Famous Geographers

Ernst Ravenstein

Proposed many laws of migration, some of which are relevant today

Developed the gravity model (interaction between places based on population and distance)

Studied internal migration in England

Ravenstein was a geographer, cartographer, and demographer

Elsbeth Robson

Studies the impact of AIDS in highly affected Zimbabwe

Found that health care reductions and AIDS shape children’s life and their experiences

Robson found that many young children are taken out of school to serve as caregivers to relatives who have AIDS

Found that more young children are becoming caregivers as households struggle with low income and labor issues

Edward Said

Wrote about how the Europeans created an identity for the people in the Middle East and defined it as the Orient (Identifying Against)

Famous for his work as a critic of Orientalism

He was also a literary and cultural critic

Carl SauerConducted research on the origins and dispersal of plant and animal domestication

First to propose that domestication was invented independently at different times and locations

Proposed that necessity was NOT the reason of agricultural invention

Believed that domestication did not develop in response

to hunger

John Snow

In the 1850s, Snow mapped the cases of cholera in the Soho District

Concluded the disease was coming from the city’s water pumps.

Advised people to boil their water to avoid cholera

Michael Watts

Studied themes such as African development and and contemporary geopolitics

Expert in social movements, political ecology, and the contemporary world

Received a bachelor’s degree in geography and economics from University College London

Wilbur Zelinsky

Defined and delimited the perceptual region of the US and southern Canada.

Studies the diffusion of place names and the diffusion patterns of religious denominations.

Published more than 200 books, atlases, articles, reviews and reports

Marvin Mikesell

Defined geography as “why of where”.

Wrote reports on camel breeding and the dispersal of the dromedary

Explored spatial organization, human life, and human interactions

Peter Gould

Conducted surveys on perceptions of places and place characteristics.

Wrote books of the AIDS pandemic, being a geographer, and the Democratic Consequences of Chernobyl

Geography graduate of Colgate University and a master’s and doctorate degree from Northwestern University

Derwent Whittlesey

Proposed the term of Sequent Occupance.

The only prefessor of geography at Harvard

He contributed to political geography and historical geography

Had a committed interest in Africa

Immanuel Kant

A German PhilosopherKant argued that we need disciplines focused not only on particular phenomena (such as economics and sociology), but also on the perspectives of time (history) and (space).The disciplines of history and geography have intellectual cores defined by perspective rather than by subject matter.

Lawrence Knopp

Geographer and coauthor of Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st CenturyClaimed that most social science is written in a heteronormative wayThis means that the default subjects in the minds of the academics who write studies is heterosexual, white, and male.Knopp and many other geographers are working to find out how the context of local culture and the flow of global culture and politics affect the sexual identities of people- beyond the heteronormative.

Donald Kraybill

Studied the Hutterite religion and was a co-author of On the Backroad to HeavenHutterites live in colonies of about 100 peopleKraybill explained that the lynchpin of each colony is the Hutterite religion.

Victoria Lawson

Coined the term jumping scale to describe rescalingRescaling- to involve players at other scales and create a global outcry of support for their positionLawson compares the ways in which Western countries, multinational corporations, and the World Trade Organization all take products and ideas created in Western places and by Western corporations and globalize all rights to profits from them through intellectual property law.For example, the West, rice is a product that can be owned, privatized, and bought and sold, while to the East Asians, rice is integral to culture, and new rice strains and new ideas about growing rice can help build community, not just profit.Taking a single regional view and jumping scale to globalize it legitimates that view and negates other regional and local views

Sir Halford J. Mackinder

An Oxford University geographer ( 1861-1947)

Was concerned with power relationships

Concluded that a land-based power, not a sea power, would ultimately rule the world

Proposed the heartland theory stating that if his “pivot-area” (the heart of Eurasia) became influential in Europe, a great empire could be formed

Thomas Malthus

A British economist in 1798Published An Essay on the Principles of PopulaionWarned that the world’s population was increasing faster than the food supplies needed to sustain it Reasoned that food supplies grew linearly, while population grew exponentially

Doreen Massey

Defines space as “social relations stretched out”Defines place as “particular articulations of those social relations as they have come together, over time, in that particular location”Considers place as a cross section of space

Natalie Oswin

Geographer studying gay and lesbian neighborhoods

Stated that newer studies see gay and lesbian neighborhoods as “extending the norm, not transgressing or challenging it”

Questions the purpose and goal of gay and lesbian neighborhoods

Richard Hartshorne

A 1950’s famed political geographer

Described the forces within the state as centripetal and the forces that divide them as centrifugal.

Whether a nation or a state continue to exist depends on the balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces.

Peter Gould

Surveyed students in California and Pennsylvania

Questioned “If you could move to any place of your choice, without any of the usual financial and other obstacles, where would you live?”

Responses showed a strong bias for their home region

Carl O. Sauer

Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957 and was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley.

