A: Paradigms and changing disciplines:

How and why do academic disciplines change?

1. Even physical sciences don’t simply change gradually and incrementally- often marked by periods of stable assumptions and then rapid change (Paradigm theory)

2. Academic disciplines are social - competition from different groups and generations

3. A discipline like Human Geography has to respond to a changing world (changing ideas theories etc) as well as internal and external factors in academic change.

A paradigm is the shared assumptions, practises and epistemology of a particular community of scientists or other academics. In its broadest sense a paradigm is a stable consensus about what are the aims and objectives of a particular discipline.

B: Turning points in the history of Geography (1860-1985)

The beginning: Exploring spaces, categorising places and to further expand empires using that information (late 19th century - 1860)

1887: German academic geography institutionalised from 1870s

Halford Mackinger at the Royal Geographical society, 1887 ‘On the scopes and methods of geography’ → For the first time a degree on geography can be obtained → Emphasis on the particular geographies of regions

1910: Paul Vidal de la Blance and genre de vie → Identifying the particular landscapes, soils, agriculture, traditions, etc in France

1939: Richard Harthorne → Nature of Geography: layed out the rules or structure of how geography should be done:

• Regional Geography: concern for identification and description of regions of the earth surface

• Idiographic Geography: concerned with the distinctiveness and even uniqueness of different places and regions.

The Quantitative Revolution (1960)

William Bunge: Theoretical Geography (1962)

“This period sees geography emerging as the science of locations, seeking to predict locations where before there was a contentment with simply describing”
Nomothetic Geography: A search for general rules and theories

Walter Christaller: Work in 1933 layed out the ground works for the later theories and models for urban cities such as → Bid Rent theory model

The radical challenge: 1970s

Social and urban crises of the 1960s,

Conflict, radicalisation and urban bankruptcy

Concern not with patterns, but for deeper economic, social and political structures - A critical social science

David Harvey Social Justice and the City (1973)

Manuel Castells: The Urban Question (1972-73)

Heavy influence of Marxism → Questions begining to arise that looks deeper into the reasons for cities radically changing ie deindustrilisation etc.

d: The cultural turn of the 1980s

• ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Post-colonialism and feminism

• Language, meaning difference: Post-modernism and post- structuralism

• Geography and the power of representation

• The ‘New Cultural Geography’

Epistemology: Is a technical philosophical term which refers to the theory of knowledge