bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Local Embeddedness
Authors: Pickles John
Published: March 2017

In economic geography and economic sociology, embeddedness refers to the ways in which relational, institutional, and cultural contexts shape economic life. In contrast to the undersocialized and utilitarian assumptions of neoclassical economics, rational choice theory, and new institutional economics, theories of embeddedness focus on the ways in which markets and society are variously articulated in particular societies, organizations, and places. Embeddedness in this sense is associated first and foremost with the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi argued that the market generally sought to disembed itself from social regulation, while society responded by attempting to socialize and regulate (re‐embed) the excesses of unregulated markets. It is also associated with the work of Granovetter in economic sociology, who cautioned against oversocializing, as well as undersocializing, the economy, in favor of a much more detailed analysis of the specific ways in which social relations structured economic practices.
Spatial Econometrics
Authors: Ye Xinyue
Published: March 2017

Spatial econometrics is a fast‐growing and rapidly expanding field in quantitative social sciences. In 1979, Paelinck and Klaassen defined the specificity of spatial econometrics. Anselin (in 1988) formally established the theoretical and methodological framework. This field provides a set of tools to model the interaction and measure the spillover effects among a group of spatial units with particular attention to location, spatial structure, and spatial processes. The current relevance debate centers on such issues as comparative spatiotemporal dynamics, big spatiotemporal data, and open source movement.
Ethnography
Authors: Watson Annette
Published: March 2017

Within geography ethnography is most utilized in fields such as cultural ecology, development studies, feminist studies, and social, political, cultural, and nature–society geography. It is both a method of data gathering and a representational practice of the qualitative scholar. It is often used within geography as an inductive approach to empirical and emotional data, especially fieldwork data. Current trends in geographic theory, including critical geography and the “postmodern” turn across the social sciences, have influenced the topics, scope, and practice of ethnographic work. This entry outlines both the continuities and changes in how ethnographic methods are employed by geographers.
Rural Citizenship
Authors: Yarwood Richard
Published: March 2017

“Citizenship,” like “rurality,” is a highly contested term. Yet emerging research has suggested that distinctive forms of citizenship are becoming associated with the global countryside. This entry examines the significance of citizenship to rural geography and how understandings of rurality contribute to our knowledge of citizenship. It explores how rural citizenship is imagined, performed, and contested in different spatial settings, from local villages to transnational rural communities. It explores how the language of rights and duties has been applied to rural areas. The entry concludes by examining the significance of rural activism in developing new forms of transnational citizenship.
Climate Change Adaptation and Social Transformation
Authors: O'Brien Karen
Published: March 2017

The consequences of climate change have been observed throughout the world, with differential impacts within and across societies. There has been a surge of attention in recent years to adaptation research, policy, and practices as a means of reducing the risks of climate change. Although adaptation is increasingly considered a necessary part of planning and development processes, there is growing recognition that there is also a need for social transformations that address the factors driving risk and vulnerability. Policies and decisions associated with transformation extend beyond business‐as‐usual approaches, and often challenge traditional ways of thinking about things, doing things, and planning for the future. However, many of the current “transformative” responses to climate change ignore the role of politics and power in perpetuating business as usual. Realizing alternative futures that are equitable and sustainable is the key challenge for this century, and will include both adaptation and conscious social transformations.
Legal Geography
Authors: Forest Benjamin
Published: March 2017

Legal geography, a highly fragmented subfield, is defined by formal attention to the spatial aspects of law and the legal dimensions of space and place. (Indeed, one may easily write of legal geographies.) Most work in the area concerns issues of jurisdiction, property, public/private space, race, and/or rights, although there is considerable variation in how these concepts are addressed. The majority of research is on common law systems, particularly in the United States, although there is a degree of attention to non‐Western and informal legal systems as well. The scholarship on legal and geographic issues outside common law systems and in the developing world tends to be categorized as legal anthropology or sociology, with relatively weak disciplinary links to geography. This separation, however, is generally institutional rather than intellectual, and there are numerous opportunities for greater cross‐disciplinary work. Much of the scholarship in legal geography is from a critical perspective, seeking to challenge established legal (or sociolegal) practices and to highlight the inequalities created or reinforced by and through them.
Sonar
Authors: Fang ZhaoBao
Published: March 2017