One of his most well known works was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952). In 1927, Carl Sauer wrote the article "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography," which considered how cultural landscapes are made up of "the forms superimposed on the physical landscape.

Carl Sauer's paper "The Morphology of Landscape" is probably the most influential in developing ideas on Cultural landscapes and it is still cited today

Richard Francaviglia

He has written seven books and numerous articles in geographical and historical journals

Is an historian and geographer interested in the way the American landscape has changed through time, and how this change is depicted in maps, literature, and popular culture.

Background includes experience as a historical resources consultant, college professor and administrator, and historical museum director.

John Frazier

As an academic geographer, John has been a leading author and proponent of applied geography. His writings, both in journal articles and a classic text, have emphasized the long and significant history of applied geography, its reemergence in the United States during the 1970s, and the long-term importance of applied geography to a healthy discipline

John has provided national leadership in bringing together public and private geographers in an annual forum that strengthens geography as a discipline

An important part of his work has been as a consultant with federal HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where he has provided strategies for incorporating mapping analysis for fair housing assessments.

Clifford Geertz

During Geertz's long career, he worked through a variety of theoretical phases and schools of thought. In 1957, Geertz wrote that "The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs...", a statement which reflects an early leaning toward functionalisms.

He worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. At the time of his death he was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

Aside from his influence on anthropology, Geertz landmark contributions to social and cultural theory were also influential for geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians.

Peter Hancock

Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor, Institute for Simulation & Training and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Principal Investigator on the  Multi-Disciplinary University Research Initiative, in which he  oversaw $5 Million of funded research on stress, workload, and performance.

In 2003 he won the Liberty Mutual Medal of the International Ergonomics Association, a world-wide competition for innovative advances in occupational safety and ergonomics.

Alexander Von Humboldt

German Geographer from the 19th Century was famous for his work in botanical geography.

The Latin American expedition may be regarded as having laid the foundation of the sciences of physical geography and meteorology.

His discovery of the decrease in intensity of Earth's magnetic field from the poles to the equator was communicated to the Paris Institute in a memoir read by him on December 7, 1804, and its importance was attested by the speedy emergence of rival claims.

David Harvey

early work, beginning with his PhD, was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time.

Social Justice and the city expressed Harvey's position that geography could not remain 'objective' in the face of urban poverty and associated ills.

It has been cited widely (over 1000 times, by 2005, in a discipline where 50 citations are rare), and it makes a significant contribution to Marxian theory by arguing that capitalism annihilates space to insure its own reproduction

Samuel Huntington

Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He graduated with distinction from Yale at age 18, served in the U.S. Army, earned his Masters Degree from the University of Chicago, and completed his P.H.D. at Harvard where he began teaching at age 23.

In 1968, just as the United States' war in Vietnam was reaching its apex, Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies, which was a critique of the modernization theory which had driven much US policy in the developing world in the prior decade.

In 1993, Professor Huntington provoked great debate among international relations theorists with the interrogatively-titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", an extremely influential, oft-cited article published in foreign affairs magazine. Its description of post–Cold War geopolitics contrasted with the influential End of History thesis advocated by Francis Fukuyama

Patrick Geddes

He was one of the pioneers of town planning. People should think about the growth of cities. (Diffusion)

In his books and exhibitions e.g. in the Outlook Tower, Geddes believed we should learn about places, people and work - both near and far.

Patrick Geddes, working to the end, died in the south of France in 1932. He was knighted the year before

John Agnew

Agnew and political geographer Gearoid O’Tuathail refer to politicians in core states as intellectuals of statecraft.

Critical geopolitics is a process by which geopoliticians deconstruct and focus on explaining the underlying spatial assumptions and territorial perspectives of politicians.

The basic concept behind critical geopolitics is that intellectuals of statecraft construct ideas about places.

These ideas of critical geopolitics influence and reinforce their political behaviors and policy

Derek Alderman

Alderman explained that African Americans in the South recently have “taken a particularly active role in reconstructing commemorative landscapes—from calling for the removal of Confederate symbols from public places honoring the civil rights movement.

Alderman studied the practice of changing street names to memorialize Martin Luther King Jr., the major African American leader of the civil rights movement.

He studied the distribution of MLK streets in the South, comparing their locations with census data on race and socioeconomics.  

He found that although MLK streets are in both cities and rural areas, they are generally poor African American census areas.

James Blaut

In A Colonizer’s Model of the World, Blaut explained the loss to African civilizations that occurred when significant populations were enslaved.

He wrote about how Europeans defined Africans and Americans as “savage” and also “mystical.”

He wrote this as an example of Identifying against.

2. Identifying against is when we define the “other,” and then we define ourselves as “not the other.”

Paul Boyle

Boyle discovered that hiring women from abroad to work as domestic servants, housekeepers and nannies establishes a relationship that differentiates the female from the employer, creating a power relationship.

Paul Boyle also describes power relationships based on money.

