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Presents a list of titles and abstracts of papers regarding geography presented to the Association of American Geographers from 1904 to 1910.

Presents abstracts of articles from the Association of American Geographers in 1940. "The Relations of Some Texas Soils to Their Parent Materials"; "The Historic Indians of Louisiana"; "Louisiana Foods".

Relying on the fecund interface of three fields—studies in science, risk geography, and knowledge management—this paper notes first that the lack of understanding of the relationships between maps and territory and risks is an unfortunate consequence of the way the mapping impulse has been interpreted during the modernist period. Then, taking into account the advent of digital navigation, the paper discusses a very different interpretation of the mapping enterprise that allows a mimetic use of maps to be distinguished from a navigational one. Consequently, we suggest maps should be considered as dashboards of a calculation interface that allows one to pinpoint successive signposts while moving through the world, the famous multiverse of William James. This distinction, we argue, might, on the one hand, help geography to grasp the very idea of risks and, on the other, help to free geography from its fascination with the base map by allowing a whole set of new features, such as anticipation, participation, reflexivity, and feedback, now being included in the navigational definition of maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research process is more like finding one's way through a complex maze. ‘Home is where the heart is’, but foreign students face a number of problems upon their return home to do research. This paper chronicles the dilemma of a Zimbabwean student conducting fieldwork for his UK-based doctoral studies in his own country. The dilemmas were critical in that the fieldwork was undertaken during the ‘Zimbabwe crisis’ and the inherent problems of researching government-related organisations. This has a bearing on any research process and invokes use of the etic/emic dilemma. This paper contributes to the gaps and growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the role played by the specious present or moment, what some call the present of the now, in geographical discussions of social change. Its most explicit treatment as a temporal framing for such change has been in performative approaches, with their stress on the capacity of immersive body practices to produce difference through the ongoing repetition of such practices, a difference that plays on what is habitually or instinctively accessed through each specious present. However, we can also find debates focused on large-scale social practices that have combined various forms of structural or institutional contingency (ie customary practices, past investment cycles, etc) with becoming and which see becoming as rooted in the everyday reiteration of such practices, an interpretation that also privileges the moment as the point when becoming is actualised. Brought together, these different approaches provide the basis for a more broadly based interpretation of change focused on the specious present. This paper explores the case for this broader interpretation. It is divided into four sections. The first reviews those philosophical discussions of the specious present that have attracted most attention from human geographers. The second reviews the ways in which the geographical debate has used the specious present as a framing for change. The third examines how these different geographical treatments fill or extend the specious present, whilst the fourth and final section considers the implications of such thinking for how we interpret change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of the returns to a questionnaire survey on the state of department archives within UK departments of geography. The results of the survey are discussed in relation to recent work in geography which has examined the archive as a site for knowledge's making but seldom in its own terms as a resource for the history of geography, and studies within the archival sciences which have considered the archive as something more than a ‘storehouse’ for collective memory. The paper reveals that the archival record for the history of British geography is at best uneven, and in many departments non-existent, although information on departmental history is held, often as memory, by individual geographers. The paper considers the survey's implications for the future histories of British geography and addresses the nature of the UK geography department archive as resource and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disciplinary space that geographers conceive to be theirs has all been previously possessed, or latterly colonised, by other disciplines. Geographers defend their existence on the basis of their oft-asserted, but never tested, cross-disciplinarity. The journals in which refereed papers were published by members of the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and the papers in Australian Geographical Studies were analysed for the period 1998–2002 to test the hypothesis of cross-disciplinarity in both subject and method. IAG members do strongly tend to publish in more than one disciplinary area, and a large proportion of papers in Australian Geographical Studies are integrative across subdisciplines in geography, with many using more than one methodological approach. However, transgression of the physical geography/human geography divide was sufficiently uncommon to create a statistical break between sets of subdisciplines. Based on the data used in the present paper, Australian geographers can make a case for being members of a vital, integrative discipline, likely to make substantial advances in the hybrid spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of the French discipline of geography through the research and writings of the eighteenth century geographer, d'Anville, the geographers on the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798–1801), and those involved in the exploration of Algeria (1839–42), and illuminates a major paradigm shift which transformed geography from a science barely recognizable to modern geographers into a social science with many of the dimensions of the modern discipline. In the eighteenth century, French geographers were primarily concerned with locational determination and representation: locating and mapping towns, major natural or human-made features, and provincial and national