From the issue dated April 16, 1999
Geographers, in an Expanding Discipline, Struggle to Define Their Space
A debate over their association's two journals reflects field's increasing diversity and specialization
By PETER MONAGHAN
Honolulu
A discipline whose domains are "space" and "place" and anything that operates within them, or characterizes aspects of them, or flows among them -- people, water, beliefs, digital data -- can only be a vast and disparate one.
Trying to contain it within a flagship journal seems a lot to ask. And as they struggle to do just that, geographers are taking stock of their field.
Their task, according to John Paul Jones III, editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, is to figure out how best to represent 30 years of "tremendous growth."
These days, at one extreme the discipline is akin to geology and related earth sciences, focusing on such subjects as climate, land forms, vegetation, and water. At the other extreme, its embrace of the latest critical theory draws it close to literary and cultural studies, as well as to anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
In that direction, geography surveys conceptions of community, homeland, or any of myriad other place-based abstractions. It also takes in concepts as varied as human interactions with the environment; spatial cognition and analysis; and business, transportation, urban planning, and tourism.
Adding to the mix of late are satellites, computerized demographic data bases, and remote-sensor systems, which have revolutionized cartography and many other aspects of geography.
"What we have," says Mr. Jones, a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, "is deep structural transformation in the way space is being conceptualized and geographic thinking is unfolding."
How, then, to fit all of that into the Annals, the venerable journal of the Association of American Geographers? And what, members asked at their annual meeting here last month, should be the role of the association's other quarterly journal, The Professional Geographer?
What's more, the association's leaders want to know if changes to the journals can help to stem membership losses -- about 500 of its 7,000 members have left during the past four years, even as the field itself has grown.
While the Annals is considered by most geographers to be the leading journal in the field, The Professional Geographer has often been an outlet for papers -- many by younger scholars -- that have challenged the discipline, including work on feminist geography, automated cartography, and the connection of psychotherapy to geography.
However, both journals are scrabbling for circulation beyond the association's own members (the Annals has about 1,400 library and institutional subscriptions, the P.G. about 750). They are also competing for submissions with the many specialty and interdisciplinary journals -- Geomorphology, Political Geography, Space & Polity, and Transport Geography, among others -- that commercial presses have begun issuing since the 1960s. The rise of those niche journals reflects a shift in the field toward specialization: Geographers working on, say, migration, cultural ecology, or rural geography often prefer to publish in, and read, journals that consistently address their primary interests. Not unlike scholars in other disciplines, geographers are finding that they don't always have much to say to each other.
Concerned that the two journals have lost their sense of mission, the group's president, William L. Graf, published a report last fall proposing that they be merged. The ensuing controversy was still lively among the more than 3,100 geographers at last month's meeting here.
Afterward, the association's Council, its 15-member governing body, decided not to merge the two journals, but approved other changes, rankling many members of the group. To make the Annals more representative of geography, they decided to publish it as a collection of three or four subdisciplinary sections, with separate editors.
What each new section will comprise remains uncertain and contentious. Who, geographers ask, will the choices slight?
Another vote was also controversial: to change the mission of The Professional Geographer. Just how to do that was left open, but the Council suggested orienting the journal more toward applied geography rather than toward theoretical or empirical geography.
That bothers the journal's editors, Stuart C. Aitken and Janet Franklin, both of whom are professors of geography at San Diego State University. Other journals that have focused on applied geography have struggled or failed, they warn, because non-academic geographers -- those who apply geographic theory to urban planning, census design, or intelligence work, for example -- simply are not rewarded for publishing articles.
Apart from changes in the two journals, the fundamental question confronting geographers remains: How can such a disparate field remain coherent?
"It's fair to say that the discussions going on about the Annals and the P.G. are tied to the fact that you've got a discipline that's outgrown its ability to contain itself," says Mr. Jones, editor of the Annals. The discipline's "upheaval," he suggests, "is reflective, really, of geography's openness to interdisciplinary work," not to mention the ever-expanding nature of space itself.
All that, he says, is "a good thing."
He plays down the internecine tensions. "As a relatively small discipline with virtually the whole world to study," he says, "geographers tend to know one another and to be willing to sit down and talk."
However, scholars in the field clearly fear disunity. At a spirited session on the fate of the journals, Mr. Graf, a professor of geography at Arizona State University, expressed that concern: "We can't allow fragmentation to go so far as to further divide the 7,000 people in the field."
Geography's comparatively small numbers suggest its long struggle for prominence in American education at all levels. It has never enjoyed as broad a public understanding in the United States as it has in Europe and Britain.
"When I say 'psychology,' you have something in mind -- it's the study of human mental activities," Mr. Graf explains in an interview. "But when I say 'geography,' doesn't that just bring to mind your seventh-grade teacher, Isadora Fist, saying, 'You will remember the state capitals of the U.S.?'"
He predicts, however, that public understanding of geography will grow thanks to new "geographical information systems," known as G.I.S. in the discipline. "Americans will become map-friendly," he says, as they make wider use of products -- derived from taxpayer-financed data bases -- that will, for example, instantly provide a map to the nearest Italian restaurant, or, perhaps of greater consequence, the optimal site for a new business.
The new technologies have innumerable uses within the profession. Mr. Graf can now use U.S. Geological Survey data bases to view, say, a constantly updated map of salinity in rivers around Phoenix. Among the many G.I.S.-related papers presented here were ones dealing with property-tax assessment, wildlife management, community policing, and guidance for visually impaired people.
