Academic Discipline Of Geography Research Articles

What’s in a Name? Undergraduate Student Perceptions of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability Key Words and Program Names

The academic discipline of geography, faced with increasing competition from cognate fields and declining undergraduate enrollments, continues to suffer an identity crisis. In recent decades, many geography programs have instituted department or degree name changes, or otherwise rebranded, without any evidence guiding these decisions. This study begins to build an evidence base for these decisions by presenting results from a survey of 4,388 undergraduates across four U.S. universities to understand how students rate key words that commonly appear in geography course descriptions and titles and phrases that comprise degree and department names. Undergraduates overwhelmingly and consistently preferred simple, thematic types of terms to those that sounded more technical or science oriented. Forms of the word geography were rated significantly lower than words or phrases containing environment and sustainability. Forms of geography that included the word science were rated particularly low. Student ratings varied by class standing, major, gender, high school location (United States vs. outside of the United States), whether the student had previously enrolled in a geography course, and self-perceived numeracy. Multivariable analysis revealed potential opportunities for targeted undergraduate recruiting and curricular development. This study is an important step toward reconciling contemporary student perceptions of geography and related fields with departmental identities and the disciplinary jargon often used in program and course descriptions. We offer a toolkit for implementing similar research at other institutions and ultimately helping geography programs recruit and retain the next generation of geographers.

Kindness: A new kind of rigour for British Geographers

Let's face it, those of us who work in the academic discipline of Geography, largely work on the subject of failure. The failure of political leaders worldwide to avert disastrous climate change. The need to prevent the continuation of the fastest species extinction the world has ever known. The social and personal repercussions of enormous global income, wealth and power inequalities. We describe all this, usually, as if it were just an interesting set of observations. Then we tell students to write an essay about it. If they cogently analyse our collective failure, we give them a high mark. Many of them can then take their university degrees and head out to banking, advertising and management and make the world an even worse place, armed with the knowledge of what they might be critiqued for by those who taught them, but never convinced them. Perhaps if we were kinder to our students when they were at university, were kinder and clearer in what we wrote and taught, more of them would use what they have learnt for good, rather than seeing their degrees as stepping-stones to their allotted place in the social hierarchy.

A geographical perspective on the Aral Sea crisis: three interpretations of an image

Abstract The Aral Sea crisis has gained global notoriety as a human-induced environmental disaster. This paper contextualizes this crisis within a broad geographical framework. Three interpretations of a single photographic image emblematic of the desiccation of the Aral Sea are related to general foci within the academic discipline of geography. These interpretations serve to guide a framing of the Aral Sea crisis within a geographical context. This is presented as a geographical problem, incorporating elements and processes salient to physical geography, human geography, and human-environment interaction. With ecological and societal sustainability in the immediate Aral Sea region still a pressing concern, geographers are well positioned to contribute relevant, research-driven insights.

Home Geography and the Development of Elementary Social Education, 1890–1930

Home geography was the principal means by which primary students in the United States learned about the social world from the 1890s through the 1920s. This subject was rooted in the German subject of Heimatkunde, and it reflected the changing nature of the academic discipline of geography in the late nineteenth century. Its content focused on basic human activities, starting with the experiences closest to students and gradually expanding outward. This curriculum was fundamentally similar to that which would later be known as “expanding horizons,” and an analysis of its development calls into question several assumptions about the history of social studies and its relationship to other subjects. Most notably, it demonstrates that the elementary curriculum did not have a single invention or founding but evolved gradually out of previous patterns and was influenced by developments both in the United States and Europe. In addition, the relationship between home geography and the university discipline makes it clear that at the primary level, the transition to “social studies” did not involve replacing earlier, disciplinary content with the integrated study of the social world, but merely reflected a new name for a curriculum that was already well in place.

Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent

© 2007 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309132507073557 Although Driver and Baigent (2007; henceforth DB) sympathize with many points made in my paper (Johnston, 2005), they apparently wish I had written a different one. My sole concern, clearly stated in the title, was to use the ODNB to illuminate aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in the UK. The core of DB’s unease with this constrained purpose is that I was apparently thereby ‘detaching the academic discipline of geography from the broader field of geographical knowledge’ by ‘showing an interest principally in those geographers who conform to a present-day version of what ‘a geographer’ should look like’; ‘Johnston assumes that geography is what geographers do’; ‘he effectively accords primacy to that kind of geography which is done by professional academic geographers’ – an ‘overly conservative view of what constitutes geography as a field’. I plead guilty to most of these charges: that is what I set out to do. I am not alone in detaching the academic discipline from ‘the broader field of geographical knowledge’ – geographers collectively have done that in a variety of ways (see Bonnett, 2003). Unlike DB, I believe that the ‘geographical contributions of university geographers . . . [have been] fundamentally different from those of people operating beyond the university sector’: the latter’s contributions are just as worthy of study – elsewhere. Clearly DB find my brief at best partial, at worst misleading. My ‘vision [sic] of the field effectively excludes not just those geographers, naturalists, surveyors, travellers, cartographers, geographical publishers and explorers whose efforts were crucial in establishing geography within the cultural and scientific life of the nation before the formal establishment of the discipline at university level’. Did they contribute to and influence that formal establishment? A few did – such as Vaughan Cornish and some RGS officers – and they are discussed. By excluding others (effectively!), I have not significantly misrepresented the emergent academic discipline: is there evidence that, over and above the academic geographers I discussed, ‘more than 1,000 men and women whose principal work Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent

The geography of mental health: an established field?

