1.4: Geography as Discipline

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

Graves, Steven M. "Geography as a “Jedi” Discipline." The California Geographer Vol. 53 (2013).

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 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.

Figure Las Vegas NV. Casino landscapes often evoke exotic location to heighten the excitement of gamblers, who then are more likely to spend more prolifically once the landscape condition their mood properly

Geography is a Way to See the World: Jedi Goggles

The ability to “read” the landscape is the first skill of the Jedi-Geographer. It sounds simple enough, but advanced ability in landscape interpretation takes many years to develop. Generally, people are not aware that all landscapes, including both the human-built and the natural, physical environment, can be read, somewhat like you read text in a book. With some practice, you can develop a measure of landscape literacy, which is the ability to “read” and understand a significant number of messages inscribed into the environment. All landscapes tell a story. Throughout this text, there are opportunities for you to learn to read them. This skill is referred to as using your “Jedi Goggles.” Noted scholar Aldo Leopold also thought this an important skill, noting, “The objective is to teach the student(s) to see the land, to understand what [they see], and enjoy what [they] understand…”

Certainly, you already have some skill reading the landscape, but most non-geographers do not read the landscape well because they do not think to do it consciously or regularly. Like a Jedi without training, you have occasionally put on “Jedi Goggles” but maybe didn’t think about what you were doing. For example, you have probably at some point found yourself driving in a dangerous neighborhood. Of course, there are no road signs at the borders of a high crime neighborhood warning, “Caution – Now Entering Dangerous Neighborhood”. Still, you know to be cautious. Why? Because- you have developed some skill reading the landscape over the years. Rubbish on the street, graffiti, bars on windows and unkempt lawns are common landscape markers (visual cues) of a neighborhood that suffers from crime; your sense of self-preservation has prompted you to learn to interpret landscape symbols associated with danger. Many police and people who are “street smart” have well-developed “Jedi Goggles”.

"landscape" by barnyz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Lewis, Peirce F. "Axioms for reading the landscape." The interpretation of ordinary landscapes 23 (1979): 167-187.

The first step you must take as you develop landscape literacy skills is to begin actively looking more closely at stores, rivers, houses, parking lots, road signs, empty lots, farm fields, hillsides and anything else that passes your windshield. As you look, think to yourself, “What is this landscape telling me?” There’s no need to focus on “pretty” landscapes because beautiful, scenic, impressive or extraordinary landscapes are no more important than those that are boring, ugly or commonplace. The ordinary, everyday landscapes, called vernacular landscapes are, as Peirce Lewis noted, our “unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations and even our fears in tangible visible form.” There is a reassuring honesty one gets reading vernacular landscapes. The lack of intentionality makes landscapes a source of unvarnished truth about a place’s history, unlike purposefully written histories that are often prone to biases and outright lies.

"erik korshagen, korshagehus, architect's own summerhouse, 1960, 1965 & 1986" by seier+seier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This text will help you learn to read the cultural histories of various places and regions as they have been written on the landscape. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, you’ll find yourself asking “What does this scene tell me about this place?” Hopefully, you’ll begin to see patterns you never noticed before and you’ll be trying to guess what forces created that which you see. With luck, you may find yourself asking “Why is this here, and not elsewhere?” Each chapter in this book features multiple images of landscapes. Most images are captioned with a quick “reading” of the images. A large photographic database, available online at The American Landscape Project, has many thousands of the images used in this text and many feature robust captions to help you learn to confidently read landscapes.

Geography is a Way to Ask Questions – Jedi Mind Tricks

Geographers also have a unique way of knowing what we know. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and because geographers have a unique way of thinking about questions and arriving at answers, we have a unique epistemology. Most of the time, people don’t think about how they know what they know. We don’t think about our epistemological processes, biases, and tendencies. Therefore, we don’t often know how we know, what we know. “I just know it!” is how you might respond if someone challenged you on your epistemology. For scientists, social scientists and other serious thinkers, “I just know it” is an unacceptable response. It’s important to understand one’s epistemological tendencies. You must know how you know, what you know.

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This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#/media/File:Blind_monks_examining_an_elephant.jpg

Geographers have a favored epistemology–it doesn’t have a name, but it does begin with a simple strategy that leads us to learn and/or understand things differently than non-geographers. When geographers seek to understand the world around them better, we have a strong tendency to frame questions and answers spatially. In other words, when geographers want to know “Why?” or “How?”, we first typically ask the question “Where?”. Privileging spatial questions in a quest to understand the world is like “Using the Force” among Jedi warriors. When geographers “Use the Force,” they ask “Where?” to understand “Why”. By doing so, geographers often come to different conclusions than non-geographers. By asking “Where?” when you want to know “Why” or “How” is the most basic of all “Jedi Mind Tricks”. Historians have a similar trick - they ask “When?” (rather than “Where?”) while seeking understanding. Still, learning to ask questions about how the world works consistently is crucial to developing a “habit of mind”; itself a crucial element in developing a disciplinary epistemology – something all college students should work to develop. Faculty in many majors do not teach students to develop disciplinary habits-of-mind. The main goal of this course is to help you develop this habit-of-mind.

