Geography’s identity as an academic discipline

Abstract

A series of historiographies emerge, in which institutional arrangements in schools and universities channel funding and provide administrative arrangements and hierarchies, but which frequently seem arbitrary or at least, inconsistent, and which are increasingly out of step in a post-disciplinary world. Peter Haggett, one of the foremost geographers of the twentieth century, was one of the key figures in geography's 'Quantitative Revolution', a mid-century explosion in data provision, analysis and representation, and an interest in systematic quantification and modelling of spatial phenomenon Anglo-German geography from the later eighteenth to the later twentieth centuries; sub-divisions included quaternary studies, biogeography, population geography, regional economics and urban sociology. In human geography, the rise of cultural theory both extended and questioned such terms as 'social science' or the purpose of general explanations. Geographers have recognised that the scope, scale and pace of human-environment interactions, that requires academic subject to adapt and embrace essential hybridities, and new discourses of enquiry.