Why Study Geography?

Alan Parkinson

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913019174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Considering studying geography at university? Wondering whether a geography degree will get you a good job, and what you might earn? Want to know what it's actually like to study geography at degree level? This book tells you what you need to know. Studying any subject at degree level is an investment in the future that involves significant cost. Now more than ever, students and their parents need to weigh up the potential benefits of university courses. That's where the Why Study series comes in. This series of books, aimed at students, parents and teachers, explains in practical terms the range and scope of an academic subject at university level and where it can lead in terms of careers or further study. Each book sets out to enthuse the reader about its subject and answer the crucial questions that a college prospectus does not.

Chapter 1

What is geography?

There are so many ways in which geography is fundamental to our lives, from physical landscapes, natural disasters, the characteristics of where we live, the energy we use, services we enjoy, the travel we undertake and the networks in which we engage. Geography is a cornerstone in the continuing education of everyone, both young and old, helping to make us more effective local and global citizens.

— Gill Miller, President of the Geographical Association, 2019–20

this chapter will discuss how geography developed as a school subject, what studying geography involves, and why it’s so important for everyone to have an appreciation of the power of geography and to be able to think geographically.

So what is geography?

One challenge for geographers when they are asked to describe their subject and what it involves is its scale. It is the ‘world discipline’, with the whole world as its object of study. This is quite a challenge for both teachers and students: where do you start with such a breadth of possible subject matter? It certainly makes it hard to narrow down exactly what it is that geographers do. A global scale allows for a huge variety of geographies to emerge. Very few people actually have ‘geographer’ as their occupation, and you won’t see many job advertisements recruiting them. The same issue doesn’t apply to some other academic subjects: you will often see someone in the media described as a ‘historian’, for instance. Fortunately, this diversity can be turned into one of geography’s strengths: what many people do in their job is geography, even if it isn’t necessarily called that. Many TV science programmes are geography in everything but name. The 2020 Netflix series History 101 is as much geographical in its subject matter as it is historical.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica definition of geography, written by the late Professor Ron Johnston, says that the subject involves ‘the study of the diverse environments, places, and spaces of Earth’s surface and their interactions’. More pithily, he said that geography studies the earth as ‘the home of mankind’: a good place to start, for sure, although he would perhaps have said humankind today.7

Geography is the subject that studies the world in the most sophisticated way, going back all the way to the Ancient Greeks, who were the first to map the world and ponder its mysteries. The Greek scholar Eratosthenes is credited as being the person who gave us the word ‘geography’, about 2,200 years ago, with ‘geo’ meaning the world and ‘graphy’ broadly meaning to write about, suggesting that geography is the science of ‘earth description’ or ‘earth writing’. There is no shortage of stories we could write about the world, and as geographers often remind us, who is writing the stories can be significant. We can all carry out some geographical thinking if we consider a place that we have (or haven’t) visited and write about it. Even a postcard from a holiday destination (or, more likely, a photo from our social media updates) may include some geographical description of the location, the weather conditions or the local culture.

Other early geographers include explorers such as Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Mungo Park, Isabella Bird, James Cook, Freya Stark and even Doctor Livingstone (I presume?). They explored the world from a Western perspective and reported back to people who would never have the chance to follow in their footsteps.

Geographers should therefore be interested in both telling and consuming compelling stories about the world, including grand tales of Polar exploration and scientific discovery, but also ‘smaller’ stories, such as those of each individual migrant crossing the Mediterranean looking for a new life in the European Union, or of a firefighter in Australia confronting a wildfire that is burning out of control and having to assess whether the wind will change direction and put them at risk. Each story has a context – it is set in a place – and a narrative that connects it with a number of external factors, such as weather and climate, urban or rural landscapes, and the time of year. Marvin Mikesell coined the pithy phrase that geography is ‘the why of where’.

Those early geographers were often travellers who came home with stories and other information (sometimes less than truthful) about the world they had seen. They were often the first people from their country to visit these places, at a time when ‘terra incognita’ (unexplored lands) still existed and sea serpents and dragons were drawn on the maps. We’ve gone beyond that now, although in 2020 our days of carefree foreign travel have been temporarily curtailed. One response to that limitation for many has been virtual travelling, and a desire to see more of the world – there is a lot of it to see.

The Roman astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy also, very importantly, started to ask questions about the world. Why are certain plants found in certain parts of the world, for example? Why do rivers only flood at certain times? Ptolemy himself actually came up with a useful early definition of geography as long ago as the second century ce:

A representation in pictures of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein.

This idea of images, then, is also really important to geographers – we love pictures. Information on the relative location of places was later used to make maps. Those that have survived are not necessarily small maps of local areas but larger maps showing whole territories, expanding outwards to the ‘edges’ of the known world as the globe began to be filled in. Although not all geographers are cartographers, all cartographers are geographers.

Maps were also sources of power, as they were often created to signify ownership of territories and resources. They tended to be made by and for people who had both an education and the money to pay for their creation. While maps are still one of the main tools of the geographer, they have arguably changed more than any other with the arrival of new technologies such as geographical information systems; we shall return to these later, as they form an important part of many undergraduate geography courses. These technologies, and collaborative projects such as Open Street Map, have democratized the ownership and production of maps: they are made by and for everyone, adults and young people alike. They have also been joined by the infographic: a combination of an image and text, often beautifully designed, with which you will be familiar from news reports and newspapers. The ultimate expression of maps for many are those found on smartphones: maps that build themselves around you as you move, providing you with the specific information you need to find a tube station, navigate to your workplace or gym, share your location with friends on WhatsApp, or ‘stalk’ a family member on Snapchat.

If you love maps, then you are a good way towards loving geography. Think of some of the story books you may have read when you were younger. Many had fantastic maps that stirred the imagination of their readers while also giving them a point of reference for the action in the Hundred Acre Wood, Middle Earth, Narnia, Panem or Earthsea.

Geography remains a difficult subject to pin down to specific topics of study. Not all geographers study the same things. It may be more accurate to say that there are many geographies, as each of you will have studied slightly different elements at school, depending on the particular interests of your teachers and the decade during which you went there. The specification of geography varies from country to country, too, as does the relative status of geography itself. Likewise, the course content of geography at university will vary depending on the research interests of your lecturers and on your own choice of dissertation topics, as we shall see in a later c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series page
• Title page
• Imprint page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What is this book about and who is it for?
• Chapter 1: What is geography?
• Chapter 2: Why should you study geography?
• Chapter 3: Where can your geographical studiestake you?
• Chapter 4: How have people used their geography qualifications?
• Chapter 5: Preparing to study geography at university
• Chapter 6: Making the most of your time at university
• Chapter 7: Why geography matters now more than ever
• Chapter 8: Finding out more about geography: further resources and support