Socialist Geography in England: J. F. Horrabin and a Workers' Economic and Political Geography

This paper examines the life and geographical writings of the English socialist J.F.("Frank") Horrabin (1884–1962) and his attempts to construct a socialist geography. Horrabin was an active socialist in the Labour Party, Fabian Society, and other leftwing groups and very involved in working-class education through the Plebs League and National Council of Labour Colleges. He was also a journalist, cartoonist, and gifted cartographer. His 1923 text An Outline of Economic Geography , which sold in large numbers and was translated into nine other languages, attempted to provide workers with an account of economic (and political and historical) geography that used bourgeois "pure geography" but put it within a socialist and historical–materialist framework. Unlike Germany and some other countries, England did not have a strong Marxist theoretical tradition, and Horrabin's approach does not develop theory (though it did attract the admiration of the German Marxist Karl Wittfogel). Rather, it sets out to be engaged in practical political education. Horrabin's work was developed within a particular context, but his geographical writings (and pioneering political cartography) exemplify one way of linking geography with political practice, and this paper examines these relationships. Many of Horrabin's concerns find echoes in current radical geography, and his work deserves belated recognition and a place in the history of geography.     

李旭旦先生的学术思想和贡献及其他——纪念李旭旦先生诞辰100周年

李旭旦先生是人文地理学家、区域地理学家和地理教育家,毕生致力于地理教育和科学研究,培养了几代地理学人才,桃李满天下。他才思敏捷,知识渊博,治学严谨、执着,有较高的学术造诣。学术上他强调人地协调论和统一地理学,提倡区域研究,致力于地理教育理论的建设,创办《地理知识》杂志,曾任德国《GeoJournal》杂志编委,主编《人文地理学》(中国大百科全书分册)、《人文地理学论丛》、《人文地理学概说》,提出白龙江是我国西部南北地理分界线的科学论断,主张把解决现实问题作为人文地理学的主攻方向,重视野外调查,晚年他提出复兴人文地理学的倡议,把我国人文地理学的发展推向一个新的阶段。他是我国现代人文地理学的奠基人。     

旨趣和方法的异同:论钱大昕与王鸣盛的地理考辨

乾嘉学者钱大昕与王鸣盛治学以考据见长,二者在历史地理领域的研究各有特点。钱大昕擅长运用缜密的考辨方法,致力于建置沿革的考证纠谬,成果丰硕。王鸣盛则重视地理考察,贯通古今史事,辨析形势险要,探究地理条件与历代兴亡、战争胜负的关系;同时又以《禹贡》为中心,将儒家经典中的重要篇章纳入地理考辨的范围,反映其学术研究的丰富性和多样性。钱大昕与王鸣盛的考证成果及历史分析对近现代历史地理研究具有重要的参考价值,其细密考证与归纳、概括的综合分析也具有方法论上的借鉴意义。     

Geography and the Australian Curriculum: Unfulfilled Knowledges in Secondary School Education

The introduction of geography as a separate discipline within the Australian Curriculum offers hope for revitalisation of the subject in Australian school education after decades of decline. Since the 1990s, the subject has been largely submerged within an integrated curriculum framework that has had significant consequences for the presence and character of secondary school geography. Its inclusion in the learning area of SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) within schools has diluted the degree, breadth and depth of geographical education. However, in spite of the hope provided by its re‐institution, the process of national curriculum construction has had disconcerting consequences for the type of geography being offered to Australian students at the secondary level. Building on critical overviews of the history of secondary geography as an Australian school subject since the 1980s, recent philosophical discourse on approaches to geographical knowledge in a school context, and the author's personal experience as a geographical educator and researcher, this paper argues that the nature of knowledge embodied by the new geography study design in Years 7–10 is flawed in both its scope and its direction. While reflecting many of the characteristics of a social realist approach to geographical knowledge, the Australian Curriculum minimises the elements of critical analysis that provide geography with its unique educational identity and value.     

Renewing the purpose of geography education: Eco-anxiety,powerful knowledge,and pathways for transformation

Concerns about the decline in uptake of secondary geography education continue despite arguments supporting the value of geography education, the power of geographical thinking, and geography’s critical role in preparing students to deal with complex challenges. Already constrained by neoliberal politics of disadvantage, young people must plan and prepare for chaotic futures. Consequently, young people are becoming distressed and worried about their futures and feeling powerless as society fails to adequately address these issues. In this article, we ask what schools and universities can do as place-based public institutions to serve young people to effectively respond to eco-anxiety and build capacities to surf the unrelenting waves of change. We draw on journeys that brought three young doctoral candidates to study geography. From their stories, we sketch what a geographical education could offer in terms of relevance, practicality, and engagement with transformative system change. We think that under current world conditions, this is a moment to revive geography education and give it renewed purpose to encourage young people to develop skills and competences to tackle wicked problems.     

