Human Geography
Human geography is the study of the spatial aspects of human activities and their relationship to the Earth's surface. It examines how people and their activities are distributed across the world, as well as the impact of human behavior on the environment. This field encompasses a wide range of topics, including population, migration, urbanization, cultural landscapes, and globalization.
8 Key excerpts on "Human Geography"
eBook - ePubMethods in Human Geography
A guide for students doing a research project
- Robin Flowerdew, David M. Martin, Robin Flowerdew, David M. Martin(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This aspect of your education as a human geographer may rarely be made explicit and, in some respects, can only be learned by doing geography. It does, however, raise an interesting question. What makes a piece of research geographical? As Kirk (1963 : 361) asked some time ago, ‘Do we think and work geographically rather than think and work on geographical materials?’ In other words, is it the ‘how’ or the ‘what’ dimension that makes our research geographical? Without being paranoid about protecting or delimiting academic turf, this is a question worth considering especially as it may be in the minds of some dissertation examiners. First consider some standard answers to the question about what human geographers study: geographers study spatial relationships; geographers study the relationships between people and environments; geographers study landscapes; geographers study regions or localities. It is certainly possible to find evidence in the geographical literature that all these, and many more, have been objects of research. It is hard, however, to claim the exclusive academic ownership of such objects that would be needed to justify the claim that they are distinctively geographical. The ‘how’ dimension of research presents similar problems. Human Geography is a social science which shades into both the natural sciences and the humanities. As such, it shares many of the approaches used by other social sciences (and faces similar philosophical choices). So difficult had it become to disentangle the methodologies of Human Geography from those of other social sciences that, nearly two decades ago, Eliot Hurst (1985) wanted human geographers to stop trying, to discard their empty geographical identities and throw in their lot with an undifferentiated social science...
- Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...This chapter is not, however, meant as a comprehensive introduction to the subdiscipline of cultural geography. Instead, it is an invitation to examine the field’s ever-changing contours through the ensuing essays. Cultural geography has been a foundational building block of Human Geography since the discipline formally was established in the nineteenth century. Documenting spatial patterns in human interaction with, responses to, and transformations of the natural landscape, raising questions about how landscape itself was shaped by and shaped social dynamics, and problematizing the ideas of culture, landscape, and nature have been cultural geography’s contributions to the ways that human geographers have thought about the world around them, past and present. Today, the line between Human Geography as a discipline and cultural geography as a subdiscipline is blurred to the point that cultural geography is Human Geography in some corners of our field. Recent intellectual and scholarly developments within geography have drawn cultural geographers closer to the fold and to deeper engagements with colleagues and ideas once thought beyond cultural geography’s purview – political, economic, historical, or environmental geography, for example. These connections have been strengthened through cultural geography’s embrace of and relevance to the so-called cultural and spatial turns across the human sciences as well as its engagement with social theory and concepts of interest to a broad range of scholars within and beyond the discipline. In short, cultural geographers today study nearly every aspect of Human Geography and do so in ways that simultaneously reinforce the subdiscipline’s place in geography and question the logic and locations of its boundaries. Cultural geography is itself deeply geographic in terms of what places and spaces cultural geographers study and how cultural-geographic scholarship is conducted across institutional and national contexts...
eBook - ePubHuman Geography
An Essential Introduction
- Mark Boyle(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Instead of studying variations in human activity from place to place, humanistic geographers became interested in human attachments to places and environments. Humans are complex beings; they have complicated psychologies, they have feelings and emotions, they attach meanings to things, and they can be conscious in their dealings with the world. According to humanistic geographers, Human Geography is best thought of as the study of the ways in which the existential, emotional, and psychological makeup of human beings leads them to make and experience different environments and places in different ways. The second reaction accepted that there are processes that organize human activities over space in ways that are coherent and predictable, but placed emphases upon society's relationship with space rather than with laws that determine spatial patterns. A branch of structural geography emerged, which argued that Human Geography ought to engage with the social sciences more so than the natural sciences. Critical realism was the philosophy of choice for structural geography; the key to understanding the spatial organization of society was to study the ways in which social, political, and economic structures created spatial patterns and processes. These structures were real and exerted material influence on the organization of space. Structural geography was pioneered most successfully by British‐born but US‐based Marxist geographer David Harvey and British feminist and Marxist geographer Doreen Massey. Marxist geography believes that the mode of production that exists in each society determines the geographical layout of these societies. Societies with different political, social, and economic institutions produce different human geographies. Marxist geographers are particularly interested in the geographies that the capitalist mode of production creates, including urbanization, transportation systems, regional variations in development, poverty, migration, and so on...
eBook - ePub- Peter Knight(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A shopping centre might lie close to a housing area, objectively, but separated by a major road system the two might subjectively be further apart than the shopping centre and a more distant area with better links. This search for understanding of the meanings which people ascribed to the spatial dimensions of their lives aligned geography with other social studies. The most distinctive thing about geography became its concern with the human, spatial dimension – in which respect it is not unique, although it may be pre-eminent. Where geographers of the inter-war years, such as Hartshome, had sought to keep geography and history separate, in post-war years there developed an interest in the dynamics of change in space: the same old suspicion that time should be left to historians has cropped up again – even reinforced in some discussions by a feeling that ‘time’ is some kind of hostile concept, challenging the ‘space’ of geography for supremacy. But both dimensions are essential to all kinds of study (Chappell, 1989, p.18). I still insist that all geography is necessarily historical geography, that a concern with genesis and spatio-temporal processes of social transformation must dominate over pure description of spatial patterns (Harvey, 1989, p.212). Notice not only the historical emphasis on change, but also the idea that geography is a study of the social world, a sharp contrast to the environmental determinism of the turn of the century. Geography has become essentially Human Geography. A consequence has been uncertainty about the status of physical geography. Whether physical geography has much in common with Human Geography is disputable. Johnston (1991, p.viii) wrote that, I find the links between physical and Human Geography tenuous as those disciplines are currently practised...