Sonar is the acoustic equivalent of radar. Underwater acoustics is a unique science, encompassing the use of water waves for underwater communication, data transmission, target location and detection, identification, and navigation, among other uses. Sound waves from different forms of energy are transmitted over long distances in deep sea, which is important for the military. Therefore, for detecting underwater targets, sonar technology has risen to the challenge. With the developments in underwater acoustics and computer techniques in the last 20 years, sonar technology has demonstrated widespread applications in hydrographic profiling, underwater target detection and recognition, communication, navigation, remote control, remote ocean floor sensing (bottom contours, formations, landforms, etc.), mineral, oil, and gas exploration, and military developments.
Homelessness
Authors: DeMuynck Erin
Published: March 2017

Social and economic stresses have led to increased demand for affordable housing, while the number of affordable housing units has declined. The contraction and dissolution of human service programs have further exacerbated the problem of homelessness. As a result, a broad and diverse swath of society today is vulnerable to temporary or permanent homelessness. Homelessness itself is not clearly defined but rather forms a continuum of housing hardships ranging from visible homelessness, which entails having no access to shelter, to hidden homelessness, in which individuals have access to shelter but it may be unsafe or insecure. All forms of homelessness have been met by policy responses that can be stigmatizing and often fail to address the causes of homelessness or to meet the needs of individuals who are experiencing homelessness.
Soils of Humid Mid‐Latitude Landscapes
Authors: Schulze Darrell G.
Published: March 2017

Soils of the humid mid‐latitudes primarily occur in climates that have (i) distinct seasonal differences between summer and winter and (ii) no, or only short, moisture deficits during the growing season. Most of these kinds of soils occur in the Northern Hemisphere. Of the 12 soil orders inSoil Taxonomy, Inceptisols, Alfisols, Mollisols, Entisols, Ultisols, and Spodosols are the most widely occurring soil orders in the humid mid‐latitudes; only Gelisols are not represented. In general, humid mid‐latitude soils tend to be rich in weatherable minerals and their clay mineralogy is dominated by 2:1 phyllosilicates. As a result, most humid mid‐latitude soils are relatively fertile even without added nutrient inputs. They support grasslands and forests in their native state but vast areas are intensively farmed. Half of the world's population lives on and is supported by soils of the humid mid‐latitudes. Sustainable use of humid mid‐latitude soils must balance the need for food, fiber, feed, shelter, and energy production with the many essential ecosystem services that these soils also provide.
Sensor Networks, The Sensor Web, and the
I
nternet of Things
Authors: Liang Steve H.L.
Published: March 2017

In the near future, millions to billions of small sensors and actuators will be embedded in our environment and connected to the Internet. The combination of these heterogeneous sensing systems can provide enormous amounts of timely, comprehensive, continuous, and multiresolution observations for creating innovative applications. This entry presents the architectural components of an end‐to‐end sensor web system, from the wireless sensor network nodes in the field to the interoperable sensor web services on the web. Design tradeoffs and research challenges are also introduced. Finally, the Internet of Things, the next generation sensor web, is introduced.
Regional Planning:
C
hina
Authors: Liu Hui
Published: March 2017

In China, regional planning started in the 1980s and has played an increasingly important role in spatial governance since 2000. The core mission is to promote sustainable regional development. There are different geographical scales for regional planning in China, of which the most frequent is a cross‐province region. In China, regional plans are prepared and authorized by three different ministries, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Land and Resources, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban‐Rural Development. Each of them has its own key content and major planning area. Therefore, China still lacks an overall design and system of organization for regional planning.
Megacity
Authors: Sutton Christopher J.
Published: March 2017

Megacities are large urban centers with populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants. The number of megacities grew from two in 1950 to 23 in 2010. By 2030, there will be an estimated 41 megacities, with much of the growth of megacities occurring in China, India, and sub‐Saharan Africa.
Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis
Authors: Guo Diansheng
Published: March 2017

Exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) uses visual graphics (including maps), exploratory statistics, and computational algorithms to enable the analyst to interact with the data, identify patterns, search for hypotheses and discover unknown or unexpected information. This entry presents a brief summary of research challenges for ESDA and introduces a variety of ESDA methods developed in different domains.
Creative Cities
Authors: Hague Euan
Published: March 2017

The drive to make creative cities has become a global phenomenon in the twenty‐first century. Advocates claim that city‐shaping investment in the arts, entertainment, knowledge, and cultural economies, and in urban planning policies will attract members of the creative class and produce thriving places. Critics suggest that this trend is problematic: it privileges urban elites, encourages gentrification, and excludes lower‐income and working‐class people from the city.
Geography Education: National Policies and Standards
Authors: Heffron Susan M.
Published: March 2017

