The nature of changes in human geography since the 1980s (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
This paper concerns the changes in human geographical research over the last 20 years as far as the mainstream Anglo-Saxon publications are concerned. We contend that although a lot of continuity appears through the further co-existence of the three broad approaches in geography (regional, theoretical quantitative and radical), societal and scientific changes have brought new elements into geographical practice. They can be captured with four characteristics: human geography is holographic, ethnographic, constructivist and institutionalist. The two first characteristics are metaphors of the geographical empirical stance that seeks to unveil the whole within the parts and the symbolic order behind everyday practice. The two others are more essential and point to the fact that geography now explicitly examines the socio-spatial reality as a social product shaped by and reshaping human institutions. As a result geography has made a lot of progress. It uses more relevant concepts to eng...
Editors\u27 introduction: human geography
2012
When we were invited by Sage to identify published work in human geography that represents what is best and most distinctive about the field it seemed an impossible task (it still does) because there is such a rich volume of material to draw from. We decided to focus on Englishlanguage and to a lesser extent other European contributions, although we are acutely aware of the irony, even the imperialism, of limiting a field like human geography to knowledges rooted in only a fraction of the world. We discuss below the dangers of delimiting Geography as a European or Euro-American science, and several of our selections return to this issue again and again. If there is a much richer geography of Geography than this, there is also a much longer history than our selections might imply. Our focus on the last thirty years is not an exercise in progressivism or triumphalism which treats the present as the climactic moment in a chain of contributions that reaches back into an ever more distan...
Editors' introduction: human geography
2012
When we were invited by Sage to identify published work in human geography that represents what is best and most distinctive about the field it seemed an impossible task (it still does) because there is such a rich volume of material to draw from. We decided to focus on Englishlanguage and to a lesser extent other European contributions, although we are acutely aware of the irony, even the imperialism, of limiting a field like human geography to knowledges rooted in only a fraction of the world. We discuss below the dangers of delimiting Geography as a European or Euro-American science, and several of our selections return to this issue again and again. If there is a much richer geography of Geography than this, there is also a much longer history than our selections might imply. Our focus on the last thirty years is not an exercise in progressivism or triumphalism which treats the present as the climactic moment in a chain of contributions that reaches back into an ever more distant and ever more imperfect past. Here too our decision was a purely pragmatic way to confine our search.
Applied aspects of human geography. A critical approach to traditionalist views
Journal of Geography, Politics and Society
Traditionally, applied aspects of human geography are mainly associated with economic geography, regional development and spatial planning. In the debate on the application potential of the discipline, a number of important problems of social, political and cultural geography, relevant to various contemporary processes on a global and regional scale, are marginalized. For this reason, the author undertakes a critical rethinking of the current debate on the applied aspects of research in human geography. A brief review of the conceptual and institutional development of applied geography in the world and in selected national schools is made. The author also distinguishes two research orientations: 1) strategic orientation – connected to studies carried out at the international, national and macro-regional spatial levels; 2) operational orientation – concerning applied studies undertook on a scale of separate municipalities, cities, neighbourhoods or even separate str...
The Active Role of Geography: A Manifesto
Antipode, 2017
The role attributed to geography and the possibility of a valid intervention by geographers in the process of social transformation depend on one another and result from the manner in which we conceptualize the discipline and its object.
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.
Geographies and Theories of Geography: An Introduction
Socio-Spatial Theory in Nordic Geography, 2022
Approaching Nordic human geography as an evolving community of practice with strong historical-geographical legacies, this chapter introduces the two overarching themes of the book. On the one hand, we foreground how geography has been, and is, theorised in Nordic human geography, particularly (but not exclusively) as socio-spatial theory. On the other hand, if often intersecting with the former, we seek to highlight the importance of historical-geographical context in geographical theorising and research. Following from this, and acknowledging that the balancing of these themes differs between the individual contributions, the chapter outlines the approach of the book.
Commentaries on “ The Active Role of Geography : A Manifesto ” Organised
2017
The fragmentation of geographical knowledge, reproduced in the training of geographers, is an obstacle that must be overcome for geography to assume an active role in transforming society. For Milton Santos, this overcoming involves a precise and original theory about how geographic space exercises an active role in the social process. In the Manifesto (Santos et al. 2000), the preoccupation with the fragmentation of geography is a problem that is continuously discussed and criticized. Fragmentation appears now in the form of a geography that is occupied with the study of locations, now as the fairly common practice of considering only one aspect of society or its territory, a partial approach to its object of study. Such fragmentations are reproduced in the teaching of geography and in the training of geographers.