Human geography is the branch of geography that deals with the study of people and their communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across space and place. Human geography attends to human patterns of social interaction, as well as spatial level interdependencies, and how they influence or affect the earth's environment. As an intellectual discipline, geography is divided into the sub-fields of physical geography and human geography, the latter concentrating upon the study of human activities, by the application of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality or the understanding of time in terms of money.
Personal life is the course of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.
Sir Nigel John Thrift, DL, FBA, FAcSS is a British academic and geographer. In 2016 he became Executive Director of the Schwarzman Scholars, an international leadership program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, having served in the position from 2006 to 2016, and a leading academic in the field of human geography.
Torsten Hägerstrand was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography.
Time–space compression, articulated in 1989 by geographer David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, it refers to anything that impacts time and space. Harvey's idea was rooted in Karl Marx's theory of the "annihilation of time and space". A similar idea was proposed by Elmar Alvater in an article in PROKLA in 1987 translated into English as "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space" and published in Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1(3) in 1989.
Spatialization is the spatial forms that social activities and material things, phenomena or processes take on in geography, sociology, urban planning and cultural studies. Generally the term refers to an overall sense of social space typical of a time, place or culture.
Landschaftspark is a public park located in Duisburg-Meiderich, Germany. It was designed in 1991 by Latz + Partner, with the intention that it work to heal and understand the industrial past, rather than trying to reject it. The park closely associates itself with the past use of the site: a coal and steel production plant and the agricultural land it had been prior to the mid 19th century.
Non-representational theory is a theory developed in human geography, largely through the work of Nigel Thrift, and his colleagues such as J.D. Dewsbury and Derek McCormack, and later by their respective graduate students. It challenges those using social theory and conducting geographical research to "go beyond representation" and focus on embodied experience. Thus, Dewsbury describes practices of "witnessing" that produce "knowledge without contemplation".
Edward William Soja was a self-described "urbanist," a noted postmodern political geographer and urban theorist on the planning faculty at UCLA, where he was Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and the London School of Economics. He had a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. His early research focused on planning in Kenya, but Soja came to be known as the world's leading spatial theorist with a distinguished career writing on spatial formations and social justice.
John Richard Urry, FAcSS FAcSS was a British sociologist, Professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility.
Rhythmanalysis is a collection of essays by Marxist sociologist and urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The book outlines a method for analyzing the rhythms of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces. It builds on his past work, with which he argued space is a production of social practices.
The sociology of space is a sub-discipline of sociology that mostly borrows from theories developed within the discipline of geography, including the sub fields of human geography, economic geography, and feminist geography. The "sociology" of space examines the social and material constitution of spaces. It is concerned with understanding the social practices, institutional forces, and material complexity of how humans and spaces interact. The sociology of space is an inter-disciplinary area of study, drawing on various theoretical traditions including Marxism, postcolonialism, and Science and Technology Studies, and overlaps and encompasses theorists with various academic disciplines such as geography and architecture. Edward T. Hall developed the study of Proxemics which concentrates on the empirical analysis of space in psychology.
The performative turn is a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences that has affected such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, history and the relatively young discipline of performance studies. Central to the performative turn is the concept of performance.
A social space is physical or virtual space such as a social center, online social media, or other gathering place where people gather and interact. Some social spaces such as town squares or parks are public places; others such as pubs, websites. or shopping malls are privately owned and regulated.
Owain Jones FGS is a Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University (UK). He was previously Reader in Cultural Geography: Place, Nature and Landscape at the Countryside & Community Research Institute and member of staff of the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, Faculty of Environment and Technology, University of the West of England.
Internet metaphors provide users and researchers of the Internet a structure for understanding and communicating its various functions, uses, and experiences. An advantage of employing metaphors is that they permit individuals to visualize an abstract concept or phenomenon with which they have limited experience by comparing it with a concrete, well-understood concept such as physical movement through space. Metaphors to describe the Internet have been utilized since its creation and developed out of the need for the Internet to be understood by everyone when the goals and parameters of the Internet were still unclear. Metaphors helped to overcome the problems of the invisibility and intangibility of the Internet's infrastructure and to fill linguistic gaps where no literal expressions existed.
Geography of media and communication is an interdisciplinary research area bringing together human geography with media studies and communication theory. Research addressing the geography of media and communication seeks to understand how acts of communication and the systems they depend on both shape and are shaped by geographical patterns and processes.
Robert MacArthur Shields is a Canadian sociologist and cultural theorist. He is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Endowed Research Chair at University of Alberta. Shields directs the City Region Studies Centre in the Faculty of Extension. From 1991-2004 he rose to Professor of Sociology and Directed the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, with an interlude in 1995-97 as a Lecturer in Culture and Communications at Lancaster University, Lancaster UK.
Dr. Michael A. Crang is a Professor in cultural geography at Durham University in the UK. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a first in the Geographical Tripos and gained a PhD from the University of Bristol.
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles.
Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping. His most influential books include The Image of the City (1960), a seminal work on the perceptual form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place? (1972), which theorizes how the physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes.
