GEOGRAPHY'S SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ERNST CASSIRER

O ne of the distinctive features of geographic research is the spatial perspective which is manifested in the geographic literature through the use of a wide variety of spatial concepts. Until the recent work of phenomenological geographers, the variety of concepts used by geographers conformed to the ideals of a scientific geography in that they referred to measurable relations between phenomena. The relations may be directly measurable, such as the highway distance between Los Angeles and San Diego, or they may be indirectly measurable, such as an individual's perception of the distance between the same two cities. This interest in both objective as well as perceived spatial relationships illustrates the expanded scope of geography's spatial perspective, which has resulted in an increase in the number of spatial concepts of significance to geographers and a proliferation of the meanings given to the traditional spatial concepts of geography.     

地理学期刊与地理学的传统——西方主要国家地理学期刊评价

SCI是世界公认的自然科学领域最为权威的研究成果检索和评价工具,另一方面,一门学科的学会刊物也是反映该领域最重要研究成果的平台。在许多自然学科领域,学会会刊都是SCI的必检刊物,但世界各国多数地理学会的会刊却都不在SCI索引之列。这就产生了一个疑问:如何来评价地理学的研究成果?本文认为,地理学刊物的评价应该遵循其学科特点,以会刊作为成果评价的核心更符合实际。本文介绍了英美德法日等主要国家的地理学会和会刊的情况,并借此呼吁,在当前以SCI期刊论文作为第一标准的中国学术行政体制下,应维护地理学自身的发展规律,保持地理学的传统,建立合理的地理学研究成果评价体系。     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

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.     

Travelling down the road to postdisciplinarity? Reflections of a tourism geographer

Like many other forms of scholarship in geography, tourism geography has evolved as a distinct subfield of inquiry within the discipline, although the contributions of tourism geographers are perhaps more readily acknowledged in the multidisciplinary realm of tourism studies. I trace the evolving relationship of tourism geography to both the discipline of geography and to the field of tourism studies. In doing so, I reflect on such influences as the role of institutions, paradigm shifts, technology, and other factors that affect the creation and management of geographic knowledge in the twenty‐first century. The intent of this article is two‐fold: first, to appeal to geographers for greater recognition of the importance of tourism as a quintessential component of geographic study that in today's world warrants integration into core aspects of geographic enquiry; second, to use current debates within both tourism studies and geography to reflect on issues of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and even postdisciplinarity.     

INTEGRATION AND DIFFERENTIATION IN MODERN GEOGRAPHY

A leading physical geographer reviews recent efforts in the Soviet Union to foster integration among the physical and socioeconomic disciplines of geography. He identifies a number of barriers that stand in the way of integration: the ever increasing multiplicity of conceptual approaches and models in geography, runaway terminological innovation and confusion, the increasing tendency of socioeconomic geographers to give their particular disciplines a greater economic and sociological orientation, the lack of cohesion in efforts to work out general geographic concepts and theories, the absence of physical-geographic background in work on social and economic geography, the increasing trend toward differentiation in geography, the fact that there is actually very little joint work among physical and socioeconomic geographers. In Isachenko's view, geography in the Soviet Union remains inevitably a dualistic discipline, in which progress toward genuine integration would require, for example, genuine collaboration among geographers in the various subfields.     

Australian Geography and Geographic Information Systems

In Australian universities geography has had traditional links with geology, environmental science and the social sciences. Human geographers’ pursuit of links into the humanities has distracted many of them from understanding the implications of the increasing interest shown by computer science, geomatics and other disciplines in geography. The emergence of a dialogue overseas between the humanities and the geographic information systems community is an important development which may result in this new grouping colonising some of the traditional disciplinary areas of human geography. It is clear that although this emerging cross‐disciplinary linkage has not had any influence on the current phase of mergers and cross‐disciplinary linkages in Australia, it will undoubtedly become important locally in the future.     

Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross‐Cultural Research in Geography

Decolonising research in geography is part of a broader ‘reflexive’ process which continues to question the positivist status of ‘researcher as observer’. This paper contributes to this reflexive turn, drawing on the particular experiences of a cross‐cultural Honours thesis. The paper is pursued through a parallel journey involving a non‐Indigenous researcher (and author of the cross‐cultural Honours thesis) engaging Indigenous research 1 with interpretative insight from an Indigenous adviser or ‘on‐looker’. The methodological difficulties revealed by the parallel journey are emphasised to highlight both the complexities and reflexive possibilities of cross‐cultural research but also to consider potential institutional and pedagogic implications that stem from the experience. One of the substantial findings of the paper is that, by linking Indigenous community priorities to research and coursework, conventional (and often unequal) research relations are minimised and colonising tendencies reduced. By challenging the conventional way that cross‐cultural research is conceived, and the way that institutional practices and research frameworks are implemented, geographers can continue their prolonged and complex efforts at decolonisation of the field and their own practices.     

国际背景与中国特色的经济地理学

近一、二十年来,以英美地理学家为主导的国际经济地理学界开始注重制度和社会文化因素对经济空间现象的影响。柔性专业化、网络与根植性、集聚与集群,区域管制等概念,频聚出现于国际主导地理刊物和国际会议讨论之中。国内也有一些学者引进这些相关理论并结合中国实例作了一些可喜的探索。这种引进理论--中国实际研究--理论总结的研究模式,推动着上世纪中国经济地理学发展。但是,从中国特色的经济地理学角度考虑,还应该探索其他研究思路。中国经济地理学发展背景,有一些在世界十分独特,如最大的且近20多年经济增长最快的发展中国家,工业化与城市化不相一致,体制变革、文化传统的特殊影响,人口与资源的尖锐矛盾,区域差异巨大,经济地理学在地理学中地位的特殊性等。根据这些背景,中国经济地理学需要冷静地审视国际学术动向和中国特色。立足中国实际,加强国际交流,凝练解释中国特殊经济地理现象的理论观点,逐渐培育国际经济地理学界中的中国流派。     

Complexity, cultural theory and strategies for intervention in the High Atlas of Morocco

As a result of the Rio Conference, mountain areas have been placed at the centre of several international initiatives to prepare suitable strategies for long-term development. In recent years, the concepts of cultural theory and complexity have been proposed as frameworks in which to develop practical agenda encouraging the sustainable development. Any such agenda must account for the dynamic interaction between the particular physical conditions of mountains and the livelihoods of the population, itself a long-standing problem for geographers. This paper draws upon a number of development initiatives in the Moroccan High Atlas to provide a critique of these concepts. It outlines the initiatives for livestock management, soil erosion, arboriculture and tourism as they represent four important areas of policy debate. The principal features of cultural theory and the use of complexity thinking in social science are then outlined. This provides an opportunity to recast the development problems in the light of these concepts, and it is argued that co-evolution, diversity and indeterminacy provide helpful pointers to the design of successful strategies.     

Avoiding the “F” word: feminist geography in Iran

Abstract

Little attention has been given to how feminist geography is defined, applied, and taught in non-Anglophone countries, especially in Muslim majority societies where Women’s Rights are quite different from the western world. The case of Iran among other Middle Eastern countries becomes even more isolated due to the several political, linguistic, and cultural limitations opposed on Iranian academics and international collaborations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Women make half of Iran’s 80 million population, 63% of university graduates, almost half of informal workers, 30% of Iranian professors, 13% of high level management position holders, and under 5% of the Islamic Majlis (Iran’s Parliament). However, feminist geography, the sub-discipline that has been traditionally dedicated to the inclusion of gender as an analytical lens within Geography, is not a recognized field at any departments in Iran. This essay aims to present the current status of feminist geographic research and teaching at selected Iranian Universities. My goal is to offer a better understanding of how the local social and political context affect what constitute feminist geographic work and how geographers navigate the political and hierarchal university systems to engage in gender studies. Through informal interviews via emails and Skype with several Iranian geographers, I illustrate why Iranian geographers often avoid using “feminist” terminology in recognizing their work, even though their work is feminist.     

