Geography of research networks in the Big South of Russia

This paper explores the contribution that pragmatist philosophy can make to the way that we do research and teaching in human geography. It provides a historical overview of the key ideas in the tradition, their influence on the Chicago School of Sociology and community organizing, and the implications of this work for epistemological practice. The paper then looks at the variety of ways in which human geographers are using research as a means to engage in the world today, focusing in particular on the contributions of participatory action research (PAR), before making the case for ‘process pragmatism’ as a framework for doing this kind of research. To illustrate the potential of this approach, the paper outlines current research, teaching and organizing activity being undertaken by geographers at Queen Mary University of London. The paper suggests that pragmatism provides a theoretical and methodological foundation for research and teaching which can facilitate the creation of new publics, and can help to build power and democratic capacity with the aim of remaking the world.

The purpose of the article is to determine the role of information in human-geographical research. Therefore, the authors analyzed and characterized the features of types and categories of information and analyzed the concepts and theories of information used in information geography as initial and basic options for identifying the definition of "information". Based on the analysis, they propose the concept of "information" from the perspective of human geography and identify its role in human-geographical research, as it enables human geographers to analyze and comprehend the intricate interactions between society, nature, and the connections between spatial structures. Results. The article reveals the fundamental role of information in human geography, providing the basis for the analysis, interpretation, and prediction of social and spatial processes. The interdisciplinary significance of the human-geographical concept is also considered. Its primary function is to combine data from various fields of knowledge and contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the complex interaction between humans and nature. The authors analyzed previous foreign and domestic studies of various scientific areas, in particular human geographers, and also examined the most common philosophical concepts of information: attributive, functional, and anthropocentric. Today, there is constant discussion and no single point of view among scientists about information concepts. The article analyzes the concepts and theories of information used in information geography as initial and basic, the definitions of the concept of "information", and the peculiarities of its use in human-geographical research. Based on the analysis, the authors proposed the concept of "information" from the standpoint of human geography and its role in human-geographical research. The main contradictions between society and nature were also revealed, and the basic principles of interaction between society and natural systems in the multisystem of environmental management were considered. The authors highlighted the ideas of the formation of the concept of the social and geographical system and the socio-geographical process and revealed the peculiarities of the embodiment of ideas in human-geographical research. In human-geographical research, information plays a crucial role in determining the level of society's development. Researchers use this information to study the distribution of human activities and natural resources, plan and manage territories, analyze dynamics and transformations in spatial structures and communication networks, and understand their impact on society. The collection and processing of primary geodata allow for the integration of different types of information and the creation of cartographic models. The utilization of information facilitates socio-economic and urban analysis, enabling the study of the demographic system's features, including its structure, distribution, and the characteristics of its primary categories. In further studies, the authors are going to prepare a model illustrating the role of information in the processes of territorial management, regional development, and restoration.

The author addresses the potential of a multiple-methods approach in human geography, an approach to social research which has received little explicit attention in the geographical literature to date. The relationship between epistemology and methodology is outlined, and the similarities and differences between quantitative and qualitative methods are described. Some problems surrounding subjectivity and objectivity in social research are also discussed. In addition, the relationship between methods and to whom the research is communicated is considered. It is hoped that the paper will stimulate future discussion both of the theoretical implications and of the practical use of a mixed-methods approach in human geography.

The ‘geographies of disability’ is an important and evolving area of scholarship within human geography. Uniting the disparate areas of inquiry in this sub‐discipline are researchers’ shared interests in understanding processes of disablement and socio‐spatial experiences of disability. What drives human geographers to engage with this scholarship? We address this and other introspective questions through presenting an analysis of the findings of an online survey conducted with 30 such disability researchers. The overriding purpose is to understand how and why these researchers do what they do. Our presentation of the survey findings is divided into four organizational categories: (1) the researcher; (2) the inquiry; (3) the research outputs; and (4) the institutions. A key finding is that conducting disability research in human geography is very much about negotiating around or through constraints while identifying and enacting enablers in order to accomplish goals associated with producing disability research.

Recent philosophical debates in human geography tend to misappropriate critical realism as a method per se. Drawing upon an extensive review of the realist philosophy and method in social science, this article argues that critical realism is a philosophy in search of a method. It first delves into recent debates about critical realism within the wider geographical discourse. It then suggests three useful guidelines in executing realist research in human geography: iterative abstraction, qualified grounded theory method and methodological triangulation. The article ends with a detailed empirical example for the readers to work through of the ways in which realist research can be practised in human geography.