eBook - ePub- John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan, John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Much of what goes for geographic research even now involves some situating or positioning in relation to forebears or intellectual ancestors, if only to show how much they have been “left behind.” In counterpoint to the tendency to dismiss the past as irrelevant to current concerns this volume will try to situate present debates and differences in relation to past ones. Consequently, the book will be divided into three sections: Foundations, tracing the history of Human Geography (as defined today) in terms of pre-professional ideas and influences from the ancient Greeks down until the late nineteenth century; The Classics, surveying the significant German and French as well as British, US, and other “roots” of later Human Geography and then emphasizing the creation of an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the attempts at providing an intellectual rationale for this initiative; and Contemporary Approaches, highlighting the ways in which the field is subdivided and how Human Geography is practiced today by examining a selection of themes with two different perspectives on each, and the operations of its practitioners in education and the larger world. In this final section we do not aim to have authors confront one another but simply offer their own perspectives on the same theme. The purpose is to emphasize divergent interpretations against the tendency to offer interpretations that suggest a general consensus of opinion or a uniform account of what has been happening over the past twenty years or so. We want to show the pluralism of the field at the same time we illustrate the degree to which recent trends draw on and legitimize themselves by reference to historic precursors. Globalization and Human Geography Globalization is a buzzword for a world that is seen as increasingly stretched, shrunk, interwoven, integrated, and less state-centered than in the past...
eBook - ePub- Sherin Wing(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Topography alone cannot dictate the location of religious projects, nor are religious spaces evanescent. 13 It should come as no surprise then that the most useful insights geographers provide regarding how human relationships are spatial come from secular research. 14 It is now accepted that geography extends beyond merely mapping a geographic location. 15 Geographical terms—cartography, territory, space—have been co-opted by different disciplines to indicate movement and interaction. 16 Some researchers have even proposed that geography is a study of social process. 17 In geographical terms, all spaces are political. Defining that space or geography is a matter of who controls it and determines which elements will be emphasized. The question is which “self” will ally with the space to define both the space and the self. 18 Space and social position are thus in constant [re]production: 19 “Space is an ontological category that characterizes all social structures and any system of social relations, and not an ontical category that refers to particular sorts of space.” 20 These interpretations share an emphasis on the production of space, not the result of that production...
eBook - ePub- J. Andrew Hubbell, John C. Ryan(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Whereas environmental anthropology and cultural geography are relatively established fields, the geohumanities is an emerging area that shares much common ground with the Environmental Humanities. To begin with, environmental (or ecological) anthropology has played a leading role in the evolution of the Environmental Humanities. A focus area within the broad field of anthropology, environmental anthropology foregrounds human–environment interactions of the past, the present and—particularly in response to climate change and the Anthropocene—the future (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2011, 1). Environmental anthropologists study a range of topics—from human behavior, ecological perception, community environmentalism, and societal collapse to natural disasters, biological diversity, urban gardening, and Indigenous knowledge. Although an academic specialization rife with theory (and the abstraction that necessarily comes along with it), environmental anthropology is also an applied, policy-driven field motivated by ecological concern and interested in presenting avenues for action. Environmental anthropologists hope to contribute to global conservation but generally focus on local solutions. Case Study 5.1 Easter Island and ecocultural collapse Easter Island is a classic case study of the relationship between environmental degradation and societal collapse. Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island on the planet. Located in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean, the Polynesian island is known for its colossal, large-headed statues, or moai, carved by the Rapa Nui people between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries (Figure 5.2). Venerated for their otherworldly powers, moai depict ancestors and are regarded as aringa ora, or “living faces,” rather than celestial deities (Arnold 2000, 23–24)...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It could be presented either as comprising a largely inert container or environment, within which the objects of interest to Human Geographers such as people or cities fitted, or as a more active determinant force, whereby physical features of this “container,” such as climate, determined its more social characteristics (environmental determinism). Human Geography, and by default Population Geography, was from this perspective not seen as very “alive.” In summary, Jones (1990: 2) was not being excessively critical when he concluded that prior to the 1950s population was “relegated to consideration in the more sterile forms of Regional Geography as part of a place-work-people chain” where the physical environment begat the economy which begat population in a fairly unexamined manner. 1.3.3 1950s–1970s As with its practice in the early part of the twentieth century, Bailey (2005; also Jones 1990) argued that the rise of Population Geography as a distinctive academic sub-discipline in the 1950s, expressed through key figures and influential texts, reflected developments within both Human Geography and society generally. With respect to the latter, population issues featured heavily in: post-World War II national projects of economic and social reconstruction; promoting geopolitical stability, economic prosperity and social cohesion; and often pushed progressive social and cultural agendas. For example, reducing infant mortality as a pressing issue for democratic societies of equals could be associated with all these aforementioned topics. However, whilst states “became absorbed by population matters” (Bailey 2005: 58), these challenges were usually not framed in practice in objectively neutral ways but were always constituted under the shadows cast by their societies...
