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What is geography? by Sydney R.

To me, geography is the study of human-environment relationships over various physical,

theoretical, locational, and temporal scales. Geography has different definitions depending on who is defining it. There are academic sub-fields including but not limited to human geography, physical geography, cultural geography, feminist geography, economic geography, and biogeography. Despite its vastness, the field of geography is not “random” yet used very intentionally to analyze the world around, above, and below us through different lenses of historical context, present implications, and future possibilities. Geography is especially not geology, even though that’s what people will remember after they ask what you’re studying. Geography is also not just about creating and analyzing maps using software that can both perpetuate the “long history of subjugation through spatial visualisation” and “democratise technology” (Garrett & Anderson, 2018, p. 342). Geography “calls on a huge diversity of processes and specialized knowledges” (Cox, 2014, p. 199). I argue that geography is the academic discipline that most students are looking for when they’re enrolling in an environmental studies program. It allows students to think about humans, nature, politics, and multi-scalar relationships in ways they’ve likely never thought of before. Additionally, geography offers the crucial spatial element of analysis, as Cox (2014) remarkably articulates:


In short, social relations are always and necessarily spatial ones. Social processes unfold over space and incorporate a spatial moment. Space is not just a correlate; it is actively mobilized in securing social ends, and it can limit what is possible, suggesting that there can be no defensible social theory that does not recognize the significance of geography. (p. 201)


Analyses that fail to recognize the importance and implications of spatial relationships intertwined with the given research interest are insufficient for understanding the ‘bigger picture,’ beyond what is visible on a map.


Geography is closely related to other academic disciplines, such as environmental anthropology, environmental sociology, political science, or ethnobiology. Geography and ethnobiology are especially complementary regarding research areas of alternative land management, implications of including and excluding Traditional Ecological Knowledge within research, and analyzing the most pressing social-ecological issues societies face today. Author Steve Wolverton (2013) suggests, “Currently, the field [ethnobiology] is dominated by anthropologists, as well as ethnobotanists, but also attracts a smaller number of geographers, archaeologists, and paleobiologists interested in addressing human environmental relationships” (p. 22). Geography is well-situated for interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars who take seriously the spatial implications of social-ecological situations. Cox (2014) emphasizes that geography is complementary to many other disciplines, yet states, “Whether the geographic imagination gets adequately represented in these endeavors is something else” (p. 200).


As social-ecological problems continue to arise and worsen in the coming years, geographic research has an exciting opportunity to capitalize on its ‘huge diversity of processes and specialized knowledges’ and move toward increased community-based and participatory research. McAlvay et al. (2021) suggest that the related field, ethnobiology, is particularly situated for decolonial scholarship: “Moving beyond the pervasive influence of colonialism and toward a more just and equitable ethnobiology requires sustained engagement” (p. 183). Geography could and should emulate decolonial scholarship through prioritizing the needs of communities that geographers wish to work with collaboratively and respectfully, instead of extending the impositional and extractive legacies modeled by eurocentric, positivist researchers of the past and present. Geography has a responsibility to find and maintain synergies between human and more-than-human worlds, yet reproducing narrow and exclusionary research will only hinder our spatial imaginations for the future.


Works CitedCox, K. (2014). Making Human Geography. The Guilford Press.

Garrett, B., & Anderson, K. (2018). Drone methodologies: Taking flight in human and physical geography. Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965), 43(3), 341–359. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12232

McAlvay, A. C., et al. (2021). Ethnobiology Phase VI: Decolonizing Institutions, Projects, and Scholarship. Journal of Ethnobiology, 41(2), 170–191. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.170

Wolverton, S. (2013). Ethnobiology 5: Interdisciplinarity in an Era of Rapid Environmental Change. Ethnobiology Letters, 4, 21–25. https://doi.org/10.14237/ebl.4.2013.11

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