Geography education varies greatly in different countries. The discussion is focused on how and where geography is taught in the education systems of different countries. The entry presents a wide scope of geography instruction using six national examples of where geography is or is not taught in national curriculum. Future research directions suggest identifying common elements and opportunities for collaborations among countries to enhance geography education.
Cloud Computing
Authors: Sugumaran Ramanathan , Armstrong Marc P.
Published: March 2017

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm that employs networked and distributed hardware and software services. These services can be flexibly configured to meet different levels of demand or budget constraints. Geospatial applications of cloud computing exploit large memory resources and distributed parallelism to yield substantial performance benefits that are normally obtained at a low cost to the end user.
Women Explorers
Authors: Evans Sarah L.
Published: March 2017

Women's relationship with exploration as a form of geographical knowledge production has been complex and contested. Recent work in feminist historical geography has revealed the previously unknown extent of women's involvement in exploration and expeditionary work, in ways that challenge existing understandings of these practices as being strongly male‐dominated.
Rural Geography
Authors: Milbourne Paul
Published: March 2017

Rural geography has emerged as an increasingly important subdiscipline of human geography during the last two or three decades. Rural researchers have engaged productively with critical theory and methodological innovation to make important contributions to human geography. “The rural” has also emerged as a more significant arena of investigation for other human geographers, particularly in relation to research and publications on nature and food. Important research themes within rural geography include migration, sociocultural change and conflict, economic restructuring, agri‐food systems, nature and environment, governance and politics, and welfare. The increased pace of globalization and urbanization has blurred the divide between rural and urban spaces, issues and processes, as well as between rural geography and other subdisciplinary areas of human geography. Global concerns about climate change and the security of food, energy, and water supplies have also emphasized the importance of rural–urban relations.
Class
Authors: Pavlovskaya Marianna
Published: March 2017

Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class‐related inequalities and to construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class. The contemporary global and neoliberal economy has given rise to high levels of concentration of wealth and economic insecurity that cut across the class divisions and social safety nets of the twentieth century. The politics of class remains central, however; imagining new horizons in class solidarity and transformation is as vital as ever for new and diverse class subjects.
Human Rights
Authors: Boyle Mark
Published: March 2017

The idea that human beings have rights simply by dint of their status as human beings (irrespective of their race, age, nationality, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and so on) is a relatively recent one. Arguably, this idea reached its apogee in 1948 when, fueled by collective memories of World War I and World War II, the member states of the United Nations conceived and ratified what has since been referred to as the global Magna Carta for all humankind: the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Human geographers pay homage to the idea of human rights and its ciphering and codification in the UDHR but also now debate the extent to which it is possible to uncritically support human rights declarations that purport to be universal.
Geographic Information Science and Technology: Educational Directions
Authors: Strobl Josef
Published: March 2017

Geographic information science and technology education has evolved into a multidisciplinary undertaking supporting academic and professional qualifications and professions. With strong conceptual foundations in geography, motivated by application domains including planning, ecology, engineering, and infrastructure management, and facilitated by technologies and computer science, educational programs and underlying curricula are now offered worldwide. This entry explores the academic backgrounds, curriculum initiatives, and models for study programs in, for example, geoinformatics, including traditional frameworks as well as continuing education, distance learning, and noncredit and informal learning. Best practice by worldwide institutions and actors is well documented through collective experience as a foundation for developing new directions accommodating novel technological and conceptual developments.
Biomes
Authors: Malanson George P.
Published: March 2017

The term “biome” is a level of biological classification with the most straightforward definition but the most varied applications. It is the unit of biogeography one conceptual step below the planetary biosphere, but the degree of division is a matter of choice. The concept is often used to illustrate basic relations between biogeographic patterns, emphasizing plant physiognomy, and climate. New work on microbiomes and anthropogenic biomes, as well as the need for bases for conservation, has reinvigorated thinking on the concept.
International Division of Labor
Authors: Lim Kean Fan
Published: March 2017

