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1.2: Geography as Discipline –Key Aspects of the “Jedi Way”

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    238564
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    If you go to the library at your college or university and head to the section housing books about geography, you may be disappointed to find there’s almost nothing there. You might mistakenly believe that geographers don’t write books, or that geography is exceptionally limited in its scope. Both assumptions would be wrong. Libraries have lots of books written by geographers, but because geographers can study almost any subject, books written by geographers are found scattered throughout the library, because libraries are organized by the subject of study, not the method by which subjects are studied and analyzed.

    Geographers write books and publish scholarly articles about an astounding array of subjects – far too many to consider here. The main point is for you to remember is that geographers can study almost anything that takes place. What are you interested in? If it exists someplace, you can bet some geographer has studied it. The author of this text wrote a dissertation on innovation waves in pop music (rock, rap, country), but has since researched subprime lending, crime, health problems, gentrification, homelessness and other topics of interest.

    The section that follows provides a unique, but basic, guide to help you better understand geography as a discipline. The entire text is designed around a set of guiding principles that characterize the way geographers tend to observe, query and analyze the world around them – and how we communicate findings and theories. To better help you learn to observe, question and analyze the world around you, this text leverages a variety of similes and metaphors from Star Wars movies. The text may refer to geographers as “Jedi” because geographers, like the Jedi in the Star Wars movies, have a special and powerful way of doing things (observing, questioning, analyzing, and communicating) that, at least in the academic and professional worlds, gives geographers unique abilities to gain insights often overlooked by others.


    This page titled 1.2: Geography as Discipline –Key Aspects of the “Jedi Way” is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Steven M. Graves via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.