Introduction: “Internationalizing and decolonializing geography: trends and challenges towards individuality and plurality”

This collective book is the result of two symposia organised by the Commission History of Geography of the International Geographical Union in July 2017. These sessions took place at the occasion of the 17th International Congress of History of Science and Technology, in the suggestive location of the Praia Vermelha Campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), with, respectively, the titles of “Geography as an international science” and “Critical, radical and postcolonial geographies and cartographies from early approaches to present-day debates”. These sessions were attended by scholars from Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, USA, Japan, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland and UK, and the successive debates highlighted the existence of different ideas on two big and polysemic words such as internationalism and de(post)colonialism. This introduction does not aim to define these words or explore their genealogies in geographical knowledge, but just to address some general trends and challenges that scholars involved in these circuits, especially historians of geography, are facing when they articulate their investigations with these terms.