Geographical Thinking Research Articles

Systems thinking in geography: can high school students do it?

ABSTRACTAn increasing interconnectedness of people and goods enhances the complexity of many geographical problems. For students to understand geography, systems thinking is a promising approach. It helps to understand increasing complexity by looking at the entire system and at the interconnectedness between the elements in the system. In order to develop adequate systems oriented teaching and learning the current state of the art of students’ systems thinking ability needs to be better understood. The authors developed a measuring tool in the form of a paper-and-pencil test in which 735 students in the last or penultimate year of secondary school (age 16–18 year) in Flanders, Belgium, took part. The main findings reveal a rather poor general level of students’ systems thinking ability. Students have many difficulties recognizing relationships between variables when several elements of systems thinking come together such as in feedback loops, interactions between human and physical environment, and a combination of different information sources. Rather great differences were found according to the students’ study background as well as an interaction effect between grade and gender of the students.

A capabilities approach to higher education: geocapabilities and implications for geography curricula

A geographical education offers more than skills, subject knowledge and generic attributes. It also develops a set of discipline-specific capabilities that contribute to a graduate’s future learning and experience, granting them special ways of thinking for lifelong development and for contributing to the welfare of themselves, their community and their world. This paper considers the broader purposes and values of disciplinary teaching in contributing to individual human development. Set in the context of recent debates concerning the role of the university and the neo-liberalisation of higher education this paper explores approaches to developing the geography curriculum in ways that re-assert the educational value of geographical thinking for students. Using international examples of teaching and learning practice in geography, we recognise five geocapabilities: use of the geographical imagination; ethical subject-hood with respect to the impacts of geographical processes; integrative thinking about society–environment relationships; spatial thinking; and the structured exploration of places. A capabilities approach offers a productive and resilient response to the threats of pedagogic frailty and increasingly generic learning in higher education. Finally, a framework to stimulate dialogue about curriculum development and the role of geocapabilities in the higher education curriculum is suggested.

Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with Solar Energy

In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.

Death and Birth in the Urban Landscape: Strabo on Troy and Rome

Although Strabo provides lengthy accounts of Troy and Rome in the Geography, the role of these cities in his geographical thinking has received little attention from scholars. This article argues that for Strabo, Rome and Troy serve as exemplars of the progression of human civilization from Homeric prehistory to the Augustan present. They are paradigmatic “rising” and “fallen” cities, through which the lifecycles of all cities in the oikoumenē can be understood. Moreover, in his treatment of the fall of Troy and the rise of Rome, Strabo departs from his Augustan-era contemporaries by illustrating the historical interactions of each city with its respective region, rather than Rome’s purported Trojan origins. In describing Rome’s expansion into Latium (Book Five) and the post-Trojan War history of the Troad (Book Thirteen), Strabo emphasizes the mutability of urban landscapes through the destruction of existing cities and the creation of new ones – two processes in which Rome has played a significant role, and which continue to shape human settlement across the oikoumenē.

Embodied Emotions in the Geographies of Sexualities

AbstractThis commentary responds to the papers comprising the themed issue ‘Geographies of Sexualities: Bodies, Spatial Encounters and Emotions’. I position the themed issue at the intersection of geographies of sexualities, embodied geographies and emotional geographies, and suggest how the papers collectively contribute to geographies of sexualities and to human geography more broadly. The themed issue entwines the themes of ‘the body’ and ‘emotions’ to advance understandings of embodied emotions in geographies of sexualities and beyond. I identify three ways in which embodied emotions are taken forward in geographical thinking. First, the capacity for emotionally embodied fieldwork generates insights into collective embodiment and communities of practice, at the same time contesting masculinist objectivity and detachment in knowledge production. Second, new spaces of encounter – such as online forums and social media – are not distinct from everyday geographies, but instead are part of a virtual‐physical emotional landscape that extends embodiment across material and digital environments. Third, the innovative combination of different elements of feminist geographical thinking – such as intersectionality, the body and emotion and affect – generates new understandings of inequality across and between social identities.

Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

Reviewed by: Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson Frank Georgia Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity Scott Fitzgerald Johnson Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 195. 978-0-19-022123-2 In Literary Territories, Scott Johnson explores the intertwined metaphors of map and library as they shaped the production of literature in late antiquity. Much of the book focuses on the fourth [End Page 289] through the sixth century, a time when increased travel expanded notions of the oikoumenē, or the "inhabited world." Efforts to accumulate and organize all knowledge, Johnson argues, fueled an "aesthetic of encyclopedism" or "archivalism" in many late antique genres. Cartographical thinking—the impulse to compile, archive, and epitomize—is a by-product of this interest, appearing in travel descriptions, letters, pilgrims' guides, and miracle collections, as well as in non-narrative works such as Roman lists of overland staging posts (itineraria) and topographical catalogs (notitiae). Casting his net widely, Johnson cleverly pairs and compares secular and religious works: Pliny's (d. 79 ce) Natural History with the sixth-century Cosmas Indicopleustes's Christian Topography; Pausanias's (c. 115–c. 180) Description of Greece with the travel diary by the Christian pilgrim Egeria (ca. 484); Synesius of Cyrene's (ca. 370–ca. 414) description of a harrowing sea voyage (Ep. 5) and Jerome's account of his journey to the Holy Land with Paula (Ep. 108, 404 ce); or astronomical works such as Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (ca. 430) and Gregory of Tours' late-sixth-century handbook, The Course of the Stars, written for monks regulating prayer times. For each work, Johnson exposes the underlying "archival aesthetic" and makes a persuasive case for how accumulation is put to the service of argument. Collecting would be instrumental for asserting imperial control, marking out a holy land, or revealing cosmic order. In addition to attuning the reader to these cartographical habits of thought, Johnson tracks how geographical thinking and frameworks underlie Christian travelers' descriptions, miracle collections, and legends related to the apostles and saints. All these genres share a focus on "locatedness," whereby the saint is rooted in a particular place. For instance, the Miracles of Thekla celebrate her local, even chthonic, powers. Yet, the Miracles also cast Thekla's influence beyond the region by inserting her into the legendary account of the apostles casting lots to missionize all the cities and lands of the world. The sortes apostolorum, as this legend is called, recurs in several collective hagiographies and miracle collections. The sortes, Johnson argues, also found expression in imperial monuments, such as Constantine's final resting place. According to Constantine's biographer, Eusebius, the mausoleum at the Church of the Holy Apostles complex featured the imperial coffin flanked by "coffins" for each of the twelve apostles, effecting an "archive of the apostles" and fixing the emperor in a universalizing apostolic geography. The persistence of this legend is evident in a seventh-century collection of tales about monastic wonderworking, the Spiritual Meadow by John Moschus. Although the collection lacks an explicit geographical itinerary, Johnson detects resonances between monastic and apostolic spaces. In the final chapter Johnson explores the geographical frameworks of two ninth-century East Syriac works. He analyzes Thomas of Marga's Historia Monastica and Isho'dnah of Basra's Liber Castitatis to show how a cartographic reading of these texts reveals their orientation toward Jerusalem and Egypt, suggesting the "westwardness" that informs their self-understanding. Johnson is also to be commended for providing an appended chronological bibliography of critical editions and English translations of Greek, Latin, and Syriac works from the first seven centuries ce. [End Page 290] Through his individual examples Johnson exposes the frameworks by which Christians and non-Christians mapped their own field of dreams, so to speak. Rather than view all this "commentary, compilation, and repackaging" as unoriginal or parasitic, Johnson claims it is profoundly creative and innovative. He suggests that, as with the codex, a technology that increasingly displaced the scroll in the later third and fourth centuries, readers could enter these narratives at random and easily compare, quote, and recombine portions. Like musical sampling today...

La división del trabajo como una relación socio-espacial, o cómo reconciliar la ciencia económica y la geografía

In economics, not enough attention is being paid to space and geography. In this document I claim that the idea of the division of labor is well suited to overcome this shortcoming and to re-insert geographical thinking in economic analysis. Each division of labor takes place in and is developed through spatial juxtapositions of economic activities, and that is why it consists of socio-spatial relations and processes at various geographical scales, including the home, the city and the global economy. However, a comprehensive analysis of the division of labor, understood not as an abstract principle, but as a real economic practice, not only reveals the geography of the economy. Rather, it is also a powerful tool for analyzing relationships of production. Any division of labor consists of a set of socio-spatial relationships, and it is through these socio-spatial relationships that economic activities, social groups that perform them, and the places in which they so it, are hierarchized. Therefore, in the cross-border division of labor uneven development is the result of a differentiated integration of persons or societies and their locations or regions.

Geographical thinking in nursing inquiry, part two: performance, possibility, and non-representational theory.