THE GEOGRAPHICAL THINKING OF N.I. VAVILOV

Much has been published recently about Academician N.I. Vavilov, a seminal scientist with broad horizons. This article is limited to his geographical contributions and interests. His early study of agriculture in Afghanistan revealed his keen powers of field observation and his deep geographic orientation. This work won him the Przheval'skiy Gold Medal of the Geographical Society. He organized a network of experimental stations across the broad and diverse expanses of the Soviet Union to test the geographical limits of crops. He carried out numerous studies of mountain agriculture in many parts of the globe, noting that the isolation and the patchwork of critical environmental conditions in mountains favored the divergence of species, forms, and types of the wild ancestors of cultivated plants. This led to his trail-blazing identification and field investigation of hearths (centers) of origin of cultivated plants, of their diffusion, of areas of ancient agriculture, and to formulation of principles of geographical variability. This work has been continued in recent years by others. Vavilov had close connections with geography, with several geographers, and with the Geographical Society of the USSR (translated by Andrew R. Bond).     

Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British nineteenth-century geographical education

The impact that Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Philipp Emanuel Fellenberg (1771–1844) had upon nineteenth-century European geographical education and ideas has long been recognised. Their influence upon British geography teaching has, however, been little explored, despite the work already done on the general impact of Pestalozzianism and Fellenbergianism on British education. Using the arguments of nineteenth-century educational theorists such as Compayre and Spencer, this study argues that Pestalozzian educationists such as Phillip Pullen and Charles Mayo in England helped to change the way that geography was taught to middle-class children. A case study of teaching practices at a Pestalozzian institution in Worksop, Nottinghamshire shows how changes in geographical education were encouraged by Pestalozzian ideas on the teaching of geography and the relationship of the subject to other disciplines including topography, natural history and geology.     

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.     

On the Study of the History of Geographical Ideas

The author rebuts the criticism by Yu. G. Saushkin that the book Razvitiye geograficheskikh idey [The Evolution of Geographical Ideas] is in effect a history of physical geography rather than a history of geography as a whole. Isachenko contends that concepts of natural science have been at the root of geography throughout its history and it is therefore natural for a history of geographical ideas to deal predominantly with the ideas of physical geography. Far from having ignored human geography, Isachenko contends, his book traces the anthropocentric school through its various stages of development. Only the survey of Soviet geography was restricted to physical geography, the author says, because Soviet geography consists of two virtually independent disciplines and the author happens to be a physical geographer viewing his discipline as the foundation of all geography.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

On the Unity of Geography

A Leningrad University physical geographer criticizes attempts to affirm the unity of geography through the creation of new disciplines like “general geography,” which would focus on study of the man-nature relationship. He contends that such a general geography, which would seek to identify general geographic laws, is advocated primarily by economic geographers who would emphasize the role of man at the expense of physical geography. Isachenko takes issue with the view that what makes any research “geographical” is its relationship to man. He contends that the criterion of whether any investigation is “geographical” is its relationship to the geosystem, defined as any natural complex, ranging from the global to the local scale. In his opinion, the unity of geography should be furthered not through the establishment of new supradisciplines, such as general geography, but through closer ties, both in methodology and in organizational terms, between the two main groups of geographical disciplines—physical geography and economic geography.     

V. P. SEMENOV-TYAN-SHANSKIY'S REGION AND COUNTRY: ITS PRESENT-DAY RELEVANCE AND MEANING (on the 50th anniversary of publication)

A reassessment of a classic Russian geographical work by V. P. Semonov-Tyan-Shanskiy (1870-1942) by a group of young geographers finds that some of its ideas were far ahead of its time and are only now beginning to be understood and conceptualized in the Soviet Union. The reissuance of his book, which has become a bibliographical rarity, is urged. Veniamin Semenov-Tyan-Shanskiy, the son of Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shanskiy, another classic figure in Russian geography, was one of the last universalists, with interests ranging from geomorphology to economic statistics. He is probably best known for a multivolume regional geography of Russia, of which 11 of 22 projected volumes appeared between 1899 and 1913.     

On the Problems of Geography and the Tasks of Popularizing Geographical Knowledge

A Moscow University geographer who advocates a unity of geography uses the medium of the Znaniye [Knowledge] Society, an organization for the popularization of scientific knowledge and communist ideology, to review the basic problems confronting geography as a research discipline. He reviews the historical sequence of philosophic concepts relating to the man-environment system in an attempt to justify his approach to the system as one in which both natural and social laws operate. Anuchin stresses the need for pure theoretical research in geography and polemicizes with those who seek prompt practical results. He restates his definition of the geographical environment as that part of the earth's landscape sphere in which nature and society interact as two parts of a single whole governed by distinctive laws. The metachronous character of development of the landscape sphere, with several parts formed at various times, is cited as an example of such a universal law. Anuchin agrees with the authors of The Science of Geography, the 1965 report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Geography, Division of Earth Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, that geography's overriding problem is to gain an understanding of the man-environment system and to develop tools for geographical prediction. An ability to predict the consequences of man's interference in natural processes is depicted as the principal contribution that geography can make to the pursuit of knowledge at the present stage of human development. If geography is unable to meet its responsibilities, the problem of geographical prediction may have to be taken over by other disciplines. Soviet biologists have already suggested the creation of a new science, geohygiene, to deal with the man-environment relationship.     