The international division of labor refers to a conception of economic production as intrinsically transnational and as intrinsically interdependent on labor power based in different places. Old and new versions of the concept abound: the old international division refers to the Ricardian view that labor power enjoys a comparative advantage based on finished products, while the new international division defines comparative advantage on the basis of tasks and processes. The new international division of labor was caused in large part by the crisis of Fordism, a process much researched by economic geographers. Empirical findings demonstrate a more complex process of transformation shaped as much by changes in firm cultures and new politico‐developmental objectives in developing countries as they are by the vertical disintegration of the production process and its relocation by firms based originally in industrialized economies.
Labor Market
Authors: Lim Kean Fan
Published: March 2017

Labor markets are socially constructed entities that facilitate the buying and selling of labor power. They are effectively political‐geographic institutions, governed predominantly by state regulations that apply within specific territorial boundaries. For this reason, analyses of labor markets have tended to be state‐centric. Economic geographers have worked assiduously at transcending state‐centrism through showing how the buying and selling of labor power is a gendered, multidimensional and often transnational process that is always in the making – it is never about the self‐correction of prices by abstract forces of demand and supply.
Regulation/Deregulation
Authors: Lim Kean Fan
Published: March 2017

Economic regulation is dynamically entwined with deregulation. Contrary to the logic of market fundamentalism, producers and/or consumers do not always benefit from deregulation. Rational choice theories of regulation have not impacted economic‐geographical research as much as regulation theory (RT). Developed in France to theorize the crisis of Fordism, RT underscores the importance of social regulation in the capital accumulation process. Rather than study deregulation as an end state, RT emphasizes regulatory reconfiguration and repurposing. Despite its eventual decline, RT left a strong legacy on economic‐geographical research on (de)regulation. There is strong potential for current and future studies to build on this legacy, particularly in research on variegated neoliberalization and primitive accumulation.
Borders, Boundaries, and Borderlands
Authors: Newman David
Published: March 2017

Borders have been a major theme in the study of political geography. The lines which demarcate and delineate the territorial configuration of the state were considered sacrosanct during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite the fact that many of them were created in arbitrary fashion. The last fifty years has witnessed alternative border discourses, ranging from the opening and removal of borders (the so called “borderless” world) to the return of borders as evidenced in the construction of new fences and walls as a result of the post‐9/11‐era securitization discourses. This entry discusses the main themes which have emerged in the renaissance of border studies during the past two decades. The entry also focuses on alternative ways of understanding contemporary processes of bordering in terms of diverse spatial scales, non‐spatial processes of bordering, critical analyses of bordering, and the ways in which borders are represented in diverse texts, ranging from maps to films, literature, and caricatures.
Population Geography
Authors: Bruce Newbold K.
Published: March 2017

Population geography is a division of human geography that focuses on the study of people, their spatial distributions, their characteristics, and their density. It is the study of the ways in which spatial variations in births, deaths, and the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of populations are related to place. Population geographers seek to understand the society around them, the structure of a population, and how populations change through population movements and processes. Population geography reflects the diversity of geography, while also being closely related to demography and spatial demography. The subdiscipline has increasingly adopted new theoretical viewpoints in order to remain relevant.
Feminist Geography
Authors: Mohammad Robina
Published: March 2017

Feminist geography brings feminist politics and theories together with a geographical focus in examining the relationship between gender relations, place, and space. Feminist perspectives in geography began in the 1970s, and by the end of the 1990s it had gained a considerable institutional presence. Three distinctive phases of development can be identified: geographies of women, socialist feminist geographies, and geographies of difference. The initial focus on femininities has more recently been complemented by growing attention to masculinities. Feminist geography has also made major contributions to ontological, epistemological, and methodological debates within the discipline.
Deep Mapping and Sensual Immersive Geographies
Authors: Harris Trevor M.
Published: March 2017

Many have questioned the epistemological and ontological construction of geographic information systems (GIS) and the perceived inability of a positivist GIS to address the needs of humanists and human geography. The social theoretic critique of GIS questioned the ways in which a reductionist GIS represented nature and society. Geographic information science (GIScience) is not a panacea for geography but the primary focus on the spatial has contributed to a lack of engagement with other important aspects of geography such as place. This space–place divide prematurely concedes considerable ground. Recent conceptual and methodological engagements in the spatial humanities and deep mapping have sought to bend GIScience to the nuanced and multivalent needs of humanists. Advances in immersive technologies point to alternative GIS representations whereby the technology might escape its reductionist spatial corset and embrace both spatial and placial representations of human behavior and contribute to a more human‐centered geography.
Community/Continuum in Biogeography
Authors: Hakkenberg Christopher R. , Tarasi Dennis D. , Peet Robert K.
Published: March 2017