For centuries, field work has been essential to geographers’ research, teaching, and community engagement activities. With recent technological advancement and growing online methods that have offered pivotal opportunities for field-based research in human geography, geographers have debated whether “going to the field” should always be normative and mean the physical field. By discussing three successful online methodologies from my virtual field work with the underserved community of Indonesian female domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong, I invite human geographers to reconsider what field work means and how human geographers can implement field work without going to the field. Through this article, I offer three major discussions weaving from existing literature in human geography and my experiences conducting virtual field work during the early COVID-19 pandemic, including (1) current debates, uses, and practices of virtual field work within human geography research; (2) lessons learned in implementing virtual field work with FDWs; and (3) working with the community in virtual field work, exemplifying my partnerships with local organization, communications with research participants during the virtual field work, and the opportunity for giving back to the community. This article contributes to the emerging development and implementation of virtual field work in human geography research, emphasizing working with the underserved community.

Contracts with, and member checks by, research participants are increasingly recommended in qualitative research in human geography. However, differences in qualitatively researching ‘the powerful’, as opposed to researching ‘down’ mean that contracts and member checks may need to be approached with caution regarding the former. The possibility of the censorship of critique by powerful research participants is exemplified in this article, and a number of more general dilemmas in qualitatively researching ‘up’ are also discussed. Finally, some choices which might help address possible difficulties in qualitatively researching the powerful are outlined.

Human geography is the branch of geography concerned with how and why people organize themselves across space and interact with their environments. Human geographers conduct their research that underpins the subfields of human geography in many social arenas. These subfields range from the geography of religion and regional geographies to political geography and mountain geography, and more. As the largest branch of geography, much research in human geography has been produced that makes use of a geographical information system (GIS). A GIS is a computer program that stores, analyzes, and displays geographic data. Work by human geographers who incorporate GIS into their research tends to fall into one of two categories. First, there is the work that uses GIS as a straightforward tool of spatial analysis, spatial modeling, and geo-visualization. The topics of these research projects span all the subfields of human geography. Second, there is the work that examines the theoretical and philosophical significance of GIS within human geography. Informed from the critical perspectives of feminism, queer studies, Marxism, and others, these studies typically situate GIS within the discipline at fundamental levels of epistemology and ontology. This approach to studying GIS within human geography shifts the focus away from the output of a research project and toward the process of research itself. This article contains sample works from some of the most vibrant subfields of human geography in which GIS is being adopted to increase our knowledge of the human organization of space and human-environment interactions: Urban Geography, Hazards Geography, and Historical Geography. This review also includes sections that summarize key works from Critical GIS, Qualitative GIS, and Public Participation GIS that provide additional vantage points from which to appreciate the multifaceted application of GIS across human geography.

Manuel Castells seminal work The Rise of the Network Society (RNS) is one of the top ten most frequently cited publications in human geography. RNS comprehensively investigates the theory of network society, which is of great significance to human geography. Citation count, however, cannot reflect the specific contribution of RNS to human geography. By jointly using citation content and context analysis on 898 journal articles on human geography, this study examines the citations of RNS to clarify the contribution. Results show that (1) “space of flows” is most frequently cited and (2) citations of RNS serve nine citation functions in human geography studies. Eight of them reveal three types of knowledge development contribution, namely, knowledge dissemination, knowledge inheritance, and knowledge innovation. Among the nine citation functions, the critique function is most thought-provoking, revealing the deficiencies of RNS: (1) spatial dualism is abstract and impersonal, (2) “space of places” is as important as “space of flows” in the network society, and (3) the lack of abundant data limits the development of empirical research on the space of flows and network of city. These critical citations provide implications for the development of network society theory in human geography. Key Words: bibliometric analysis, citation context analysis, content analysis, knowledge development, network society.

The euphoria which accompanied the rise of socially-relevant research in human geography in the early 1970s was dissipated by the failure to achieve a significant social policy impact. Since then ‘relevant’ human geography has occupied a social policy backwater. This paper revisits the question of relevance in human geography and examines the potential contribution of a religious perspective for a reinvigorated human geography.

