Conceptual models
A conceptual model is an abstract representation designed to articulate the processes operating in a system of interest. A conceptual model may take narrative form and use words to describe the system at hand, but with their long spatial science tradition, geographers have frequently drawn on geometry and graphical forms of visual representation to render their conceptual models. For instance, Figure 12.1 provides a schematic diagram of the physical processes involved in maintaining the earth's...
Coming to Know Geography through Difference
Historians of Anglo-American Geography have only recently addressed the exclusion of subordinated groups from the discipline. It took nearly a century of study before questions were asked about the exclusion of these groups, both as practitioners of the discipline and as subjects of study. It was the tumultuous late 1960s - the Vietnam War protests, strikes and student uprisings throughout Western Europe - that created a dissatisfaction among certain groups of geographers with the seemingly...
Science Reflexivity and Critique
A series of core values connect spatial science and critical human geography, including commitment to open inquiry, continual questioning, and reflexivity. These values serve as points of continuity across the discipline of human geographic research, uniting all geographers who seek to create rigorous understandings of the social world. Of these common values, we argue that reflexivity is key, because the principle of open inquiry ultimately rests on constant interrogation of our questions and...
An Example Situating Scientific Development
Our aim is to problematize the science beyond-science debate within geography and to argue that critical analyses of the conditions of knowledge production must be a fundamental element of advancing scientific understanding. We draw here on an example from development studies, to illustrate the importance of understanding knowledge as situated -situated in history, geography and social relations of difference and power. This choice reflects both our research interests and the process by which...
Conclusion Does Fragmentation Matter
Contemporary academic disciplines are necessarily fragmented into specialist sub-disciplines and fields without it, scientific progress would be substantially hindered. Fragmentation can create problems, however, since it can readily stimulate centrifugal forces that are much stronger than any countering centripetal forces. Individual academics - in our case, geographers - are drawn to work in small communities, many of which are relatively isolated from other communities within their...
Conclusion Newtons Apple
This chapter has been almost entirely about physical geography. This will disappoint the editors, who were, no doubt, hoping for a more balanced assessment of the topic. But like the cobbler sticking to his last, it seemed safer for me to keep to the world I know, rather than venturing into someone else's. My world is one of water and soil. That is not to say that I'm not interested in people or in how my scientific knowledge can be used to better people's lives - far from it - but in research...
Questions Theories and the Challenges of Fieldwork
In short, simple curiosity about the world compels many geographers to head to the field. But landscapes do not always deliver their mysteries in any transparent fashion. And, as interpreters of landscapes, we always employ some set of cognitive schemes to make sense of what we are witnessing. The processes of probing and interpreting places are thus complicated and time-consuming. How does one channel one's innate curiosity into the pursuit and analysis of data that enable one to say something...
Conclusio Of Geography On Global Warming
Geography has a long history of usefulness, in times of peace and war, in contexts of imperialism and development. Looking back, not all would agree that these interventions have been to the obvious betterment of humanity. Harvey 1974 suggests that a legacy of racism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism leaves Geography with more to be ashamed of than proud of. The involvement of geographers with public policy has not, however, been either constant or uncomplicated, as Graf's account of American...
Geography as a Positivist Science
Let us now discuss the question of geography's scientific status in earnest, adding substance to the sketch provided above. For the term 'science' has not just been a rhetorical weapon used by geographers it has also described specific ways of investigating reality. It is these ways I want now to explain in this and the next two sections before moving on to an assessment of geography's scientific credentials. I suggested above that the first substantive attempt to make geography a science was a...
Conclusion
In our example we demonstrate that scientific discourses of development - pervasive in the media, popular culture, scholarship and indeed classrooms - have roots in dominant explanations of how economic development 'should' proceed, and how it is currently lacking supposedly threatening the environment, food supply, etc. in the Global South. We have also demonstrated that these discourses are remarkably tenacious and continue to persist because they are bolstered by a series of material and...
World Knowledge and Discipline
Geographers are fond of saying that what 'ties the discipline together' is an attention to phenomena insofar as they are distributed in space. At the same time, and like other scholars, geographers tend to see their discipline as divided into subdisciplines. There is economic geography, bio-geography, and so on. Here a similar strategy is invoked it is held that economic geography concerns spatial aspects of economic phenomena, that biogeography concerns spatial aspects of living things, and so...
Where Next
Gazing into the crystal ball for insights into tomorrow's world is always a dangerous game, and I do not want to make any predictions about the future of geography. There is no reason why all of the above future scenarios re-integration, co-existence, splitting up cannot occur at different times in different places. I doubt very much that there is one, unitary future of geography, just as there has been no single history of geography. Conflicts and debates between physical and human geography...
Cartographic visualization exploring geography
In contrast to the communication model of cartography, the visualization model of cartography is relatively new and still evolving. Currently there are very few rules, procedures and consensus governing the process of cartographic visualization. Instead the emphasis is upon the user's own personal preferences, ideas and agendas with the aim of discovering something new and hopefully interesting about the world. The purpose of cartographic visualization is to facilitate data exploration,...
Map Making and Myth Making A Classic Example of Map
One of my first recollections of being interested in maps and mapping was at school when I watched a TV series about Victorian London. The series was concerned with the social conditions of London and one programme was about the frequent cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. It was this programme that grabbed my attention since it told a very interesting story of how the link was made between cholera and dirty drinking water by the use of a map. At the time, it was generally accepted...
Maureen Hickey and Vicky Lawson
F rom its modern foundations, geography has designated itself a science, and it prospers less when this role diminishes. A real science is able to accept even the shameful, dirty stories of its beginning. Foucault, 1988, quoted in Kirby, 1994 300 As the title of this chapter indicates, there is an ongoing struggle over legitimate knowledge within human geography, centred around what many in the discipline identify as a science beyond-science binary. While we do not deny that there are...
Noel Castree
If you're reading these words you're almost certainly a student studying degree-level geography in an English-speaking country. This chapter is probably on a reading list for a course you're taking on the nature of contemporary geography. Whether you're an undergraduate or a Master's student, the course is doubtless a compulsory part of your degree. You may not like this fact. Unless you're intending to go on to become a university geographer yourself, you may well think that the course is both...
The Degree Business Geography as a Commodity
Academic disciplines have never been insulated from wider governmental, economic or cultural forces. As David Harvey 1996 95 famously put it, geography 'cannot be understood independently of the . . . societies in which it is embedded'. The 'nature' of geography is thus determined not only by internal struggles within the discipline - like those between the aforementioned Gillian Rose and her antagonists - but also by external influences. The geographer Allen Scott 1982 was among the first to...
Geography Coming Apart at the Seams
Rather than police the margins of the discipline, let's stretch them. Geography is an open, vibrant and exciting place to be. Adam Tickell RGS Newsletter, December 2002 For most outsiders, an encounter with the discipline of geography may suggest that it studies everything, from global environmental change at one extreme to the minutiae of body-space at the other. It spans the physical, environmental and social sciences, and reaches into the humanities too. Nor might it look much like geography...
Getting Back Together or Splitting Up
Let us assume that human and physical geography are in some way divided. If so, there would appear to be at least three ways forward integration or perhaps re-integration splitting up or some kind of uneasy co-existence. What are the arguments in favour of re-uniting the two halves of geography, how might this best be achieved and are there any signs of this happening Three types of argument for re-unification have been presented in recent literature. The heritage argument claims that as...