GEOGRAPHICAL SYSTEMS AND ECONOMIC-GEOGRAPHICAL SYSTEMS

A group of physical geographers of the Institute of Geography in Moscow, the principal academic research institution in geography, published an article in 1974 seeking to define and categorize terms and concepts now being used in Soviet geography. The article said the term geosystem (geographical system) applied equally to physical-geographical and socio-economic entities, and the term “geographical environment”, in actual research practice, referred not only to the physical setting of human activities, but also to engineering elements and social conditions. The present writer contends that such a definition of the geographical environment, incorporating both natural and social elements, smacks of a unified geography, and that geosystems, as originally defined, refer only to natural terrestrial systems, excluding man.     

“It is loved and it is defended”: Critical Solidarity Across Race and Place

Since 2010, the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous people of western Mexico have struggled against transnational mining activity in their sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta in the semi‐desertic plateaus of San Luis Potosí. This struggle has been accompanied by a multitude of non‐indigenous and largely urban actors who have joined the Wixárika, bringing with them their own cultural, political and geographic registers for understanding and mobilising against mining in the region. Taking Wirikuta as a contemporary demonstration of interracial and cross‐geographic alliance building, I analyse how social movements that express solidarity and affective ties with the territories and cultures of indigenous peoples struggle to unsettle entrenched racial and spatial relations.     

Teaching introductory GIS programming to geographers using an open source Python approach

Computer programming is not commonly taught to geographers as a part of geographic information system (GIS) courses, but the advent of NeoGeography, big data and open GIS means that programming skills are becoming more important. To encourage the teaching of programming to geographers, this paper outlines a course based around a series of laboratories that aims to provide an introduction to programming. Methods for teaching and assessment are recommended. These laboratories use core spatial concepts that are relevant for all areas of geographic study, and use an open source Python approach that has wider logistical and pedagogical benefits.     

Resisting and Reconciling Big Wind: Middle Landscape Politics in the New American West

Abstract: While critical geographers have addressed how place politics impacts rural landscapes, less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which rural landscape identities are being impacted by the new energy economy. The nascent US wind energy opposition movement is evidence of broad, organized resistance to the landscape impacts associated with the re‐sculpting of rural energy geographies. Drawing from cultural landscape and place theory, this article examines the shifting terrain of wind opposition in the “New American West”. The article argues that wind energy opposition is fundamentally about who speaks for and negotiates conflicting social commitments to technology, economic values and an imagined American pastoral identity. By examining a case study of wind development in Nevada, this article considers how renewable energy development can constructively acknowledge the important role the “middle landscape” continues to play in American constructions of rural space.     

EMBEDDEDNESS AND THE (RE)MAKING OF RETAIL SPACE IN THE REALM OF MULTICHANNEL RETAILING: THE CASE OF MIGROS SANAL MARKET IN TURKEY

The purpose of this article is to investigate the value of the concept of embeddedness for economic geographers. Alongside the case study of the multichannel grocery retailing brand Migros in Turkey, the spatial impacts – in relational and physical terms – of digitalization and the integration of an online shop into the profile of a supermarket chain are investigated. In applying the concept of embeddedness the article seeks to understand these complex, diverse and uneven processes of (retail) restructurings that affect different dimensions and dynamics of networks, societies and spaces. In my case study I identify two dimensions of embeddedness processes: (1) embedding the online shop in the firm's routines and practices, whereby processes of transfer of knowledge and technology dominate; and (2) embedding online shopping in the customer's routines and practices, whereby processes of adaption to consumer culture dominate. These dimensions are reflexive and as such mirror ongoing negotiation processes between the two stakeholders. On one hand multichannel retailing thus not only alters where but also how people shop, and can result in new retail spaces like pick‐up stores. On the other hand it can be shown, that the “locations”, where online shopping of Migros is available, reproduce spatial variations of socio‐economic factors, such as income distribution or population density. As such, the concept of embeddedness is useful for economic geographers – also in the realm of e‐commerce – to unravel the interconnections of societal, organizational and spatial patterns as well as their variations across space. The study is based on qualitative interviews.