity, we are not and have never been modern [2].

My reason for leaving this short note is that scientific knowledge has a spatial nature; I strongly believe that scientific knowledge shapes and is shaped by the spatiality; scientific knowledge generates and is generated by spatial encounters in terms of relational spatialities networks in a world of contingency and constant becoming. Therefore, this note tried to show very briefly that the geographies of science are not simply about spatial disparities of knowledge but also about the role that “spatial causalities” can play in the generation of scientific knowledge.

Interest in the geography of scientific knowledge has been of the significant domain in the past 20 years. But no serious attention has ever been taken to geographicalism of scientific knowledge prior to the “spatial turn” in philosophy, literature, and humanities/social sciences with the advent of some of the 1960s Parisians, including Foucault, Deleuze, and Lefebvre, and the revival and expansion of their thought after the 1980s. In the late 1980s, as cultural and social studies experienced a spatial turn, geographers began experiencing a concomitant “cultural turn”. The growing currency of geographicalism after the spatial turn is closely linked to the recognition of the key role of spatialities in the processes by which people (re)construct their understandings of the world. The main concern in “geographicalism” is the spatiality of scientific knowledge [3]. Therefore, the “geographical turn” is a kind of revealing of the infusion process of spatial vocabulary and languages into historical and philosophical accounts of scientific knowledge [4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

Geographicalism in science studies and all endeavors in this field reveal not only the power of spatialities in scientific knowledge but also the consciousness of human beings. So, to understand the nature of scientific knowledge, we must necessarily grasp the specific and inherent spatialities of the being in the world. It is critically important to pay attention to those places and spaces that have generated knowledge and then circulated and consumed it in different scales from the body to the global. At every geographical scale, “historicality”, “sociality” and “spatiality” are tightly interwoven [4]. According to Soja [5], historicality, spatiality and sociality are philosophical ingredients of ‘the trialectics of being’. Based on such an understanding, the geography of science and striving for putting science in its place, has developed since the early 1980s mainly with Livingstone [6, 7]; Naylor [8, 9]; Shapin [10]; Finnegan [11]; Powell [12]; Withers [13, 14] and Meusburger [15]. The research of these geographers is basically rooted in or inspired by views and theories of Michel Foucault, Henry Lefebvre, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, Anthony Giddens, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. The pivot focus of these geographers is to prove that geography (place and space) matters in the production of scientific knowledge. As Livingstone [16] (p. 3) emphasized, “space is rapidly becoming a central organizing principle for making sense of scientific knowledge.”

It concluded that the development of innovative knowledge and ideas took place not only in the spatial contexts but also they occur due to the spatial causalities associated with the myriad interlinkages and interdependencies among places and operate across many spatial scales from the body to the global. “The relational approach suggests that it is crucial to study and manage the social interactions and their contingencies that are fundamental to knowledge and innovation” [32] (p. 676). Hence, we must seek knowledge in spatial encounters and betweenness of places, not merely within places. Conjunctures of the multitude of hybrid, relational and mobile spatialities networks are the laboratories of the studies of geographers of science and historians of geography in the twenty-first century.

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

I am very grateful to Distinguished Professor Simin Tavallai (Department of Geographical Sciences, Kharazmi University, Iran) for her inspiring comments on drafts of this paper and their smart feedbacks.

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.