Based on Carl O. Sauer's taped reflections on his own academic life, this paper outlines and offers a personal appreciation of Sauer's intellectual history. I argue that Sauer's intellectual life can ...be conceptualized as three dialectical developmental stages: (1) the Warrenton-Calw stage , marked by general education in his hometown environment; (2) the Chicago-Ann Arbor stage , marked by steep intellectual growth and expansion of his knowledge in geography as an academic subject; and (3) the Berkeley Stage , characterized by his Mexican field work and establishment of his own form of historical-cultural geography. This paper argues that Sauer's own intellectual curiosity, rather than any external influences, was the primary factor behind his scholarly progression to successive stages. Driven by his own curiosity, Sauer covered a wide range of research themes covering physical geography, use of fire in the development of landscape, theoretical discussion of the landscape morphology, and prehistorical agricultural origins and dispersals. He was a remarkable scholar and teacher who made a significant impact on the course of geography.
This essay, adapted from the APCG Presidential address delivered at the eighty-fourth annual APCG conference in Bellingham, Washington, explores the substantial legacy of Larry Ford as an author and ...photographer. Ford's extensive research publications profoundly influenced the thinking, and indeed the career trajectory, of numerous geographers, including the author. Ford's corpus of landscape geography photography is perhaps the equal of his text-based works and is the most important photographic collection housed in the Geography Department at California State University, Northridge. To demonstrate the value of the collection, several sample images from the Ford photography collection are considered from a landscape geography perspective.
Attention to plant life is currently flourishing across the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces recent work in the informal sub-discipline of ‘vegetal geography’, placing it into ...conversation with the transdisciplinary field of ‘critical plant studies’ CPS, a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and human-plant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language. I explore three key themes of interest to multispecies scholars looking to attend more closely to vegetal life, namely: (1) plant otherness; (2) plant ethics; (3) plant-human attunements, in the hope of encouraging greater cross-pollination between more-than-human geography and critical plant studies.
Big data and human geography Kitchin, Rob
Dialogues in human geography,
11/2013, Letnik:
3, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We are entering an era of big data – data sets that are characterised by high volume, velocity, variety, exhaustivity, resolution and indexicality, relationality and flexibility. Much of these data ...are spatially and temporally referenced and offer many possibilities for enhancing geographical understanding, including for post-positivist scholars. Big data also, however, poses a number of challenges and risks to geographic scholarship and raises a number of taxing epistemological, methodological and ethical questions. Geographers need to grasp the opportunities whilst at the same time tackling the challenges, ameliorating the risks and thinking critically about big data as well as conducting big data studies. Failing to do so could be quite costly as the discipline gets left behind as others leverage insights from the growing data deluge.
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated ...in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.
In this paper we trace the co-evolution of a set of industries and supporting institutions in the Film and television (TV) industry in one of Europe’s most peripheral regions. It is a comprehensive ...overview of the key stages of development, from inception to sustainability with key roles enacted by a diverse set of actors, from community activists to the current Irish President. This work contributes to the growing literature that is focussing attention on the growth of creative economy activity beyond the city. We pay particular attention to the role played by firms, institutions and geography and their co-evolution towards a cluster of cultural activity in Galway, Ireland.
•Traces the co-evolution of a cluster of economic and cultural activity in Galway, Ireland.•Tracking the evolution of the cluster over four decades from inception to sustainability.•TV and film production employing over 600 people; independently producing and co-producing content internationally.•Highlighting interventions from language movements to government policy to Hollywood producers in the clusters development.
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