An ecological community refers to the association or assemblage of living organisms that coexist within a given space–time context. The dual concept of “community/continuum” refers to two complementary approaches to characterizing community types. The community‐unit hypothesis describes ecological communities as distinct and repeatable entities, whereas the individualistic‐continuum theory represents communities as idiosyncratic assemblages within a continuum of independently distributed species that track environmental gradients and reflect chance events of dispersal and disturbance. Although most ecologists prefer the continuum model to describe variation in species composition across landscapes, the classification of communities into discrete types is of great practical value, provided the sometimes arbitrary nature of these entities is recognized. A flexible community classification typology recognizes that species associations are empirically observable and that broadly defined community types exist in replicate, even though their composition reflects idiosyncrasy and dynamism along a continuum of variation.
Soils: Salinization
Authors: Metternicht Graciela
Published: March 2017

Soil degradation is a global problem that causes reduction in soil quality and, hence, decreases in soil function, including productivity. About 33% of the world's lands are degraded as a consequence of depletive human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing, excessive use of chemicals, and their interactions with natural environments. Salinization is a specific form of soil degradation that is frequently found in soils of arid and semiarid regions. It causes chemical soil deterioration and changes in physical and chemical soil properties (soil structure, permeability, and chemical balance). In agricultural areas, salinization is of concern because salts mainly affect crop growth, reducing crop yields, with the magnitude depending on the degree of salinity.
Quantitative Methodologies
Authors: Stewart Fotheringham A.
Published: March 2017

Quantitative methodologies have been a major component of geographical studies since the 1960s and encompass an extremely broad variety of applications covering every substantive part of the discipline. The term encompasses statistical methods, mathematical models, visualization and computation, and is also linked to relatively modern terms such as “geographic information science,” “geocomputation” and “geoinformatics.” This entry examines why quantitative methodologies in geography are special; contains a brief history of quantitative methods in geography; describes the main broad strands of quantitative methods employed in geography; looks at current trends related to geographic information systems, visualization, “big data,” and “big models”; and considers the challenges ahead.
Resource Extraction
Authors: Bridge Gavin
Published: March 2017

Resource extraction refers to the separation and removal of natural resources from their immediate context and encompasses a stunning diversity of practices, organizational forms, and materials. Extraction is widely interpreted as a physical process by which “gifts of nature” are removed from the earth and transformed into useful raw materials. However, a more specific understanding of extraction frames it as a political‐economic process of expanding value and power via the identification, capture, and control of extractable materials. As a mode of economy, extraction can be distinguished from industrial production in five significant ways. The scale and diversity of resource extraction have increased over time and is a defining feature of the Anthropocene. Extraction is now a target of several different national and international policy concerns. Four significant trajectories of concern are identified, which also reflect an evolution in human geography's engagement with resource extraction.
Peacekeeping
Authors: Belcher Oliver
Published: March 2017

Peacekeeping is a conflict management strategy to establish security and provide humanitarian assistance in a postconflict context. Largely conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, peacekeeping operations have become more frequent since the end of the Cold War. In recent years, the adoption of remote sensing and geospatial technologies has transformed the composition and operation of peacekeeping forces.
Urban Planning: Human Dynamics
Authors: Appleyard Bruce
Published: March 2017

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, urban planning grew as a profession to address the poor conditions of the industrializing cities of the nineteenth century by focusing on technical, aesthetic, and political processes to guide such things as the orderly use of land and the provision of infrastructure, for example, streets, water, and sewer. By the late twentieth century, urban planning goals expanded to include social equity, sustainable development, and livability as the ideal outcomes of all urban planning processes. Urban planning and human dynamics (UPHD) is an emerging transdisciplinary, multiscalar research field focusing on dynamic patterns in human communication and exchanges influencing settlement and behavior patterns. Central to this understanding, is the study of “urban access” – an individual's technology enhanced capacity to discover, navigate, and participate in the exchange and management of goods and services in urban environments, central to the sharing economy phenomenon emerging at the dawn of the twenty‐first century.
Biogeography: History
Authors: Riddle Brett R.
Published: March 2017

