Geography at Bristol: An Historical Account of the School of Geographical Sciences Prepared for the University's Centenary Celebrations in 2009 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Centenary of the Department of Geography, University of Aberdeen
Scottish Geographical Journal, 2019
Prior to the amalgamation of Aberdeen's two medieval universities in 1860, Geography had been taught to undergraduate students at both King's and Marischal Colleges since at least the late 16th Century. First mooted in the early 1900s, it was not until 1919 that a lectureship in Geography at Aberdeen was created and a 'Department of Geography' came into being. In this contribution we chronicle how, over a century, the Geography department has evolved, highlighting developments in the curriculum and research-related activities. The early decades of the Department were shaped by John McFarlane, the first and only full-time appointee in Geography until his retirement in 1945. The post-World War II period, led by Andrew O'Dell, saw Geography develop into a large and influential Department. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Department (and University) experienced unprecedented levels of growth. Student numbers, research output and income accelerated apace. In the recent past national assessments of research and teaching quality and institutional restructuring have prompted further change. As the Department enters a second century it remains committed to delivering a high quality education to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to the pursuit of excellent geographical research.
This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981e2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). We show how organisational, sociocultural, and epistemic changes were coproduced, as expressed by three significant findings. Organisationally, the group emerged through shared philosophical interests of two early career geographers at Queen's University of Belfast in 1981 and received new impetus through its strategic plan 1995e1997, which inspired long-term research collaborations. Socioculturally, the group's activities contributed to national traditions of geographical thought and praxis in masculinist academic environments, with instances of internationalisation, increasing feminisation, and organisational cooperation. Epistemically, the group's events in the 1980s shaped contextualist, constructivist, and critical approaches, and coproduced new cultural geography, but the emphasis shifted from historically sensitive biographical, institutional, and geopolitical studies of geographical knowledges, via critical, postcolonial, and feminist geographies of knowledge-making practices in the 1990s, to more than-human and more-than-representational geographies in the early twenty-first century.
Geographers and the scholarship of teaching and learning
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2018
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[Ron_Johnston,_James_Sidaway]_Geography_and_Geography_since_1945.pdf
Geography and Geographers provides a survey of the major debates, key thinkers and schools of thought in human geography in the English-speaking world, setting them within the context of economic, social, cultural and political, as well as intellectual, changes. It focuses on the debates among geographers regarding what their discipline should study and how that should be done, and draws on a wide reading of the geographical literature produced during a seventy-year period characterised by both growth in the number of academic geographers and substantial shifts in conceptions of the discipline’s scientific rationale. The pace and volume of change within the discipline show little sign of diminishing; this seventh edition covers new literature and important developments over the past decade. An insightful and reflective examination of the field from within, Geography and Geographers continues to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date single volume overview of the field of human geography. This seventh edition has also been extensively revised and updated to reflect developments in the ways that geography and its history are understood and taught. Providing a thoroughly contemporary perspective, the book maintains its standing as the essential resource for students and researchers across the field.
This introduction to the special issue Reflections on Histories and Philosophies of Geography discusses the context and content of nineteen articles written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGSIBG). The group was founded in 1981, two years after the early career researchers who set up the group, Richard T. Harrison and David N. Livingstone, published jointly their first critical interventions in support of human geography's paradigmatic shift away from positivism, based on an early form of social constructivist argumentation. We argue that the subsequent proliferation of epistemic pluralism, which is discussed in the contributions to this special issue and has characterised the activities organised by the HPGRG, exemplifies the considerable value of three historiographical practices: first, engaging with the history and philosophy of geography collectively in one research group; second, situating methodologies within the history and philosophy of geography; and third, critically interrogating the discipline's evolving geographical knowledges, professional practices, and material cultures from different authorial positionalities.
Area, 2015
This paper considers recent patterns of departmental change in the management of Geography in UK universities. It notes the increasingly multidisciplinary management of Geography since the mid-1990s. Various measures of this trend are explored and discussed. The paper also considers the problematic accommodation of Geography within the faculty structures of institutions. These findings speak of a problematic identity for the discipline within this institutional context. The paper goes on to consider some of the impacts of these trends for the practice of Geography in UK higher education.
The London Geography Alliance: Re-connecting the school subject with the university discipline
London Review of Education, 2016
The London Geography Alliance was established to provide a network of subject-based support to primary and secondary schools, by linking teachers and university lecturers. Workshops and fieldwork were conducted over a 17-month period to address different aspects of the geography curriculum. The effects of the project were evaluated using qualitative and quantitative methods. Primary school teachers improved their knowledge of geography and their confidence to identify and facilitate geographical learning. Secondary school teachers enhanced their subject knowledge, developed new ideas, schemes of work and resources for teaching, and improved their use of fieldwork techniques. The project showed how teaching in schools can be improved through making links to university disciplines.