borders. By the early nineteenth century, there is evidence that geographers were beginning to broaden their interests to include problems that were not strictly locational. In this period of transition, instead of radically reforming their approach, French geographers clung to their traditional methodologies and stretched them to solve nonlocational problems. By the mid-nineteenth century, they had substantially refocused their attention on the general nature of the terrain, description of major landscape features, ’man’ as a being interacting with the environment to produce race and culture, the movement of populations, hegemonic boundaries and territoriality, the history of exploration, and commercial geography. Geography retained an anachronistic and increasingly peculiar concern with the determination of location. This paper represents the first step in an attempt to explore geography's ambiguous role in the intellectual revolution that took place between 1750–1850 and which gave birth to the modern social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, discussions on positionality and the relationship with research collaborators have been very much in the human geography realm. In this paper, we explore issues of expertise, positionality, collaboration and participation from our perspective as physical geographers working in a developing country context. We trace our journey from identifying ourselves as top-down ‘experts’ to participatory ‘facilitators’, and the difficulties and dilemmas encountered during this journey as we coped with the contrasting challenges of academic demands and local necessities. Our experiences highlight the many assumptions we make about doing research in developing countries and the real lack of capacity in these places to undertake typical short-term research projects designed in the developed world. We conclude with a call for a longer term and deeper commitment by physical geographers to the people that we engage with in our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the contours of a ‘method’ for postcolonial development geography, which makes it possible to imagine another ‘world-picturing’. We suggest three steps towards such a method. First, we propose that a postcolonial method involves thinking about why we are doing research in the south in the first place; how we come to and produce our questions; and how we analyze and represent our findings based on our subject positionings. Second, that we need to recognize theorization as an inherent part of method, rethink how we currently theorize and reconfigure our methods of theorization to address wider political aims. Problematizing theorization helps challenge the universalism of Eurocentric theories, thus enabling development geography to move towards more decolonized versions and visions. Finally, that this must be accompanied by firmer recognition of our multiple investments – personal, institutional and geopolitical – and how they frame the possibilities for change. These are some possible steps that we think can reconfigure the ‘scholarly track’ that postcolonial development geographers traverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is adapted from an address given at the plenary session of the conference ’From Native and Landscape Research to Urban and Regional Studies‘ held in Tartu on 23 August, 2002, to mark the birthdays of J.G. Granö (120 years.) and Edgar Kant (100 years). The Finnish geographer J.G. Granö was Professor of Geography at the University of Tartu from 1919 to 1923, a period during which that university became the birthplace of many original geographical ideas. Edgar Kant was beginning his studies at that time, and a link was forged between the two scholars which lasted until Granö's death in 1956. The nature of this interaction and its significance for the history of geographical studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what lies ahead is of particular concern for Latin Americanists. The last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of both the popularity of their specialty, and an equally troublesome reduction in employment opportunities. This paper uses Association of American Geographers (AAG) data bases to document the age-gender structure of contemporary Latin Americanist geographers, and projects likely compositional changes through the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most cities are influenced by those cultures which they serve and represent. At the same time, the cultures are influenced by their respective cities. This mutual relationship among cities and cultures constitutes a complex of processes of functional interrelationships. The geographic approach to these processes leads to the delimitation of twelve major world-regions and several sub-regions that are characterized by the areally varying processes associating cities and cultures. A system of world-regions of this nature is proposed in the present paper. The proposed system places every city of the world into a hierarchy of functional regions, far beyond the city's own hinterland. Every city is then visualized as a molder and reflector of its cultural environment. In addition, the following implications of such a regional system on the field of urban geography are discussed. First, the urban geographer is able to contribute to regional studies by considering the influence the cities have upon a given region. Secondly, the urban geographer adds another aspect to the research on any city by purposely studying the city as the expression of the surrounding cultural realm. Thirdly, the proposed regions are a tool for systematic and comparative study on the regional variation of cities from one culture-region to another.

The article presents information on the 58th meeting conducted by the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers in North Carolina. The annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG) was held in North Carolina on November 23-25, 2003. A series of New Voices of the Southeast sessions, an innovation conceived by SEDAAG President Ron Mitchelson, was implemented this year. These sessions showcased new geography professionals in the region. Three New Voices sessions with twelve papers were organized by Allan James and Kavita Pandit.

Focuses on the importance of enlarged international contacts for the Association of American Geographers in the U.S. Significance of first-hand reports on geographers and geography in a session in a meeting; Presentation of a paper on China; Invitation for a Russian geographer to attend the meeting.