This essay offers a critique of environmental ethics and argues that a post-environmental ethics may be unavoidable. It does so by exposing and questioning the ontological assumptions common to otherwise different modalities of environmental ethics. These modalities, it is argued, rest upon an implicit or explicit 'material essentialism'. Such essentialism entails the belief that putatively 'environmental' entities have discrete and relatively enduring properties. These properties 'anchor' ethical claims and permit the objects of ethical considerability to be named. Against this, it is argued that a non-essentialist ontology is preferable. This ontology presumes neither that environmental phenomena are simply environmental nor that their properties can be 'fixed' under some determinate description. Drawing on recent 'hybrid' research in human geography and elsewhere, it is suggested that the motility and mutability of ostensibly environmental entities be recognised. This recognition, I conclude, desta bilises conventional environmental ethics and calls for a more supple mode of ethical reasoning.

This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, this contention goes well beyond noting the marginality (until recently) of radical–Marxist positions (Belina, B., Best, U., & Naumann, M. (2009). Critical geography in Germany: From exclusion to inclusion via internationalization. Social Geography, 4, 47–58). Second, I will argue that although this configuration has had real costs, including both analytic and ‘civic’ deficits, it has also allowed the development of distinctive strengths and innovative emphases in human geographic research that can and should be engaged by other sub-communities in the international discourse.

The Impact of Product Failure on Innovation Diffusion: The Example of the Cargo Bike as Alternative Vehicle for Urban Transport

The present article aimed to study the secular changes in the mean adult human height of males and females across different regions of Russia. Here we present the results of the meta-analysis of a comprehensive data set on the mean heights of males from the 1900–1910s to the 1990–2000s birth cohorts among 63 regions of the Russian Federation (in over 470 groups), and mean heights of females from the 1940–1950s to the 1990–2000s birth cohorts among 54 regions of the Russian Federation (in over 340 groups). The regional secular trends of mean height were illustrated for the adult population in seven federal districts in Russia. We analyzed anthropological data using a combined approach, in which the temporal aspects of variation in body height were studied through retrospective analysis, and the spatial aspects (regional differences in adult height over a long period) were studied using cross-population analysis. The positive secular trend of the adult body height of men and women throughout the 20th century can be observed both at the national and subnational levels. During the last century, adult height of males increased by 9,35 cm (from 166,33 cm to 175,68 cm) at a rate of 0,84 cm/decade. From the 1940–1950s to the present, women’s adult height increased by 3,75 cm (from 160,06 cm to 163,81 cm) at a rate of 0,78 cm/decade. In our study, we found regional trends of secular dynamics and differences in mean height in different time slices. At the early 20th century, men of the Far Eastern Federal District exhibited the highest mean height, and at the end of the observation period this distinction was held by the men of Moscow and Krasnodar Krai. In the middle of the last century, the highest female height was documented in Pskov Oblast and Volgograd Oblast, and in the end of the century — in the Krasnodar Krai and Altai Krai. Regional differences in the spatiotemporal variation in adult human height may be explained by socio-economic differentiation between the subjects of the Russian Federation.

Technique for assessment of economic development sustainability of Russia’s
 regions is provided. Methodologically the technique is based on diagnosing the
 loss of sustainability in economic growth and assessing the degree of instability.
 The authors propose to assess the degree of sustainability by such measure, as
 variance in the economy’s growth rate, while the risks of instable growth — by
 an index, reflecting relative variance in economic growth rates.
 Economic growth sustainability and dynamics for several RF administrative
 territories are assessed, including Belgorod oblast, Bryansk oblast, Volgograd
 oblast, Pskov oblast, the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Republic of
 Dagestan and Krasnodar krai. The estimates are based on statistics for the
 2000—2011 years period.
 As is found out, different territories has different periods of sustainable and
 unsustainable development as well as different degrees of economic growth
 instability. In terms of economic development Belgorod oblast, the city of St.
 Petersburg, Krasnodar krai and the Republic of Dagestan are stable as compared
 to the growth of the overall Russian economy. Such territories, as Bryansk
 oblast, Volgograd oblast, Pskov oblast and the city of Moscow show instability
 of economic development as compared to the Russian economy as a whole. As
 correlation and regression analysis shows, indices of economic development
 instability significantly affect investments in the regional economy.
 Based on a small sample of administrative territories the authors show that
 instability of economic development is responsible for 40 per cent reduction in
 investments. Thus the conclusion is made that economic development
 instability is a rather significant factor of the territory’s investment climate.