Threats to University Geography Courses

A piece in the Times Higher Education publication today, written by several geographers, including colleagues on the RGS Council.

They say:

Geography shapes how we understand and produce a more sustainable and just world – from the physical processes of environmental change to the dynamics of cultures, societies and economies, and how these interconnect. It is, by design, a holistic, systems-based approach to understanding the world. But its combination of STEM, social science and arts and humanities can sit uneasily within university faculty systems, heightening the risk that we are dismantled into separate components.

It is precisely through its breadth – cultural geographers working alongside soil scientists, for example – that geography permits us, and our students, to interrogate complex challenges in innovative, ground-breaking ways. That is why geography leads research in interdisciplinary domains such as climate science, global poverty, plastic pollution, sustainability and geopolitics.

And they finish by saying that:

....the cuts to geography are especially hard to take, not only because it is our subject but also because it is happening at a time when bookshops, TV screens, social media and museums are increasingly filled with treatise, tales and testimonies about maps and mappings, the Earth, environmental change and nature writing, contemporary geopolitics and new imperialisms, urban worlds and social inequalities.

These issues – and the list goes on – reflect many of the challenges that humanity faces right now.

Authors:

Jenny Pickerill is professor of environmental geography at the University of Sheffield and vice president for research and higher education at the Royal Geographical Society.

Beth Greenhough is professor of human geography at the University of Oxford.

Peter Hopkins is professor of social geography and a Leverhulme major research fellow at Newcastle University.

Tariq Jazeel is professor of human geography at UCL.

Jamie Woodward is professor of physical geography at the University of Manchester.