Friday Forum,
School of Geography and Environmental Studies
‘Journey towards knowledge’
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of ideas and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

9 August 2013

Today we stand in footsteps millennia old.
May we acknowledge the traditional owners whose cultures and customs have nurtured, and continue to nurture, this land, since men and women awoke from the great dream.
We honour the presence of these ancestors who reside in the imagination of this land and whose irrepressible spirituality flows through all creation.
Jonathon Hill

Region
Time

The 1960s
Classical regional geography
Integrated teaching about human and physical features in space

Layered English landscapes:
Midlands fields
Transport in Birmingham
Canal 1770
Motorway
1980

Brewing 1754-1900
West Midlands iron industry around 1850
Iron works – note proximity to canals

My home town - Oldham

The early 1970s
Positivist quantitative physical and human geography

Ever more quantitative

Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA):
A ( basic) primer
• A simple view as
– Earth rotational feedbacks
– Gravitational feedbacks
– -> Global feedbacks
• Modelling critically requires
– Time-steps of spatial distribution of ice mass
– Knowledge of how Earth responds to loading: (3d) Earth structure
(notably, lithospheric thickness, lower & upper mantle viscosity)

Spatial aspects of physical processes
Gravity and rebound
- - - - - - Before ice melt
_____ After ice melt
Courtesy of Matt King

Geography matters!
(Courtesy of Matt King)
Greenland mass loss equiv to
1mm/yr global sea level rise
West Antarctic mass loss equiv to
1mm/yr global sea level rise
• Pacific islands feel the brunt, regardless
• Northern Europe feels less than average due to Greenland melt!

More recent human geography
Post-positive approaches
Ever more sub-disciplines

Peet’s view of the growth of sub-disciplines in human geography

Malpas quoting Jessop on the churning
Contemporary discourse in relation to space, both within geography and more generally, has been characterized by ``an unreflexive `churning' of spatial turns, leading to short intellectual product cycles for key socio-spatial concepts, limiting opportunities for learning through theoretical debate, empirical analysis, and critical evaluation of such concepts''
(Jessop et al, 2008, p 389-401, quoted in Malpas 2012 p 229).

• Geography is confused at the centre and open at the boundaries
• Geography opens a world to other disciplines
• Geography is atomised among subdisciplines
• Specialisation is more productive than integration
• Other disciplines study place and space

Centre for Environment
Provide solutions for real-world environmental problems.
Be guided by end-users in setting priorities.
Support interdisciplinary research, including science, humanities, government and law
Australian Environmental History (HTA271)
Explores the interaction between human beings and the natural environment in Australian history.
The unit first examines the Aboriginal relationship to the flora and fauna of the continent and then reviews the impact of
European settlement on the land and native animals until the
1970s.
It assesses the effects of agriculture, pastoralism, mining, forestry and introduced animals, and of pollution arising from urbanisation and industry.
It traces the rise of an environmental consciousness with the establishment of national parks and nature reserves, the development of ideas about wilderness, conservation, and preservation, and the emergence of the green movement.

The new national school curriculum
• Geography builds a broad and holistic understanding of the world by integrating knowledge from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.
• Geography develops students’ curiosity and wonder about the world.
• Geography explores the places that make up our world, and investigates the effects of location and distance on the characteristics of places, the interconnections between places, and the management of place and space.
• Geographical skills include fieldwork in human and physical studies, and interpreting and mapping spatial distributions
• Field and computer-based technologies are fundamental to geographical study.
• This knowledge and skills can be applied in everyday life
and to a variety of careers.

Re-forming and re-presenting geography

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
…the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple tree
Not known because not looked for…
T.S.Eliot ‘Little Gidding’