Biogeography, the study of the geography of life, emerged as a recognizable science as plant and animal collections grew during the eighteenth‐century age of exploration. The foundation of biogeography, that geographically disjunct regions with similar environments have distinct plants and animals, appeared as Buffon's Law in 1761. While being further developed within both evolutionary and ecology frameworks by late nineteenth‐century naturalists, including Wallace, Sclater, and Darwin, biogeography then developed along the two often distinct and separate trajectories of historical (evolution, systematics, paleontology) and ecological (population, community, ecosystem) biogeography. A revitalization of biogeography occurred in the 1960s alongside acceptance of the plate tectonic model of continental drift, and development of the equilibrium theory of island biogeography. Biogeography currently integrates four persistent themes (biogeographic regionalization, historical reconstruction, turnover among areas and across gradients, and geographic variation within and among closely related species) within emerging subdisciplines including phylogeography, macroecology, and conservation biogeography.
Environmental Education
Authors: Atkinson Lindsey
Published: March 2017

Environmental education can be defined as education about, from, and for the environment. It aims to develop knowledge and awareness of the environment and environmental issues, and the skills needed to benefit the environment and to influence attitudes and behavior with regard to the environment. It is interdisciplinary, incorporating science and social, economic, and political aspects related to the environment. Environmental education can incorporate a range of learning and teaching methods with an emphasis on outdoor education and lifelong and participatory learning. Environmental education has developed as a subject area from the 1960s and, more recently, has contributed to education for sustainable development.
Representation: Time
Authors: Peuquet Donna J.
Published: March 2017

Interest in representing temporal as well as spatial information in digital form coincided with the availability of large volumes of spatiotemporal data via advancing geosensing technology as well as accumulation of digital data from archival sources. A historical review is given, including entity‐based, location‐based, time‐based, and combined representational approaches and a framework for spatiotemporal query. The importance of going beyond representation of strictly observational data to include process is discussed, as well as issues and challenges unique to representation of the temporal dimension.
Public Health: Human Dynamics
Authors: Rushton Gerard
Published: March 2017

Public health activities address sources of ill‐health and mortality that cannot be controlled by individual actions. As the types of disease that contribute to ill‐health change, so do the types of public health activities for any given population. Public health methods for controlling the diseases of cholera, smallpox, and tuberculosis are discussed in relation to the behaviors of individuals and societies. The success in eradicating smallpox is contrasted with difficulties encountered in eradicating polio today. The epidemiologic transition describes changing patterns of deaths in populations in relation to new patterns of behaviors by individuals and groups. With the large decrease in deaths from communicable diseases, public health now focuses more on changing behaviors that contribute to ill‐health, particularly in young and adolescent populations. Control of the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs are notable examples of this focus. Also of concern is the exposure of some components of the population to chemicals, particles, or other contaminants in the environment. Of particular concern today are disparities in health between segments of the population that often appear to be linked to poverty and racial biases. Public health often researches the different sources of ill‐health among populations located in vulnerable places or places that are inaccessible to treatment methods available to other groups in the population.
Conservation and Capitalism
Authors: Brockington Dan
Published: March 2017

Conservation and capitalism have long been understood as opposites: the first protects the nonhuman world while the latter has, historically, plundered nature. However, today it is appropriate to regard them as mutually constitutive of each other. Capitalism is now shaping conservation practice, while conservation is extending the reach of capitalism as an economic system. Together they are remaking the biophysical world. This entry explores how this two‐way relationship works by examining recent research into neoliberalism and attempts to save nature through the market.
Subculture of Poverty
Authors: Wilson David
Published: March 2017

The theory of a subculture of poverty, first offered by anthropologist Oscar Lewis to understand the persistence of poverty in rural and urban settings, pervasively persists. The theory asserts that the poor adapt to conditions of poverty and marginality by creating a subculture adapted to those conditions that ensures some degree of normalcy and happiness. This culture sustains poverty by normalizing its supporting value orientations: helplessness, the search for immediate gratification, dependency, marginality, and powerlessness. Criticisms have been widespread and harsh, focusing on the notions that the poor are anything but passive and unthinking beings in the face of social and economic oppression, and that it is problematic to read from human behavior a notion of unfettered human choices. In both cases, the notion of a subculture of poverty is deemed to be simplistic and caricaturing.
Dependency Theory
Authors: Moseley William G.
Published: March 2017

