HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE‐SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.     

Grappling with Geography's Existential Dilemma: The Legacy of William Torrey Harris

Geography's existence as a school or college subject has never been a given. While geographers make cases for geography's importance, acceptance of those cases rests not on impassioned rhetoric but on the social and intellectual contexts into which disciplines fit. Contexts are contested and they change. From a seemingly secure position at the beginning of the twentieth century, geography's role in American schools has been eroded and diminished by corrosive forces. Geographers need convincing answers to the existential question lest the subject disappear entirely. Geography's enviable position was in large measure the work of William Torrey Harris. Harris made a compelling existential case for geography and his vision, its implementation, its rejection, and its fate offer a model from which geographers can learn. Understanding how to respond to a social and intellectual context is crucial to geography's future.     

Rural and Urban: Using American FactFinder on the Census Bureau Web Site Lesson Plan: Grades Four through Eight

Abstract

Regional survey courses are often perceived as ancillary to the systematic foci taught by geography programs. This situation stands in contrast to the recent recovery of place and region as key elements in the practice and theory of geography. In this article, I outline one possible approach for bridging the gap between regional geography's revival in theory and research and its instruction in the classroom. This approach is described in the context of a survey course about the former Soviet Union—a region where the conventional boundaries of place have been severely questioned by political, economic, and social upheavals.     

Placing Geography's Institutions into Geographic Pedagogy: Colearning and Coproduction of Knowledge as Strategy to Do Geography Differently

This article discusses New Zealand geography's recent engagement in institutional regeneration that is aimed at redeveloping the knowledge claims its geography community can make. This engagement has led to new levels of understanding among many New Zealand geographers of colearning and coproduction of knowledge as geographic processes involving knowledge, power, and authority relations. The article briefly outlines two linked trajectories: those relating to the gradual recognition of institutional collapse, and the commitment to remaking a new and generative institutional framework, and the uptake of ideas from international geography that helped with prioritizing revisioning and institutional regeneration. Lessons from New Zealand geography's sobering institutional experiences and new efforts at collective learning and activity to extend the spheres of geography's action are salutary for international geography.     

Teaching Social Justice: Reviving Geography's Neglected Tradition

Abstract

American students are encouraged to become globally competitive. I argue that in a world plagued by social inequality and environmental mismanagement, students should become globally cooperative. But this position is not new. Nineteenth century geographers such as Peter Kropotkin argued that geographic education should promote cooperation and tolerance of others. This article explores why geographers cast aside this progressive vision for geographic education. It hypothesizes that geography's pursuit of academic and scientific legitimacy prompted it to spurn “value-laden” methods. The article concludes by suggesting that geographers return to their social justice roots by adopting constructivist pedagogical methods of Paulo Freire.     

Geography,the Integrating Discipline: Explaining China's Population-Driven Geopolitics to Students

Abstract

This article demonstrates geography's role as an integrative discipline and its utility in connecting students to the world around them. A case study links China's demography and its geopolitics to the lives of U.S. students. The relationship of China's population pressures to its resulting economic growth, need for economic resources, and geopolitical efforts are examined using the concepts and holistic capabilities that are the academic strength of geography.     

THE CLASSROOM AS THE FIELD FOR STUDYING GEOGRAPHICAL EDUCATION

ABSTRACT. Recent attempts by U.S. politicians to reform the nation'sschools have shifted the goal of education to school accountability as assessed in standardized testing. Such an emphasis undermines geographical education in schools because of geography'ssuperficial representation in tests and in the social studies curriculum. Fieldwork done in the classroom can point to means of circumventing this dilemma. Collaborative fieldwork between college faculty members and public‐school teachers has the potential for adding geography to the social studies curriculum in a substantive way. Work conducted jointly by Hartwick College and the Oneonta (New York) Middle School exemplifies such a partnership.     

The Delhi Bias: knowledge hegemony of India's slum governance

Slum eradication has been a concern in South Asian cities since the colonial times. Legislation and policies are being framed both out of national desires and international strategies. However, very little is being studied on how these legislation and policies come into being, specifically geography's influence in their formulation. The article analyses parliamentary debates from India (Rajya Sabha, 1953–2014), and outlines the process of historical, political, and institutional dominance of Delhi. It shows that the slum legislation and policies in India are formulated by abstracting cases from the Delhi slums. This knowledge hegemony of Delhi is discussed within the growing consideration towards urban theory's southern shift, which puts the Southern cities (megacities) as underdogs. The paper argues that at a regional level, these megacities exert the same hegemony that the southern theory wants to avoid. The results argue towards broadening the southern theory and ordinary city discussions.     

