What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate?

This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present. Like all disciplines, Geography is no more nor less than the collective endeavours of researchers and teachers operating in specific contexts. The contexts both shape, and are shaped by, these individuals. This book’s biographical and autobiographical chapters transport readers to the times and places where geographers have sought to make Geography matter. The result is a more vivid, grounded understanding of the discipline than the many high-level surveys of geographic thought paradigms currently written for university students.

This book’s accessible essays each conclude with a study task. Making Geography Matter is aimed at university students and their teachers who wish to understand the goals, history and evolving practice of Geography. It provides an alternative perspective – both concrete and engaging – to the many student-focussed texts that map out numerous ‘isms and ologies’.

Les mer

What is the purpose of Geography? What do geographers study and why? How do they seek to shape the world they interrogate?

This book addresses these questions by examining the lives and works of individual geographers, both past and present.

Les mer

1.Introduction

Noel Castree, Trevor Barnes and Jenny Salmond

Part 1 – Making Geography

2.Absolute beginner? Halford Mackinder and the popularization of geographical knowledge

Emily Hayes

3.Geography as the science of environmental influences: Ellen Semple and the search for disciplinary relevance

Innes M. Keighren

4.Keeping human and physical geography together: Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett’s scientific turn

Trevor Barnes

5.Contemporary geography: Advocating for a heterodox subject

Rita Gardner

Part 2 Making geographical knowledge

6.Landscape and environmental change: Carl Sauer on land and life

Kent Mathewson

7.From mapping to GIScience: A sixty-year project

Michael F. Goodchild

8.Radicalizing geography: The case of David Harvey’s Marxism

Eric Sheppard

9.Open horizons from here to there: Doreen Massey’s geographies

Jamie Peck

10.Geographies of meaning and experience: Anne Buttimer’s lifeworld

Federico Ferretti

11.Landscape as a way of seeing: Denis Cosgrove’s symbolic geographies

Veronica della Dora

12.Boundaries and borders matter: Ron Johnston’s electoral geography

Charles J. Pattie

13.Mobility matters: Movement, meaning and practice in the context of power

Tim Cresswell

14.Scale matters: The case of workers and their geographies

Andrew Herod

15.Proximity, distance, and difference: The global and the intimate

Gerry Pratt

16.Which realities are we trying to understand? The workings of a physical geographer in the quest to respect river diversity

Gary Brierley

17.Beyond science: Climate change in a ‘wicked world’

Mike Hulme

18.‘Other’ geographies: Engaging with different ways of knowing, valuing, and acting in post-colonial Australia

Sue Jackson

Part 3 Making geographical knowledge matter beyond Geography

19.Geographers and the national state: Dudley Stamp plans Britain’s towns and countryside

Trevor Barnes

20.Geographically empowering the marginalized: Bill Bunge, expeditions and maps

Luke Bergmann and Trevor Barnes

21.Making other economies possible: Geographies of ethical action

Katherine Gibson

22.Speaking truth to power: Microplastics and the sewage scandal from the rivers of Manchester to Westminster

Jamie Woodward

23.Talking geography in the public realm

Danny Dorling

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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781032380506
Publisert
2025-02-28
Utgiver
Vendor
Routledge
Vekt
929 gr
Høyde
246 mm
Bredde
174 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
400

Biographical note

Noel Castree has worked at the universities of Manchester, Wollongong and Liverpool, and the University of Technology Sydney. He is managing editor of the journals Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning F. He is author of the books What Future For the Earth? (2025) and Making Sense of Nature (2013).

Trevor Barnes is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he has been since 1983. His research is in economic geography and on the post-war history of human geography. He is both a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.

Jennifer Salmond is Professor Physical Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a physical geographer whose research interests include urban meteorology, air pollution, climatology and critical physical geography.