In another hopeful sign, some 4,300 students graduated last year with geography majors -- the most ever and a 35-per-cent increase since the mid-'80s. Many graduate students are hired away even before completing their master's degrees to work in such non-academic professions as land-resource management. They also are being sought for jobs that until recently did not require geography training -- for example, to work as department-store buying agents, using computerized Census data to guide their activities.
"For a large part of this century," says Mr. Aitken, co-editor of The Professional Geographer, people "have been focused on time and history and explanations of what's come before and after, and no one looked at the power of space." Now, he says, geography "is very much on the agenda," as scholars and policy makers examine the ways in which space and place shape human relations.
Anything but an expansion of the discipline's professional activities -- publishing among them -- would be unwise, he argues.
That's why many of the association's members were surprised and upset by Mr. Graf's report last fall, even though he has long advocated changing the journals. During the annual meeting, resentment and confusion were apparent. For example, members of the feminist and socialist special-interest groups objected that the association's leaders had usurped direction of the disciplinary journals without any formal comment from the members. They wondered aloud why Mr. Graf and the other Council members were rushing ahead with the changes.
But Ronald F. Abler, executive director of the association, notes that the bylaws give the elected Council sole authority over publishing. And Mr. Graf adds that members of the Council feel a sense of urgency to make changes considered necessary to correct the journals' growing problems.
He wrote in his report that the association's publications had begun to run into the red -- and threatened to go deeper with the decline in memberships, which cost $55 to $129 per year, depending on income, and include subscriptions to the two journals. Subscription rates for libraries cannot be increased without prompting some institutions to drop at least one of the journals, he said. And the association has calculated that giving individual subscribers the option of receiving the journals via the Internet -- as institutions already can -- would actually add expense.
Even more important than declining readership, Mr. Graf said, is the question of how to represent the field.
Many of his fellow physical geographers -- those oriented toward geology and the other earth sciences -- have complained of being marginalized by the editorial process. Suspicion has fallen on Mr. Jones, a leading expert on social theory, and Mr. Aitken, an authority on the relationship of geography to community and family.
While 40 per cent of academic job postings are in physical geography -- as are more than 15 per cent of papers at the association's meetings -- the subdiscipline is less well represented in the Annals and the P.G.
Mr. Jones told his colleagues at the meeting that physical geographers should submit more papers to the journals. He calculated that since he began as editor of the Annals, in 1996, only 9 per cent of the submissions had come from them, and 10 per cent from environmental geographers. Their acceptance rates matched those for papers in other specialties, he said, observing, "You can only publish what people send you."
Dividing a revised Annals according to specialties, he said, might prompt scholars in underrepresented subdisciplines, such as physical geography, to submit more papers.
But someone will have to decide what those sections are to be.
Some geographers consider the discipline's traditional categories -- human geography, physical geography, methods -- to be old and tired. At the session on the future of the journals, Mr. Abler, the association's executive director, speculated whether sections might be titled, say, "Analysis" and "Synthesis."
"The issue of labels is critical," Mr. Graf acknowledged.
The chosen categories could provoke a turf battle, warned Nanda R. Shrestha, an associate professor of business and industry at Florida A&M University.
To encourage physical and environmental geographers to submit papers, the Council also decided to increase the page dimensions of the Annals, better to accommodate the complex, map-like documents that those scholars often produce.
There again, the issue of expense looms large. Reproducing a set of color maps costs $3,000 to $7,000, and the Annals has to ask the authors to come up with the money.
It is unlikely that changing the journal will persuade geographers to read everything in the Annals, or in any other non-specialized journal. "We're inundated," says Billie L. Turner II, a professor of geography at Clark University, in Massachusetts.
Ten years ago, as a member of the association's publications committee, he suggested that the Annals adopt a format similar to the subspecialty sections that are now envisioned. At the time, he recalls, "senior geographers felt that was too divisive. They wanted -- as I want -- to believe that everyone has a large breadth of interest."
That may be wishful thinking. As Mr. Graf noted in his report: "The most common comment from individual members about the journal is that most issues contain nothing of interest to them."
That worries Mr. Turner. "This has always been a discipline of multiple takes and understandings," he says. "We're like anthropology in that respect."
That comparison might be taken as a warning. "Anthropology is splintering," he points out, referring to such developments as the recent partition of the department at Stanford University into separate departments of anthropological science and cultural-and-social anthropology. Geographers must beware not to follow suit, he says. "I don't believe in a discipline that ever privileges one way of looking at the world."
Performing "bridging work" among the various approaches, Mr. Jones suggests, has been integral to the flagship role of the Annals as "a focus and home for everyone in the field."
Whatever the association does do with the journals, he says, geography's future itself might resolve some of the tensions.
If the new geographical information systems don't help to unite the field, he suggests, the job might be accomplished by young geographers who are able to think about space in new ways. "There are students coming up through the ranks who are both critical theorists and techies," he says. "It's because they grew up with P.C.'s in their bedrooms.
"If we project ahead a little bit, it's very likely that the kind of growth pains one sees now will be resolved by young people."
Science and theory are not necessarily in separate spheres, Mr. Jones says. He puts it this way: "If you think of a three-dimensional space, with a physical-human axis, a scientific-interpretative axis, and a mainstream-critical axis, and they're not orthogonal axes, and there are overlaps, geography is largely a community spread throughout this space."
So is the field like a gyroscope out of kilter?
On the contrary, says Mr. Jones. "It's a great time to be a geographer."
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Educatio