Part one in this two paper series reviewed the nature of geographical thinking in nursing research thus far. The current paper builds on it by looking forwards and providing a particular vision for future research. It argues that it is time to once again look to the parent discipline of human geography for inspiration, specifically to its turn towards non-representational theory, involving an emphasis on life that onflows prior to meaning, significance, and full cognition; on life's 'taking-place'. The paper introduces this way of viewing and animating the world. Some potential connections to nursing research and practice are suggested, as are some specific avenues for future inquiry. Explained is how, through non-representational theory, nursing might be re-imagined as something that reveals space-time.

Geographical thinking in nursing inquiry, part one: locations, contents, meanings.

Spatial thought is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance in nursing. Building on a long disciplinary tradition of conceptualizing and studying 'nursing environment', the past twenty years has witnessing the establishment and refinement of explicitly geographical nursing research. This article - part one in a series of two - reviews the perspectives taken to date, ranging from historical precedent in classical nursing theory through to positivistic spatial science, political economy, and social constructivism in contemporary inquiry. This discussion sets up part two, which considers the potential of non-representational theory for framing future studies.

Mixed qualitative-simulation methods

Across geography there has been variable engagement with the use of simulation and agent-based modelling. We argue that agent-based simulation provides a complementary method to investigate geographical issues which need not be used in ways that are epistemologically different in kind from some other approaches in contemporary geography. We propose mixed qualitative-simulation methods that iterate back-and-forth between ‘thick’ (qualitative) and ‘thin’ (simulation) approaches and between the theory and data they produce. These mixed methods accept simulation modelling as process and practice; a way of using computers with concepts and data to ensure social theory remains embedded in day-to-day geographical thinking.

The Legacy of Jedidiah Morse in Early American Geography Education: Forgotten and/or Forgettable Geographer?

Despite numerous and significant writings by historians of geography and biographers from other disciplines, and his authorship of the first geography textbooks written in and for the new American republic, most geographers are largely unaware of the contributions of Jedidiah Morse in academic geography. Writings about Morse suggest that he had alienated himself from many of his contemporaries early in his career through his authoritarian brand of Calvinistic republicanism, a perceived contradiction of that style with his entrepreneurial ambitions, his role in the controversial Bavarian Illuminati, and a dispute with a noted New England historian. But subsequent, broader intellectual movements sealed Morse's fate as a forgotten geographer (to most), including the end of the Second Great Awakening, Transcendentalism, Darwinism, and the “new,” process‐based geographical thinking inspired by Carl Ritter, Alexander von Humboldt, and Arnold Guyot. Regardless of the reasons for Morse's lost legacy, his contributions to geographical education are important and should be remembered.

Oldfield, Jonathan D. and Shaw, Denis J. B. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment (review)