The way this would work is contractors give migrants extra money, help them move, and then borrow money to pay for other supplies or the migrants.

James Curtis

James R. Curtis and Thomas D. Boswell pioneered urban cultural landscape study Latinos in the United States.

The cultural landscape is what geographers and others call the human-constructed environment as opposed to nature.

The theory of cultural landscape is predicted that all societies and cultural group occupy space, but how space is defined built upon, utilized, and transformed into place will vary by cultural group tradition.

Mona Domosh

In her studies she noticed how people have created great divisions of labor that tend to be gendered.

Along with Joni Seager they came to the conclusion that gender is defined as the cultures assumption about differences between men and women: their ‘characters,’ the roles they play in society and what they represent.

The divisions of labor become clearly marked there after for many and the idea of what jobs are appropriate for either gender become very strongly influenced by said guidelines.

Colin Flint

Colin Flint is a strongly noted political geographer whose job is to study the geopolitical world order or the temporary periods of stability in the way international policies is conducted.

What he tends to focus on is when a stable world order breaks down causing the world to go through a transition where they can then settle into a new order.

He and other noted political geographer Peter J. Taylor argue that at the end of World War II five possible world orders could have emerged from the three major powers the United Kingdom, United States and Soviet Union.

Frederich Ratzel

Also a political geographer was the first to study why and how certain states are and become powerful.

Ratzel stated that a state resembles a biological organism whose life cycle extends from birth to maturity and ultimately to decline and death.

His theory was based on the effort to describe the experience of states in the nineteenth century including the United States. It was a theory that might have been forgotten if some if his followers hadn’t translated it but they ultimately led to Nazi expansionism.

Peter J. Taylor

The idea of globalization is said to be the critical understanding of the world today or others say it is overhyped a concept that Peter J. Taylor studied.

Globalization is a set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships and heightening interdependence without regard to country borders.

Taylor along with Ron Johnston and Michael Watts explain that “Whatever your opinion may be, any engagement with social change in the twenty first century has to address this concept seriously, and asses its capacity to explain the world we currently inhabit.”

This is why he also argued the idea of the geopolitical world and the emergence of the five possible orders.

Surinder Bhardwaj

Bhardwaj studied non-hajj pilgrimages in Islam, which include “visits to sacred shrines of holy men, the graves of saints and Imams, and the tombs of martyrs of the faith.”

Geographers studying the hajj to Mecca has resulted in the neglect of ziarat. Are important

Some sects of Islam see non-hajj pilgrimage as non-Islamic, the ziarats (non-hajj pilgrimages) to many Muslims.

Bibliography

http://www.st-columbas.pkc.sch.uk/geography/

http://www.uta.edu/history/transatlantic/Francaviglia.htm

http://www.ist.ucf.edu/people/hancockp/hancock.htm

"San Francisco Gay Pride Parade 1: Uncut." Google Images. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://idisk.mac.com/mstrickla/Public/06230954.jpg&imgrefurl=http://sfciviccenter.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-gay-pride-parade-1-uncut.html&usg=__Xqt-JZHKebjjiHSH-

Jessie, Sara R. “Exponential vs. Linear” Google Images. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://images.google.com/Je6fz3qKNonk=&h=336&w=400&sz=62&hl=en&start=19&itbs=1&tbnid=7pfgTNFiO6rlEM:&tbnh=104&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dheterosexual%2Bneighborhoods%26start%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D18%26tbs%3Disch:1>.

Schriftman, Jacob. "Kant’s Four Questions and What a Fundamentalist Would Do with Them «." The Jacob Schriftman Blog. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://schriftman.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/kants-four-questions-and-what-a-fundamentalist-would-do-with-them/>.

Delgado, Josefine. “Eurasia Heartland” Wikimedia Commons. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pivot_area.png>.

Bibliography

"Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces - Two Forces in." Yoga Meditation. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www.swamij.com/centripetal-centrifugal.htm>.

Chaco, Par E. "Commercial Pressures on Land Blog." ILC. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www.landcoalition.org/cpl-blog/?tag=food-prices>.

Davis, Mark P. "The Unsaid Reason VCs May Not Back You: Resource Efficiency." Web.

Fernández, Jesús G. "File:Pivot Area.png -." Wikimedia Commons. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pivot_area.png>.

"Geography - Merriam-Webster's Atlas." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwmapssn.pl?pennsylvania>.

"Leading Figures in Politics, Art and Geography Convene for the Doreen Massey Annual Lecture." Distance Learning Courses and Adult Education - The Open University. Web. 21 Mar. 2010. <http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/newsimages.aspx?id=15687&filter=>.

Acknowledgements

Bogdan Tesileanu - 1/4 of geographers, acknowledgements

Nicole Drobner - 1/4 of geographers, bibliography

Taylor Login - 1/4 of geographers, bibliography

Julio Pelegrino - 1/4 of geographers, bibliography