The purpose of this review is to offer an outline introduction to a field of inquiry known as the geography of mental health (or mental health geographies). Since this is the first time the field has been reviewed in this journal, attention will be paid to the history of the field, not just recent findings. Research has chiefly, but not exclusively, tackled (i) the spatial epidemiology of mental ill-health and (ii) the changing locational associations of mental health care. This review has concentrated chiefly on contributions to this field of inquiry made by researchers with a background in the academic discipline of geography. While there are 'geographical' contributions made by workers from other disciplinary backgrounds, there is arguably something distinctive, particularly in the most recent scholarship, arising from a theorized sensitivity to the entangled relations of mental health, society, space and environment.

Understanding and managing climate change: the UK experience

Climate change has emerged over the last 25 years not just as a physical reality, affecting global and regional climates, but also as a socio‐cultural phenomenon – an icon of a globalizing world which is increasingly altering the physical fabric of our planet and at the same time demanding new forms of global governance. The UK, both through its scientific research activity and through its development of climate change policy initiatives, has been at the forefront of this emergence. This review traces some of this history from a UK perspective, with an emphasis on the last 10 years. The relationship between climate change science and policy has become increasingly reflexive, leading to new forms of research and institutional structures. The academic discipline of geography has been rather marginalized from this process.

Women's professional choice in geography: National sentiments and national exclusion

This article demonstrates the impact of the masculine construction of both modern nationalism and academia on the estrangement of women within the academic discipline of geography in Israel. I argue that the academic elite of Israeli geography has been constructed as a national-masculine arena, combining the heritage of power relations in modern geography and the imperative to serve the national return of exiled Jews to their ancient homeland. I begin by analyzing the masculine construction of Jewish Israeli culture and ideology, in general, and that of Israeli geography, in particular, and go on to examine how this maculinization shaped the professional choice of eight junior women geographers, whose biographies are similar to mine. Relying on in-depth interviews, the article discusses the common features that attracted these women to the masculine discipline of geography, and how, at undergraduate level, they opted for teaching as a means of realizing their personal interests and national sentiments toward the landscape. I further argue that by labeling teaching a feminine domain, these women focused on the national-masculine field of geography without breaking the national consensus that marginalizes women. Moreover, the construction of breadwinning as masculine was seen as significant in these women's choices, as it allowed them some freedom. In conclusion, therefore, I argue that for these junior women geographers, opting for teaching is one way of eschewing “masculine” economic responsibility, and this replays, rather than challenges, gender divisions in Israeli society.

On Disciplinary History and Textbooks: or Where Has Spatial Analysis Gone?

Change within the academic discipline of geography comes about as a result of internal struggles for disciplinary hegemony, for its ‘heart and soul’ and for resources. One approach to the study of these struggles is through examination of textbooks, authoritative statements of the discipline's contemporary condition. Analysis of a small number of recent texts shows that they reflect a current contest within human geography between two groups, stereotyped as ‘spatial analysts’ and ‘social theorists’. The former are being ‘written out’ of disciplinary history, despite their continued vitality. Reasons for the continued presence of, and investment in, spatial analysis within human geography are rehearsed.

A Geographer's Perspective on Information Technology and Industrial Activity

It has been a long time since information technology (IT) came to be a key driver in industrial progress. IT is also driving a huge social transformation. Concern over the impact of this transformation has extended into various academic fields.Although the rapid diffusion of IT has been covered extensively in Western Europe and North America, these works show poor relations between object and method, making them difficult to comprehend. We aim to illustrate the trends highlighted by these studies, which focus on the usage of IT in industrial activity and its impact.This article consists of six sections. In section 2, we will look at how IT has been considered in the academic discipline of geography. We will consider the influence of IT to the spatial activities of business organizations in section 3 and 4, focusing on the characteristic of individual industries in section 3, then on business function and office location in section 4. In section 5, we will discuss urban impacts of developing information infrastructures. Finally in section 6, we look at the literature and indicate existing issues.In current geographical studies, the impact of IT on the location of business activity is evaluated in four ways. In the first type of study, IT is seen replacing face-to-face communication. In the second type of study, time saving from IT is examined, and its resulting impact on the location of business activity. In the third type of study, savings in communication costs are discussed, especially the reduction in long distance charges from using digital and satellite technologies. Fourth comes the impact of information infrastructure on regional development.In spite of geographers' empirical observations on the spatial influences that IT brings to business, further issues remain. Because information is invisible, it is difficult to investigate its flow or stock in an enterprise, so we can find few empirical studies, just a lot of works discussing the spatial effect of IT in general. Next, while there are many discussions about business location in relation to IT, there are few studies discussing how IT affects business functions. Yet we know IT does change many functional aspects of an organization. Japanese geographers have paid little attention in their research to non-electrical information activities such as face-to-face contact nor the impact on communication costs.Capitalist societies are being greatly transformed by IT. Though no grand theory on the future direction of society has yet been offered, there is no doubt that IT plays an important role. Enterprises have received positive impacts from IT. A careful, deep understanding of IT impacts on business and a careful debate on how this can be extended to the entire society have great significance in geography. But because of a lack of empirical studies, specific research in this particular sector will also have significance.The following four areas are identified for further study:1) The application of IT in individual industries;2) The general impact of IT on information behavior in business;3) Social aspects of IT relating to globalization and flexibility; and4) Technological innovation and the labor market