REVIEWS 543 One failing in the volume is that not all of the potentially interesting material is identifiable in the (generally good) index. For example, on page 30 Rady observes that several of the earliest surviving Hungarian wills are by women, a fact which he ‘suggests that they felt especially vulnerable to coercion but also to convenient lapses in the [non-textual] memory of kinsmen’. This is something of a throw-away remark, but there is obvious potential for further consideration from a gender history perspective. But the index has no entry for ‘women’, so one cannot always find such points without reading through the book. Unsurprisingly, there are also challenges in handling legal terms in a different language. This is to be expected. Legal terms are often specific to particular (geographic or cultural) communities, which have no ready alternatives to hand. But using technical English terms might mislead. For example, the protonotaries are described as linked with ‘inns’ (pp. 54, 55 and 122), with the index even referring to ‘inns of court’. Lawyers are described as being trained by ‘pupillage’ (pp. 159 and 161). I am not sure whether these English terms, associated with barristers, accurately describe the Hungarian model or not. These are important qualifications, but they should not detract from the achievement of this volume. Hungarian legal history has become much more accessible. It is thought-provoking, provides new insights and is full of material which should stimulate historians from a wide variety of perspectives. Rady has shown that the history of customary law in Hungary is central to the history of Hungary. Faculty of Laws, UCL Ian Williams Oldfield, Jonathan D. and Shaw, Denis J. B. The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2015. xv + 196 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£95.00: $160.00. Russian scientists have developed distinctive ways of conceptualizing the natural environment over the past century and a half. Their ideas have drawn on diverse disciplinary traditions — everything from black earth pedology to early adventures in thinking about the cosmos — and traversed a fraught ideological terrain of statism, utilitarianism and Marxism. For Jonathan Oldfield and Denis Shaw these theories coalesced around the field of geography: a science with a rich and underappreciated past in Russia. The primary mission of their deeply researched and contemplated monograph is to SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 544 demonstrate the complexity and sophistication of these ideas and reveal their pertinence for the broader study of beliefs about the natural world in Russian and Soviet history. As historical geographers well-immersed in the fields of environmental history and the history of science, Oldfield and Shaw succeed in providing an informative and valuable synthesis for an interdisciplinary audience. The authors approach their topic chronologically, beginning with the appearance of the sciences in Russia in the era of Peter the Great and concluding with the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule. Such an organization allows them to chart the origins, developments and shifts in geographical thinking. For instance, they highlight how the genetic soil science of Vasilii Dokuchaev and his followers in the late nineteenth century played a significant role in the rise of ideas about natural complexes, physical-geographical regions and natural zones. Near the end of the book, Oldfield and Shaw also argue that geographers after Stalin were able to more effectively make the case for the rational application of science as a necessary means of both transforming and protecting the natural world. In doing so, they helped curtail the rampant Prometheanism of the Soviet Union in earlier periods. Throughout their chronological overview, the authors foreground three dominant concepts that developed in the Russian geographical sciences: landscape, geographical envelope and geographical environment. Attention to landscape as the key unit of geographical study preoccupied Lev Berg (1876–1950) in particular. He drew directly on German ideas from the tsarist era and indirectly on the soil science of Dokuchaev to theorize that specific formations on the earth’s surface were the proper unit of study for physical geographers. The broad range of natural processes and phenomena active in particular places gave rise to landscapes that...

20 years of quantitative geographical thinking

20 years of quantitative geographical thinking

Spatial Thinking Assists Geographic Thinking: Evidence from a Study Exploring the Effects of Geospatial Technology

This article provides a description and discussion of an exploratory research study that examined the effects of using geospatial technology (GST) on high school students’ spatial skills and spatial-relations content knowledge. It presents results that support the use of GST to teach spatially dependent content. It also provides indication of an important link between spatial thinking and geographic thinking. The article concludes with a discussion of how these results inform instructional strategies for the teaching of geography.

Violence and space: An introduction to the geographies of violence

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.

O TERRITÓRIO NO PENSAMENTO GEOGRÁFICO BRASILEIRO CONTEMPORÂNEO - DOI 10.5216/bgg.v36i1.40364

Esse artigo é parte de uma pesquisa realizada, em nível de doutorado, sobre o conceito de território no pensamento geográfico brasileiro contemporâneo. Trata-se de um estudo histórico e teórico de caráter bibliográfico, mas também estatístico, no âmbito da Geografia Humana, por meio do qual objetivamos identificar a produção geográfica sobre o conceito de território. Orientou essa investigação o pressuposto que o território tornou-se, juntamente com a categoria espaço, relevante para o conhecimento e o pensamento geográfico contemporâneo. No entanto, interessava-nos descobrir quando e como o território assumiurelevância nos estudos geográficos em meio à predominância dos estudos sobre espaço e identificar as configurações intelectuais que o território assumiu no pensamento geográfico brasileiro contemporâneo.Palavras-chave: Território, Produção Geográfica, Pensamento Geográfico Brasileiro.

America and the American Revolution in British Geographical Thought, c.1760–1830

Abstract This article investigates British ideas about ‘America’ in the years before and after the American Revolution. What characteristics and qualities were thought to distinguish the continent from other parts of the globe? How did the Revolution affect ideas about ‘American’ space? Existing studies tend to present the Revolution as a disruptive moment in British intellectual life. Instead, this article analyses mainstream geographical works—sources which, due to their popularity and summative nature, can help expose the longstanding, formative ideas about America circulating widely in British literate culture. Collectively, these books interpreted America both as a novel space literally and conceptually outside the ‘Old World’ and as a space defined in terms of Britain and its European neighbours. Significantly, the books’ responses to the Revolution were shaped by the same conceptual frameworks. This means that, far from signalling a comprehensive shift in British perceptions of the continent, Revolutionary events were inserted into established narratives; they were used to reinforce and amplify existing structures and terminologies for understanding America in British literate culture.

