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Social geography

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Social geography is the branch of human geography that is interested in the relationships between society and space, and is most closely related to social theory in general and sociology in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena and its spatial components. Though the term itself has a tradition of more than 100 years,[1] there is no consensus on its explicit content.[2] In 1968, Anne Buttimer noted that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, (...) social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within particular schools".[3] Since then, despite some calls[4] for convergence centred on the structure and agency debate,[5] its methodological, theoretical and topical diversity has spread even more, leading to numerous definitions of social geography[6] and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a great variety of different social geographies.[7] However, as Benno Werlen remarked,[8] these different perceptions are nothing else than different answers to the same two (sets of) questions, which refer to the spatial constitution of society on the one hand, and to the spatial expression of social processes on the other.[9][note 1]

The different conceptions of social geography have also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology. When the term emerged within the Anglo-American tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography and urban sociology.[10] In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic processes (though there also was a considerable number of accounts[11] for a phenomenological perspective on social geography),[12] while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the "cultural turn". Both times, as Neil Smith noted, these approaches "claimed authority over the 'social'".[13] In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as "social" elsewhere.[14] In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline,[15][note 2] or even as identical to human geography in general.[16]

  1. ^ Dunbar, Gary S. (1977): Some Early Occurrences of the Term "Social Geography". Scottish Geographical Journal 93 (1): 15-20.
  2. ^ Smith, Susan J. et al. (2010): Introduction: Situating Social Geographies. In: Smith, Susan J. et al. (eds.): The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies. London (Sage): 1-39 [5-7].
  3. ^ Buttimer, Anne (1968): Social geography. In: Sills, David (ed.): International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York (MacMillan): 134-145 [134].
  4. ^ Peter Jackson (1983): Social geography: Convergence and Compromise. Progress in Human Geography 7 (1): 116-121.
  5. ^ Gregory, Derek (1981): Human Agency and Human Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6 (1): 1-18.
  6. ^ Eyles, John (1986): Introduction: Diffusion and Convergence? In: Eyles, John (ed.): Social Geography in International perspective. Barnes & Noble: 1-12 [4-5].
  7. ^ Smith, Susan J. et al. (2010): 3.
  8. ^ Werlen, Benno (2008): Sozialgeographie: Eine Einführung (3. ed.). Bern et al. (Haupt). [11] (in German)
  9. ^ Jackson, Peter (1987): The Idea of 'Race' and the Geography of Racism. In: Jackson, Peter (ed.): Race and Racism: Essays in Social geography. London (Allen & Unwin): 3-18 [14].
  10. ^ Johnston, Ron (1987): Theory and Methodology in Social Geography. In: Pacione, Michael (ed.): Social Geography: Progress and Prospect. London (Croom Helm): 1-30 [3-4].
  11. ^ Ley, David (1977): Social Geography and the Taken-for-granted-World. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2 (4): 498-512.
  12. ^ Jackson, Peter (1981): Phenomenology and Social Geography. Area 13 (4): 299-305.
  13. ^ Smith, Neil (2000): Socializing Culture, Radicalizing the Social. Social & Cultural Geography 1 (1): 25-28 [25].
  14. ^ Del Casino Jr., Vincent J. and Sallie A. Marston (2006): Social Geography in the United States: Everywhere and Nowhere. Social & Cultural Geography 7 (6): 995-1006 [995-996].
  15. ^ for the German-language geography, see Bartels, Dietrich and Thomas K. Peucker (1969): Annals Commentary: German Social Geography, Again. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (3): 596-598.
  16. ^ for the Dutch-language geography, see Cools, R.H.A. (1943): De ontwikkeling der sociale geografie in Nederland. Sociaal-geographische Mededeelingen 2 (3): 130-153. (in Dutch) Cited by: Thomale, Eckhard (1972): Sozialgeographie: Eine disziplingeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entwicklung der Anthropogeographie. Marburg. [110] (in German)


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