Most people don’t use “The Force” and there are consequences for understanding our world. Consider for instance a conversation overhead by the author of this text some years ago on a large college campus in Illinois. I overheard two people discussing why most African-American students on that campus rode the elevator in a campus building while most white students used stairs instead. It was evident and obvious that this was occurring, but the causal reasons for this difference in behavior eluded those discussing the behaviors. One person in the conversation was quick to assign ethnicity as the primary causal factor motivating students to use or avoid elevators. A geographer using “The Force” would not have made this mistake because the geographer would have thought about the spatial aspects of the phenomenon first, and would have realized that ethnicity was probably not an important factor explaining why black and white students used elevators differently. Instead, a geographer would have asked, “where are the students who use elevators from?” Had the people discussing the question asked “Where?”, it may have occurred to them that many of the black students on that campus grew up in Chicago, where using elevators to reach the upper floors of tall residential apartment buildings was a daily ritual. The behavioral habits developed by students living in high-rise apartments lingered with students after they moved to campus, prompting them to select the elevator to navigate to upper stories on campus out of habit, even when the building was only two or three stories. Students from rural and suburban locations, on the other hand, typically lived in single-story or two-story houses, and were, therefore, more accustomed to reaching an upper floor by climbing stairs out of force of habit. To a geographer, those behavioral differences were not black and white – but spatial. Thinking that way, at least in this course, is called “Using the Force”.

By privileging matters of place and space in their quest for knowledge, geographers may bias their conclusions – arguing that location, space or place is a significant causal variable in the outcome of various phenomena. Favoring one epistemology over others is nearly unavoidable, and it is acceptable if one recognizes the biases an epistemology creates. Historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, etc. each have their own epistemological biases. If these competing means to comprehend reality can be given a fair audience, a robust, multi-perspectival or interdisciplinary understanding of our world is possible. There is danger in discounting epistemologies unfamiliar to you – and because the US school system does a poor job of developing students’ spatial epistemology, taking a geography course and developing some measure of this unique habit of mind is a critical element in a quality, robust liberal arts education.

"Sedona Rock Stacks - Red Rocks" by future15pic is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Geography is a Way to Solve Problems – Jedi Weapons

Geographers have a very powerful toolbox of problem-solving tactics and strategies. The tools in the geographer’s toolbox are our methods and most of our methods are dependent upon our spatial epistemology, or way of knowing. There are dozens of methods used by geographers today. This is partly because geographers have adopted many methods used by scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The scientific method is widely used by geographers, but humanistic methods, like those employed by historians or even art critics, are also used by geographers. Generally, geographers alter these borrowed methods so we can use them effectively alongside our discipline’s spatial epistemology. Taken together, the methods and the epistemology provide geographers with a series of methodologies; or set of rules that govern the collection and analysis of a wide variety of data.

For example, if a geographer were to survey students about a new campus policy, many of the questions included in the survey would be the same as those used by a political scientist, historian or sociologist. However, a geographer would insist that the survey include a spatial question among the demographic questions. Instead of simply asking about each survey respondent’s age, gender, and ethnicity; the geographer would likely insist on asking about each respondent’s address, ZIP code, or at least “hometown”.

Like many other disciplines, geographers use statistics. Often, we use statistics in a manner indistinguishable from the way they are used in other disciplines. Other times we have found a need to develop separate geography-friendly statistical tools more suited to answering spatial questions. For example, social scientists from other disciplines might start a statistical inquiry by calculating the mean, median and standard deviation of some data points. Geographers, on the other hand, might first plot the data on a map, and then calculate a spatial mean, spatial median and the standard distance of the same data. That’s because geographers want to know where and why. There are a vast number of spatial statistics. Some are exceptionally complex and some quite simple. Spatial Analysis is the name of a subfield of geography which applies advanced mathematical analyses to spatial data. There are a lot of good jobs for people who can do spatial analyses of data.

For the past few decades, the primary tool in the geographer’s toolbox has been a suite of software products known as Geographic Information Systems or GIS. GIS is the “lightsaber” of the modern geographer. Like the lightsaber used by Jedi in Star Wars movies, GIS is used by a select few (Jedis), and in the hands of a “master”, GIS is both amazingly powerful and versatile. GIS software allows geographers to analyze data in a unique fashion, permitting geographers to ask spatial questions and solve problems using our special methods and while engaging our peculiar spatial epistemology. GIS allows geographers to sometimes solve problems that have proven intractable to those without GIS. People from other fields began to embrace GIS, but the techniques for using GIS have begun to emerge as foundational tools for modern geographers.