Preface to the Special Issue “Geographical Thinking about Modern Japan's Territory: The Mainland, the Colonial Areas, and Their Interactional Space”

Preface to the Special Issue “Geographical Thinking about Modern Japan's Territory: The Mainland, the Colonial Areas, and Their Interactional Space”

The Deconstruction of National Identity in Lithuanian Literature: Marius Ivaškevičius’ Plays

A heating national identity that makes use of romantic myths from the Golden Age of Lithuania creates the necessary “emotional glue” that can bring harmony to a social group. A coherent narrative of national history together with collective memories are inseparable from the ideology of nationalism that flourished in East Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Benedict Anderson). But we also have to emphasize that the impact of patriotism on a society can be compared to the ambivalent deconstructionist idea of the pharmacon , suggesting that medicine used in too great a dose may become poison. Therefore, the deconstructionist’s suspicion of national mythology and static national identity does not weaken national health, as may appear at the first glance, but may actually strengthen it. The two plays by Marius Ivaskevicius, Madagaskaras ( Madagascar ) and Isvarymas ( Expulsion ), still find a great resonance with readers and theatre audiences and are the subject of this article. I will consider how the deconstruction of national identity is based on the transformation and rewriting of national myths in Ivaskevicius’ plays. The deconstruction of identity, as I call it, emerges as a result of the interplay between opposing types of static heating and dynamic cooling identities. Having rejected extreme notions of national identity (i.e. these which are overly optimistic or utterly pessimistic) we enter into the field of the intricate semantics of identity, which leads us to the acknowledgement that nothing at all is self-evident and permanent, and everything depends on the perspective of each era. Madagascar (2004) is a symbolic memory text where the author not only rejects the Lithuanian myths concerning national identity but also renews them from the contemporary point of view by adding lots of irony. Mocking the past and the idea to create a “reserve Lithuania” on the island of Madagascar allows him to speak of the ongoing national identity crisis: the old myths are no longer valid in our rapidly changing world and we cannot find a clear-cut answer to the question of who we are. In the next play, Expulsion (2011), the author keeps investigating the same problem of national identity: “ From the geographical point of view, London is located on an island. But if we were to abandon geographical thinking, all of us are islanders. Humanity still consists of islands called nations. ” (Ivaskevicius) In the postmodernist global world there is no such thing as total isolation and islands are indeed interconnected by the seas rather than remaining isolated entities. This applies equally to postmodernist nations and peoples. The play depicts the dramatic integration of Lithuanian immigrants into an alien culture. Benas, the protagonist of the play, and some other young Lithuanians are brought to London as cheap illegal labour. However, the golden grindstone of the free market crushes them all. In order to survive, they must adapt in an alien culture. But are there limits to how much they are actually able to adapt? The writer describes only the destructive cases of integration and sets very relevant social and moral problems about the integration of poor emigrants from the Eastern Europe into rich Western societies. Critics like to call Ivaskevicius an anthropologist of the nation and writer of relevant political drama (Vaidotas Jauniskis, Ramunė Baleviciūtė, Valdas Vasiliauskas, Kristian Lupa). We must not perceive the crisis and deconstruction of the national identity in Ivaskevicius’ plays as merely a rejection (or destruction) of past national creation myths, but rather as their ironic recreation, because, in this time of dynamic globalization, our modern national consciousness and culture needs them.

All the Colours of the East. “Ideological Geography”, Orientalism, and the Fluctuating Semantics of the East in the Works of Maurice Barrès

Maurice Barrès is a geographical thinker: His texts are built around places and spaces, and they are structured by movements in space and by the changing of places. The names of cities, rivers and regions carry a semantic weight and are bestowed with an evocative power equalled only by certain toponyms in Proust. This geographical thinking is a constant in Barrès’s work, and it takes on many functions. In the present article, I examine the role of the East within his system of thought. The semantics and the valuations of this cardinal direction are fluctuating in Barrès’s texts: Barrès’s East often wears a menacing Pickelhaube or an alluring veil, defines and divides Europe, is, at the same time, a promise of joy and a menace of horror. First, I define Barrès’s particular concept of geography, blending locational and mental properties. I then analyse various manifestations of the East in his works: how the formative voyage is generally a voyage to the East; how the East can paradoxically be found in the West; how, because of its ‘Easternness’, Germany is excluded from Europe. In a last section, I examine Barrès’s last major work, Un Jardin sur l’Oronte (1922), set in the Middle East at he time of the crusades, and show how the view from the East seems to be subverting Barrès’s – and not only his – categories.