A New Look at the Maya Lowlands of Middle America

Abstract

The long search for geography's uniqueness may be aided with the acceptance of its primary tool being the multiple-scale approach. This is the division of data on a given topic or area into significantly different groups by the scales of the information needed to describe, analyze, and present its distributions. By using several scales in a logical order during research and presentation, geographers can improve the contributions of the discipline to science.     

Politics,Public Space,and Memorials: The Brawl on the Mall

This paper examines recent proposals for memorials and monuments on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Demands for memorials are increasingly at odds with the Mall's important role as open green space and public protest space. This article analyzes the broader issues embodied in the competing purposes of this highly visible public space by considering the recent controversy over the World War II Memorial. The controversy focused primarily on the location of the memorial. Opponents contended the World War II Memorial would interrupt or destroy the iconography of the National Mall. Supporters argued that the location selected for the memorial was consistent with its importance in U.S. history and that it deserved such a prized location in the central axis between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The article then analyzes the politics behind the site selection, and examines the debate about the impact of the memorial's location. It concludes that the location of the memorial was not accidental but intentional, and thereby reveals a purposeful re-writing of the Mall's symbolic space to suit a specific vision of the war and its meaning in American history. The article also contends that the location of the memorial represents an emerging social-political agenda that is prioritizing the Mall as a place of commemoration at the expense of open space, and, perhaps, at the expense of public protest space.     

Trade Disputes,Dispute Settlement Mechanisms,and Local Development

Dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs), and the institutional architecture of free trade agreements, have been neglected in economic geography's contemplations of international trade or globalization. This article highlights the role of DSMs in free trade agreements, especially in relation to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and draws out some implications for local development. The study reviews literatures that have addressed the mandate and rationale of the WTO's formal and legalistic DSM, paying especial attention to the realist perspective on international trade, the issue of fairness, and implications of asymmetric power relations for local development. Economic geographers need to incorporate free trade institutional architectures in contemplations of local development.     

Old Theories in New Places? Environmental Determinism and Bioregionalism*

Bioregionalism is a contemporary environmental movement containing deterministic ideas similar to those of geography's environmental determinism. This paper examines the theoretical and practical implications for bioregionalism based upon the experience of geography by identifying parallels between bioregionalism and environmental determinism in terms of both culture and politics. While not a latter day form of environmental determinism, bioregionalism deterministically links political culture and the environment. By comparing and contrasting environmental determinism with bioregionalism's deterministic tendencies, I identify certain contradictory ideas within bioregionalism. Among the most important contradictions occur when bioregionalists base moral judgements on a form of environmentalism, and when they advocate self determination while promoting environmentally determined lifeways. These ideas lie at the intersection of bioregionalism's social and ecological objectives—where the deterministic nature of bioregionalism is at odds with bioregionalism's decentralized, egalitarian philosophy.     

Broadening the teaching of development in the classroom

Abstract: A key objective in the New Zealand Curriculum, in the learning area of the social sciences, is that students are taught the knowledge and skills to enable them to explore and analyse people's values and perspectives. A specific achievement standard for the NCEA at Level 2 (year 12) concerns learning about disparities in development within or between countries. This article raises the issue of how the concept of ‘development’ is taught. It outlines some of the historical uses of the term and discusses how the concept is constructed in the curriculum. It explores what students learn about development in the classroom and possibilities for broadening how the concept might be taught.     

The National Geography Standards and Your Undergraduate Curriculum: The Opportunity That Knocks More Than Once

Abstract

Geography For Life: National Geography Standards 1994 offers university geographers opportunities in the areas of program assessment and development. This article describes an assessment process that is applicable to both individual courses and geography programs. The process can strengthen programs by making them more consistent. As a result, geography may have a more powerful presence in teacher certification programs. Additional techniques for enhancing geography's role in preservice education curricula are also outlined. Finally, the article expresses concern that geographers at the university level will not take the recently published National Geography Standards seriously, thinking they apply only to K-12 education. They are challenged to extend the Standards' scope and content to the baccalaureate degree.     