In contrast to the relatively uniform set of development stages suggested by modernization theory, dependency theory stressed the unequal relationships between countries that had been constructed from the colonial period to the present. Dependency theorists argued that economies in the tropics were “underdeveloped” during the colonial era as European countries refashioned these economies for their own benefit. Through a combination of taxation policies and forced coercion, tropical countries came to produce primary commodities which were traded for manufactured goods from Europe in a global system of unequal exchange. In terms of policy implications, dependency theory gave rise to programs of import substitution and some nationalizations of foreign‐owned industries. Dependency theory has been criticized from at least two distinct angles. Neoliberal economists slammed import substitution policies for leading to inefficiency and stifling economic growth. In contrast, poststructuralists essentially saw dependency theory as overly defeatist, insufficiently acknowledging of the role of individual agency, as well as discursive power.
Earth System Science
Authors: Castree Noel
Published: March 2017

Earth system science (ESS) is now over 30 years old. It is an interdisciplinary field originating in various environmental sciences, such as climatology and ecology. It has grand, integrative ambitions. It aims to understand and, where possible, predict continuities and changes in the relationships between the various “systems” that together govern the character of Earth surface phenomena. Originating in the United States, ESS is now an international enterprise with practitioners in Australia, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. Over time it has extended its reach beyond complex biophysical systems to incorporate the human drivers of, and responses to, global environmental change. Geographers have been involved in ESS since the 1990s, though some have been critics – with many geographers simply ignoring it. ESS is now in an important new phase, given that humans appear to be altering the Earth system in unprecedented ways. Interesting questions arise as to what sorts of contributions geographers will in future make to the enterprise.
Emotional Geographies
Authors: Thien Deborah
Published: March 2017

The field of emotional geographies comprises interdisciplinary scholarship focused on theoretical and substantive considerations of emotion, space, and society. Major influences on this work include feminist scholarship, humanistic and phenomenological approaches, health and wellbeing literatures, and the spatial turn in cultural theory. The entry outlines both feminist approaches and the debate on emotion versus affect in studies by geographers before turning to the application of emotional geographies in studies of health and wellbeing.
Environmental Movements and Protest
Authors: Bebbington Anthony
Published: March 2017

Environmental movements are forms of collective action that are sustained over time and across space and which serve to politicize nature while also pursuing particular normative goals regarding the environment. These goals vary widely, reflecting the particular environmentalism that underlies these movements. These environmentalisms can hinge around notions of conservation, justice, livelihood, resource nationalism, and the rights of nature and species, among others. Politicized notions of the environment can also be fostered by movements that do not self‐identify as “environmental”: the indigenous movement for example. Environmental movements range from the locally focused through to transnational, networked movements. Movement strategies and approaches to protest also vary widely. Some movements embrace direct action and overt protest, while others prefer to express disagreement through negotiation. Nongovernmental and other social movement organizations play critical roles in determining movement orientation and strategy, though relationships between these organizations and the broader movement can be complex and tense.
Geophilosophy
Authors: Woodward Keith
Published: March 2017

Geophilosophy was created by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). By adapting geographic concepts that emphasize proximity, contingency, interdisciplinarity, and bottom‐up modes of thinking, it overturns top‐down understandings of philosophical practice and linear histories of ideas. Geophilosophy has also influenced numerous theoretical and practical developments in geography, such as nonrepresentational, affect, and assemblage theories. It has given critical language to “minor” or micropolitical approaches within political economy and political ecology, and is one of the key inspirations behind the discipline's recent “ontological turn.” Underlying all of these is a nuanced retheorization of the complicated, constitutive relationship between lives and environments.
Regional and Interregional Trade in Producer Services
Authors: Beyers William B.
Published: March 2017

Producer services have attracted the attention of scholars interested in regional development because they can be traded in a manner similar to goods, thereby contributing to the economic base of regions and nations. The development of information technologies has facilitated growth in trade in producer services, yet face‐to‐face communications still plays a major role in the production and delivery of these services. There is evidence that the share of purchases used economy‐wide has come to a growing extent from producer services, also implying growth in trade or exports of these services from regional and national economies.
Mining and Mineral Resources
Authors: Bridge Gavin
Published: March 2017

Mining is one of the basic activities by which humans acquire raw materials. Mineral resources may be classified in different ways, reflecting socially meaningful differences in how minerals are utilized. Modern societies are materially complex and the range of mineral resources has grown over time. Their integral role in modern economic life means mining and mineral resources occupy several core areas of policy concern. Resource economics and political science have traditionally dominated the policy space surrounding mineral resources, but geographers have made significant interventions by querying the scales and spaces through which mining and “mineral problems” should be understood; highlighting interdependencies between extraction and consumption, and between mining and other livelihood activities; and critiquing assumptions about physical scarcity commonly associated with mineral resources.
Phenomenology
Authors: Jeffrey Alex
Published: March 2017

