| name | phg-literature-positioning |
| description | Use when mapping and entering a large, contested literature for a Progress in Human Geography (PiHG) review essay — defining the corpus, its camps and debates, and where your intervention sits. Positions the essay in the field; it does not build the synthetic argument (see phg-argument-synthesis). |
Literature Positioning (phg-literature-positioning)
A PiHG review is judged partly on command of a literature — reviewers are usually leading figures in
the field, and they will notice what you missed, misread, or misattributed. This skill defines the
corpus (what you are reviewing and why), maps its camps and debates, and locates your entry
point so the essay reads as an authoritative, fair, and current intervention rather than a partial or
dated survey.
When to trigger
- Assembling and bounding the literature the essay will review
- Mapping who argues what, and where the real disagreements lie
- A reviewer said coverage is "partial," "dated," "US/UK-centric," or "misreads camp X"
- Deciding whose work anchors the debate and whose is peripheral
Define the corpus (make coverage defensible)
State what is in, what is out, and how you decided — even for a narrative review. Reviewers trust an
essay that is explicit about its net.
- Boundaries: sub-field(s), time window, languages, and any inclusion logic (key journals, citation
thresholds, or a structured search — see
external_tools.md).
- Currency: include the most recent work; a review that stops three years back reads as stale.
- Reach: watch Anglophone/Global-North parochialism — PiHG is an international journal; engage work
from beyond the usual centers where it exists, and name the limit honestly where it does not.
Map the debate, don't list the papers
Positioning is relational: show how the works stand to each other, not one-by-one.
| Do | Instead of |
|---|
| Name the camps and what divides them | Listing authors chronologically |
| Identify the crux the field is stuck on | Summarizing each paper's findings |
| Show who talks past whom (and why) | Treating the field as one smooth consensus |
| Locate the silences — what no camp addresses | Only covering what is well-trodden |
The silences and the talking-past are where your intervention (phg-critical-intervention) will land.
Position your entry (fair before critical)
- Steelman before you critique. Represent each camp at its strongest; a review that knocks down weak
versions loses the referees who built the strong ones.
- Attribute precisely. Credit ideas to whoever originated them; misattribution is the fastest way to
lose a reviewer who is in the literature (see the guardrail in
exemplars/library.md).
- Locate yourself. Say where your organizing concept (
phg-theory-building) sits relative to the
camps — extending one, cutting across several, or naming what all miss.
The referee-in-the-field test
Assume your reviewer wrote three of the works you cite. Would they say "yes, that is my field, fairly
drawn, and I hadn't seen it that way"? If instead they would say "you missed X, misread Y, and ignored the
Global South," the positioning is not yet PiHG-ready.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
- An author-by-author or year-by-year list with no map of the debate
- Parochial coverage (only the US/UK canon) presented as the whole field
- Dated corpus that misses the recent turn the review claims to address
- Knocking down straw-man versions of a camp
- Misattributing a concept to the wrong scholar or the wrong journal
Output format
【Corpus】what is in/out + how bounded
【Camps】the 2–4 positions and what divides them
【Crux】the disagreement the field is stuck on
【Silences】what no camp addresses (the opening)
【Your entry】where your concept sits relative to the camps
【Reach】Global-South / non-Anglophone work engaged? limit named? [Y/N]
【Next】phg-argument-synthesis
Supplementary resources