Teaching Geography to Non-traditional Students: Inducting,nurturing and retaining them

The Department of Environmental and Biological Studies at Liverpool Hope University College recruits an above-average number of students who could be classified as 'non-traditional'. Many are mature and many have gained entry to higher education via routes other than A level. In addition, and increasingly, many have selected or been allocated to the first-year geography modules with little or no experience of geography education. These students undertake a carefully structured programme of small-group teaching, designed to induct and train them in the practices of higher education and through which they are introduced to key geographical concepts. This paper highlights some of the issues arising from teaching non-traditional students and identifies as case studies elements of the programme, which support the development of students' skills and geographical understanding.     

沙学浚区域研究的特点与方法

沙学浚在政治地理、军事地理、历史地理等领域所取得的研究成果,多基于他对不同时空、不同尺度、不同类型区域的准确把握与深入认识.通过对沙氏不同时期论著中关于区域划分、认知、分析等方面思想方法的梳理与总结,可以发现,重视海洋的区域研究视角、空间价值与地位价值相结合的区域研究方法,以及宏观时空视野与动态发展观相结合的区域研究理...     

地理学思想史指要——杰弗里·马丁《所有可能的世界:地理学思想史》评介

地理学思想史研究对地理学学科发展具有重要意义.当前国内对地理学思想史的研究比较缺乏.地理学思想史的任务并不仅仅是讲述地理思想和知识的产生、形成和演变过程,而且要通过这一过程达到对地理学性质的把握和准确认识.通过地理学思想史研究可以把握地理学的要旨:地球表面的差异性是地理学的关键,而对此进行描述和解释是地理研究的主要内容.地理学思想史有两个大的发展阶段:古典时期和近现代时期.在面临坚持传统与积极创新的抉择时,地理学家应该多从思想史中吸收和借鉴,并避免掉入二元论的语义陷阱.     

"Environmental awareness" and rock climbing: changing pedagogies to enhance pro-environmental graduate attributes

Geography has long been seen as having a central role in education for sustainable development, and yet the degree to which a geographical education translates to personal capacities for action has been questioned. Having struggled for some years to engage Outdoor Adventure Education students with physical geography science-based knowledge of the environment, we trialled a pedagogical shift to emphasize a relational, self-in-environment consciousness developed through autoethnography. We recount this experience to suggest that a similar approach may have potential to connect geography students’ cognitive knowledge of societies and environments with personal identities and capacities for action.     

Determinism and Indeterminism in Foreign Geography. Part II

The controversy between the environmentalists and the possibilists and the schools of cultural determinism, social determinism and indeterminism in West European and American geography are reviewed. The shift away from geographical determinism is viewed as not being necessarily a positive development in geography because it has led to a gradual strengthening of indeterminist tendencies with their associated disregard for physical geographical factors. When viewed in the historical context, geographical determinism is found to have shifted significantly from the extreme views of Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington to a more pragmatically oriented view of the environmental impact on problems of economic development, i.e. from historical-sociological explanations to problems in applied geography. Even if the modern determinists tend to exaggerate the significance of the physical environment in some cases, this is still viewed as the lesser evil compared with an underestimation of environmental factors.     

经验科学进步的一般模式与当今地理学的发展——试以人文地理学为例

笔者首先引入库恩的范式理论和科学进步模式,并用协同学理论对之改造,以此作为本文分析问题的理论框架。紧接着,尝试用该模式剖析地理学的发展历史,指出每阶段的大致时间区间、发展特点、重要的历史贡献和代表人物,并用自组织原理阐述科学危机和科学革命发生的机理,从而为第四部分分析当今地理学危机作理论铺垫。然后,以人文地理学为例总结地理学的科学范式,从而形成当今地理学发展总的图景。再之,本文指出当今地理学危机产生的原因有两个:地理学范式逻辑结构松散和信息革命的挑战。危机是革命的先导,继计量革命和行为革命之后,(人文)地理学领域将要发生战后的第三次较大的革命,(人文)地理学范式将得以重塑,(人文)地理学共同体的地理思维、地理行为将随之变化。最后,本文引申出在新的时代条件下地理学的两大发展任务和地理哲学领域的两大前沿课题,以供参考。     

Educational Innovation and the Market for Geographers in Hungary

This paper examines the status of geography in higher education in Hungary. Stress is placed on reforms begun in the 1990s to launch new curricula for training professional geographers. The authors played an important role in developing this new curriculum by introducing new subjects into geography programmes, working out the scope and sequence of courses, obtaining accreditation and carrying out market research for graduates. The project was motivated by a decline in demand for geography and geography teachers in secondary schools accompanied by an increase in demand for geographers trained to work in public administration, government and business. The graduates of the new professional geographer curriculum receive a practice-oriented education designed to cultivate their spatial problem solving and applied geographical skills. In this paper the authors present the steps in the curriculum reform and suggest that it may serve as a model for reform in a number of nearby countries planning to join the EU.