PUBLIC MEMORY AND POLITICAL POWER IN GUATEMALA'S POSTCONFLICT LANDSCAPE

ABSTRACT. Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.     

Childhood asthma: Regional and social inequalities in parents' perceptions of the diagnostic process in Norway

This paper focuses on the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in British and to a lesser extent North American and Australian human geography in the last decade. It begins by exploring what constitutes the cultural in what has been dubbed 'new cultural geography'. It then explores contemporary claims that cultural geography has eclipsed or marginalised social geography. The final section evaluates these claims about the demise of the social, arguing that the social has not been evacuated but rather has been redefined. While this paper tells a specific story about a particular tradition and geographical frame of reference, it nonetheless has wider relevance because it provides an example of the differential development of particular sub-disciplinary areas, of the way subdisciplinary knowledges shape each other, and of the way understandings of disciplinary trends are contested.     

Confronted by Insurmountable Opportunities: Geography in Society at the AAG's Centennial*

Geographers at the AAG's centennial are challenged with exceptional opportunities to create a more central place for geography in society and in the university. Realizing these opportunities requires identifying and leveraging key emerging trends in the formation and uses of geographic knowledge. Better integration of geography's profound technological innovations with its core traditions also is necessary to strengthen the discipline's research capacity, and to more effectively engage with and contribute to the needs of society. Trends toward multidisciplinary research and integrative science, and the heightened need for geographic understanding in today's world, hold further promise for advancing the discipline while sustaining its historic strengths and diversity.     

冷战后东南亚地缘政治变化中的大国战略调整述评

冷战后,东南亚地缘政治格局发生了重大变化。一是在冷战时期展开地缘战略博弈的两大阵营势力的淡化与退出,缓和了东南亚的地缘政治环境;二是东南亚国家实现了“大东盟”的内部联合,并强化了自身应对安全风险的能力。而世界大国发展对资源的需求,对航道安全的关注,也凸显了东南亚的地缘战略地位;三是中国的崛起效应。这些变化引起了新一轮的大国战略考量,并在美国的推力下,其它几个大国借着新时期南海问题、缅甸民主化等地缘环境的变化,调整了对东南亚的战略布局,进一步实现了平衡和遏制中国的深层次战略目标,从而也加剧了东南亚地区大国互动关系的复杂化和大国战略博弈的炽热化。     

Constructing a Dialogue: Geographic Education and Geographic Research

Geographic researchers and those who specialize in educational issues have paid insufficient attention to one another. Many theoreticians are openly contemptuous of those who study education; many who focus on pedagogy are unnecessarily defensive. This essay calls for a program of sustained intercourse that is explicitly mutually transformative in nature. It reviews what each perspective offers the other. A change in attitude among those who emphasize geographic research is needed that takes pedagogy far more seriously than it has hitherto. Conversely, geographers whose professional interest is in education would benefit from including new conceptual material such as social theory and political economy in pedagogic works. The results of such an intersection would be to inject new energy into the field, including secondary schools, widen geography's audience, and enhance its popular reputation.     

Contesting ‘Local’ Commemoration of the Second World War: the case of the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore

This paper concerns the performance of national war memory at the Changi Chapel and Museum, a site honouring the many prisoners interned in Japanese-Occupied Singapore—especially at Changi—during the Second World War. In the light of the global nature of ‘the Changi story’, and the predominantly transnational nature of its present in situ memorialisation, we first examine how the Singapore state has sought to ‘localise’ the site to make it equally appealing to Singaporeans, as a place where a sense of their ‘shared history’ may be invoked. We then explore the Singaporeans' views about the site and its reconfiguration as a national icon, arguing how the state's task of ‘localising’ the site has been a vexed process due to myriad factors such as ethnic and religious plurality, and the already foreign-centric bias of prevailing knowledge about Changi. Following that, we show how this performance of national memory is also inflected by Australia's national remembrance of the same event. More broadly, we highlight the contested process of ‘localising’ such war memoryscapes as national iconography, suggesting how it may be more fruitful to conceive them as ‘international memoryscapes’, or places to which all individuals can relate regardless of race or national affiliations.