Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban redevelopment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social interactions and the environment through qualitative and quantitative methods.This multidisciplinary approach draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the intricate connections that shape lived spaces.
Feminist geography is a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. Feminist geography emerged in the 1970s, when members of the women's movement called on academia to include women as both producers and subjects of academic work. Feminist geographers aim to incorporate positions of race, class, ability, and sexuality into the study of geography. The discipline was a target for the hoaxes of the grievance studies affair.
David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
The quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline of geography. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.
Erik Achille Marie Swyngedouw is professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of Environment, Education and Development and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute.
Critical geography is theoretically informed geographical scholarship that promotes social justice, liberation, and leftist politics. Critical geography is also used as an umbrella term for Marxist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, queer, left-wing, and activist geography.
Edward William Soja was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice.
Neil Robert Smith was a Scottish geographer and Marxist academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and winner of numerous awards, including the Globe Book Award of the Association of American Geographers.
Marxist geography is a strand of critical geography that uses the theories and philosophy of Marxism to examine the spatial relations of human geography. In Marxist geography, the relations that geography has traditionally analyzed — natural environment and spatial relations — are reviewed as outcomes of the mode of material production. To fully understand geographical relations, on this view, the social structure must also be examined. Marxist geography attempts to change the basic structure of society.
William Wheeler Bunge Jr. was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada.
The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is an academic movement which emerged during the mid-1980s, loosely based at UCLA and the University of Southern California, which centers urban analysis on Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles School redirects urban study away from notions of concentric zones and an ecological approach, used by the Chicago School during the 1920s, towards social polarization and fragmentation, hybridity of culture, subcultural analysis, and auto-driven sprawl.
Open Marxism is a collection of critical and heterodox Marxist schools of thought which critique state socialism and party politics, stressing the need for openness to praxis and history through an anti-positivist method grounded in the "practical reflexivity" of Karl Marx's own concepts. The "openness" in open Marxism also refers to a non-deterministic view of history in which the unpredictability of class struggle is foregrounded.
Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a promise for post-ideological consensus. The political development in post-communist countries went two different directions depending on the approach each of them take on dealing with the communist party members. Active decommunisation process took place in Eastern European states which later joined EU. While in Russia and majority of former USSR republics communists became one of many political parties on equal grounds.
J. Richard Peet is a retired professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, remained there for over 50 years, with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand.
Carolyn Gallaher is an American academic who is a political geographer and associate professor at the American University School of International Service. Her scholarship is focused on the role of paramilitaries in irregular warfare and the influence of the religious right in U.S. foreign policy.
Social Justice and the City is a book published in 1973 written by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. The book is an attempt to lay out afresh the paradigm of urban geography, by bringing together the two conflicting theses of methodology and philosophy. Going against the grain of his previous book Explanation in Geography published in 1970, he argued that geography cannot remain disengaged, impartial and ‘objective’ at a time when urban poverty and associated ills were reigning high.
Katharyne Mitchell is an American geographer who is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Phil O'Keefe was emeritus professor at Northumbria University, and a geographer and development specialist with experience in East and Southern Africa.
Sallie A. Marston is an American social geographer and Regents Professor in the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment located in Tucson, Arizona.
Loretta Lees is a university professor, urbanist, author, and scholar-activist. She is the Director of the Initiative on Cities and professor of sociology at Boston University. Prior to moving to Boston, she was Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester in the UK and served as Chair of the London Housing Panel working with the Mayor of London and Trust for London. Since 2009, she has co-organized The Urban Salon, a London forum and seminar series for architecture, cities, and international urbanism, which examines urban experiences using an international and comparative frame. Lees’ scholarship focuses on gentrification, urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. She was identified as the only woman in the top 20 most referenced authors in urban geography worldwide and the top author on gentrification globally. She was awarded the 2022 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association. Other accolades of Lees include her election as a fellow of Academia Europaea (MAE) in 2022, and Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) in 2013. She has published 16 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. Her research has been featured extensively in documentaries, newspapers, and in podcasts.
