Universalism, in human geography, signals the position that ideas of development produced in Western social sciences hold for all times and places.
In the late 19th and 20th century, Émile Durkheim wrote that "the truths of [modern] science are independent of any local context", echoing the Enlightenment's philosophies and assuming an isotropic globe, thus allowing homogeneity to overtake difference.
Through the imperialist expansion by the west and the successive colonisation around the globe, supposed universal "truths" began to diffuse across borders, space and place.
The realization that the truths may not be universal across different spaces was an important factor in the 1970s, when questions arose of nationally varying styles of science.
By the mid-1980s, geographical sensibility towards science increased, seeking to show that locality and spatial situation needed to be remembered to understand how scientific knowledge was made, became credible and flowed globally.