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that studies human consciousness and experience. Geographers began to adopt aspects of phenomenology in the 1960s and 1970s, partly to challenge the abstraction and generalization of prevailing spatial scientific approaches and partly to provide a more invigorated sense of human agency within geographical theory. Phenomenological approaches emphasize the significance of human subjectivity, the complexity of geographical knowledge production, and, in some quarters, the search for shared categories through which the world may be apprehended. In recent years phenomenological approaches have been critiqued for an overemphasis on human subjectivity, while some have questioned the extent to which phenomenological philosophy challenges the positivism of spatial science.
Postcolonial Geographies
Authors: Sidaway James D.
Published: March 2017

Geography has long been caught up in imperial projects. Postcolonial geography critiques and seeks to subvert this relationship. It builds on radical antecedents in the 1970s, whereby geographers critiqued their subject's relationship with nineteenth‐ and earlier twentieth‐century colonialism and examined neo‐imperialism. Since then, and increasingly since the 1990s, geographers have offered a range of postcolonial geographies that acknowledge and work through both imperial legacies and colonial pasts and presents. This work has posited postcolonial alternatives, examined structures of race and racism and challenged Eurocentrism, while tracing the trajectory of postcolonial theory.
Race and Racism
Authors: Kobayashi Audrey
Published: March 2017

The concept of race as a means of sorting and segregating human beings is ancient, but its modern manifestation dates to the time of European exploration and the Enlightenment, when it became an instrument of both science and geopolitics. Racialization is the process by which race is deployed through discursive acts of racism. Geographers played a significant role in the invention of the concept of race and in the development of racial science. The concept motivated the environmentalist approach that dominated the discipline by the early twentieth century, and remained a contentious topic in both human and physical geography from the 1920s onward. By the end of the twentieth century, with the advent of poststructuralist thinking, race was recognized as a social construction and, as such, one of the most powerful ways of organizing human relations. Current geographical studies of racialization emphasize changing conditions in a world of increasing globalization, urbanization, and shifting geopolitics as well as the embodiment of race.
Residential Segregation
Authors: Holloway Steven R.
Published: March 2017

Residential segregation characterizes contemporary cities and has a long historical precedent. It is global in reach and is changing form in response to global economic changes. Racial residential segregation receives the greatest scholarly attention because it was imposed by blatantly discriminatory actions. Black−white segregation has declined in US cities, but remains the highest of any group. Asian and Hispanic segregation has remained relatively unchanged, but reflects the specific experiences of various nationality groups. New research has developed classificatory and cartographic methods to accompany single‐value indices, which have been improved by attending to explicit spatial structure. “Big data” provide interesting possibilities.
Slum
Authors: Wilson Matthew D.
Published: March 2017

A slum is a squalid settlement of substandard housing and living conditions where inhabitants lack adequate living space, reliable housing structures, and dependable resources such as clean water, electricity, and sanitation services. They formed especially in industrial cities in the United States and Europe during conditions of mass immigration and prevalence of low‐wage labor in the late nineteenth century. In the twenty‐first century slums are predominantly found in urban areas of underdeveloped and developing counties. Conditions contributing to the formation of slums include urbanization driven by rural to urban migration, inadequate responses to housing shortages, the reality of dysfunctional labor markets, and a lack of government provision of resources. Efforts to reduce slum inhabitance that have had varying degrees of success include slum demolition or removal, guided relocation of inhabitants to better‐quality living conditions, and upgrading measures to provide slums with essential infrastructure and services.
Social Reproduction
Authors: Norton Jack , Katz Cindi
Published: March 2017

Social reproduction is a geographically and historically differentiated process encompassing the production of a stratified labor force and the cultural forms and practices that create and maintain its differences while making them common sense. It involves both the sensuous labor of everyday life and the structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation to production. These material social practices take place across geographic and temporal scales, encompassing daily and generational relations that are as much intimate as global in their effects and charge. Social reproduction also involves the reproduction of the material grounds and conditions of production, including the conservation of environmental resources and the concerns of environmental justice. The work of social reproduction is racialized, gendered, and class specific and is accomplished within a contested and shifting amalgam that includes the family, household, state, workplace, and institutions of civil society.