Introduction Flashcards
What is the genealogy of human geography?
- Early Geographical Thought
- Imperial Discipline
- Regional Geography
- Spatial Science
- Humanistic Geography
- Radical and Marxist Geography
- Feminist Geography
- ‘Cultural Turn’
- Poststructuralist/Non-Representational
Early Geographical Thought
Environmental Determinism
Imperial Discipline
Victorian geography was intimately bound up with British expansionist policy overseas (Livingstone, 1992)
Regional Geography
Criticised for descriptiveness and lack of theory.
Spatial Science
A focus on space, theory necessarily mathematical.
X - uniform logic, absence of politics
Humanistic Geography
Focused on notions of dwelling and home (‘sense of place’) and questions of being and consciousness.
X - overly abstract, too subjective, ignores power relations
✓ - Introduced issues now central to human geography – place, emotions and affect, the body and performance
Radical & Marxist Geography
Geographers examined the uneven socio-spatial relations between capital, labour and commodities.
X - ‘grand narratives’ & reductionist
Feminist Geography
Widening the focus to include women’s issues and advancing a particular political agenda (equality).
‘Cultural Turn’
Key work around the idea of landscape as a cultural text/representation/’way of seeing’
Postmodern & Poststructural
Drew on Derrida’s concepts of narrative, deconstruction and hyper-reality.
Eschews the idea of a single, objective truth and instead emphasises the partial, incomplete and contested nature of meaning.
Non-Representational Theory
Turns attention to performance, practice and affect. Considers the world as in a state of becoming and focuses on the ‘event’.
X - overly theoretical, representation still matters
Gaps in the genealogy?
Postcolonial Geographies!
More-than-human Geographies! (de-centre human, trouble human/nature binary)
Digital Turn!
