Writing for Immediacy: Narrative Writing as a Teaching Technique in Undergraduate Cultural Geography

Narrative inquiry is an innovative means of encouraging students to internalize concepts, reflect on experiences or create applications for theoretical ideas. The use of first-person creative writing in a second-year cultural geography course prompted initial scepticism from students but eventually highlighted their constructivist engagement with course concepts. Despite a number of ethical, evaluative and moral dilemmas, encouraging the use of creative writing as a form of narrative inquiry allowed students to tell their stories so that they were valued and connected to wider disciplinary concepts.     

Uncommon Groundings: Fred B. Kniffen's Place in Current Cultural Geography

Fred Bowerman Kniffen's academic career started in the 1920s at a time when cultural geography in North America was getting underway. For more than 60 years, Kniffen played a prominent role in its formation and elaboration. His contribution centered on material cultural studies, particularly folk housing, and the patterns and processes of the diffusion of the cultural elements of ordinary people. However, Kniffen's legacy within contemporary cultural geography extends beyond these central concerns. This essay examines Kniffen's relation to mass or popular culture studies, material culture studies, Berkeley school cultural geography and the "new" cultural geography. It considers the bases for Kniffen 's appeal to a diverse following, and suggests why his contributions will not be soon outmoded.     

Putting Geography in its Place

Work on the history of geographical knowledge and practice frequently draws inspiration from theoretical insights developed elsewhere in the academy. After briefly touching on some of these historiographical matters, I argue that geographers might make some telling interventions into this debate by attending to some of their own key concepts – space, site, location – and disclosing their significance for elucidating the history of intellectual traditions. The fact that historians of science have begun to remark on the role of ‘place’ in knowledge production and consumption further confirms the value of this ‘geographical turn’. Subsequently I dwell on the implications of a spatialised historiography for work on the history of geography itself, and urge that ‘the history of geography’ might profitably be reconceptualised as ‘the historical geography of geography’.     

The Place of Population Geography in the System of Population Sciences

The area of research that is considered the proper domain of population geography is defined. In addition to an areal approach to the analysis of various aspects of population, such as growth, structure, migration and settlement patterns, there is great need for synthetic regional population studies, integrating all aspects of population within a particular territory. Causal relationships must be explained and the study of population must be related to the study of economic location.     

The Place of Regional Economic Geography in the System of Geographical Sciences

The author holds that regional geography cannot be regarded as an independent geographic discipline because it lacks its own system of laws, such as the natural laws that operate in physical geography and the social laws that operate in economic geography. He agrees with the view that both physical and economic geography fall into theoretical and regional departments, and that regional studies test the localized application of the general laws formulated by the theoretical departments of the two great divisions of geography.     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

旧志"分野"考--评古代中国人的地理文化观

“分野”是旧志编纂中的重要组成部分,是指天象星宿与疆土州国的对应,是古代中国人的一种地理化观念。以星宿定位州国的宇宙观在我国古代典籍中有众多记载,被赋予特殊丰富的内涵,对研究古代中国的历史地理有较大价值。