New value from asking ‘Is geography what geographers do?’ (original) (raw)
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Reconstituting Geography for the 21st century
Environment and Planning F, 2021
We write as the inaugural editors of a new addition to the Environment and Planning family of peer review journals. It is called EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice (phonetically, our subtitle sounds as pee-tee-em-pee). Geography today should be more than the sum of its many lively parts, but as a discipline cannot dance to one tune-be it ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically or otherwise. We believe that the action lies in forging connections, in mutual learning and in productive disagreement. In this editorial, we detail the context, aims and scope of the journal. At the end, we call for guest editors of special sections and issues, and for articles that fit the remit of this exciting new venture. As a discipline, Geography today is both distinctive and exceedingly vibrant. Many other disciplines are increasingly interested in people-environment relationships, in local-global connections, in the nature and significance of various boundaries and borders, in movements (e.g. of people, goods, knowledge and information) between places and regions, in landscape and land use change, in the difference that proximity and distance make, and in the functioning of biogeochemical systems at various scales-but Geography has historic pedigree in all these areas. It remains the discipline dedicated to understanding why, how and with what effects people utilise-and are affected by-both natural and created environments (in both a material and semiotic-representational sense). In the Anglosphere, if not necessarily elsewhere, the discipline is also extraordinarily heterodox: variety of focus, methods and aims in both research and degree-level teaching is the rule, not the exception. This heterodoxy is both the product and lubricant of Geography's breadth of focus, of the virtues of specialisation and-in some parts of the discipline-of a belief that we can learn valuable things by eschewing orthodoxy. Today, albeit not equally across the globe and in different modalities, Geography is burgeoning. Its practitioners have formed lively communities with shared interests in some of the most important issues of our time, such as destruction of the nonhuman world, voluntary and forced migration, rapid urbanisation, new patterns of economic development, the identification and amelioration of concentrated poverty, reduction of the impacts of various natural hazards, emerging geopolitical rivalries and the new cartographies of war, trans-border political struggles for justice, environmental conservation and restoration, infrastructure development and planning for the future, multicultural localities and cities, and much more besides. Even so, many geographers might believe all is not well in the house of Geography. Some lament the lack of unity of purpose and focus in the discipline; others feel that Geography does not offer enough exemplars of 'integrated analysis' that make a virtue of the many specialists we have working side-by-side in the same departments. Yet others believe Geography's public image remains too weak in several countries, allowing other disciplines to encroach on its fundamental research and teaching areas; some assert that geographers borrow too much from other disciplines and do not make formative contributions of wider significance; and still others maintain that what passes for 'geography' in many departments is really 'geography lite' practised by geologists, sociologists or ecologists with little to no sense of the history and achievements of Geography over the last century or so. This is the immediate academic context in which EPF is being launched. The wider context is febrile: the first pandemic in a century, with grave economic and social knock-on effects; the forced 1005376E PF0010.
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.
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.
Geography is one of the oldest sciences that have formed their identities through fundamental research focused on budding new theories and methods, but also by solving specific spatial, social and economic problems. The awareness of importance of using geographic skills and spatial ways of thinking has greatly increased in the last decades. This is foremost a result of increasing challenges in the contemporary world, which can be largely attributed to scarcity and a rapid depletion of natural and social resources. On the other hand, the evolution of geo-information techniques has offered a new approach in solving variety of global problems, including spatial management. At the same time, the last decades have seen an increased awareness of the importance of space, the so-called spatial turn in social sciences, which has provided an opportunity for the affirmation of geography in a new theoretical discourse of understanding the space and place. Thanks to its fundamental characteristic as a bridge between nature and society coupled with potential benefits from application of new information techniques, geography should definitely become one of the key sciences of the 21st century. However, applied geography today often takes place outside the academia, resulting in theory and practice becoming more separated, while geography tools and approaches are often used by professionals from other fields. At the same time the ideas of multidisciplinary approach in solving complex issues unfortunately, are sometimes far from the reality. This is exactly the reason why there is a need for an academic discussion about past experiences and future potentials of applied geography focused on problem-solving research in all geographic disciplines. Hence, Applied Geography is a dynamic field that changes over time but always maintains a central focus on attempting to solve practical problems our societies face. Studies in Applied Geography are versatile in terms of subject matters but the foundation of this field is based on applying geographic concepts and geospatial technologies to solve real world problems. Given that, it is difficult to define Applied Geography with a strict structure since Geography itself cannot be defined that way and Geography lacks a set of fundamental theories to call its own. The relevance and value of applied geographical research has never been more apparent given the plethora of problem situations which confront modern societies – ranging from extreme natural events through environmental concerns. This paper seeks to exhibit the fundamental principles and empirical praxis of applied geography and provides an overview of the principles and practice of applied geography. Consideration is given to the relationship between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research, and the particular concept of ‘useful knowledge’ is introduced. Finally, a prospective perspective is adopted to consider the question of the value of applied geography for contemporary societies.
Economic Geography as (Regional) Contexts
2006
Context is important for understanding. Geography, according to my PhD super visor at Lund University, the famous Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand, is about doing contextual analysis as opposed to compositional analysis, which is the task of other scientific disciplines (Hägerstrand 1974). This distinction corre sponds to the one the German philosopher Immanuel Kant used when classifying sciences either as physically or logically defined. Geography and history under stood as chorology and chronology respectively constitute the physically defined sciences, while other disciplines are logically defined based on their respective objects of study. Geography and history are synthetic (i.e. empirical based) sciences, while the logically defined are analytical. These distinctions are in my view fundamental in understanding the raison d'être of geography as well as its place and position in the division of labour with other disciplines. Looking specifically at human geography and the whole history of ideas of the subject, the last 70-80 years can be interpreted as a struggle between a tradi tional position of geography as an idiographic, physically defined discipline (i.e. regional geography), others wanting to turn human geography into a nomo thetic, analytical discipline, and later attempts trying to develop a theoretical informed, contextual approach transcending the idiographic-nomothetic dichotomy. The nomothetic position was primarily represented by 'spatial analy sis' defining the object of study of geography as 'space' (i.e. 'spatial patterns' and 'spatial processes'), leaving 'history' to history and 'society' to the other social sciences and, thus, finding a place for human geography among the analytical social sciences (Schaefer 1953). As will be discussed later, this position was neither unproblematic nor sustainable in the long run for a social science, even if it had a hegemonic position until the demand for 'social relevance' started to be voiced loudly at the end of the rebellious 1960s. Personal and educational background-and early years of research experience Also personally and educationally a contextual perspective promotes understand ing. Trained as a business economist with a broad background in business
Professional Geographer, 2006
In the context of debates about policy relevance, geotechnologies, and the status of and prospects for geography, we present the case for a promotional strategy based on foregrounding the impact, diversity, and wealth of geographic scholarship.