Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
subdiscipline will be. As Johnston (1991:2) recognised: 'It is the advancement of
knowledge—through the conduct of fundamental research and the publication of its
original findings—which identifies an academic discipline; the nature of its teaching
follows from the nature of its research.' But geography has also undergone many
profound transformations. As L.Murphy and Le Heron (1999) explain, since 1900, a
number of different schools of geographical thought have evolved from the regional
geographies in the late nineteenth century, through to the 1960s, to quantitative
geography in the 1960s and 1970s, humanistic geographies in the 1970s and 1980s, to
GIS, political economy geographies, feminist geographies, new regional geographies and
post-modern geographies in the period since the 1980s. What is apparent is the plurality
of these diverse approaches now available to geographers which has characterised many
of the approaches embodied in this topic. These new approaches have spawned new
research agendas, critical debate, often opposing philosophical and methodological
positions as each perspective has been informed by the multiplicity of knowledge from
each platform of research. Yet critics of this growing diversity of geographical research
agendas in human geography have also become alarmed at the lack of coherence and
focus in the discipline of geography as the seemingly fragmented range of geographies
have been discovered, reinvented, reimaged and given new life within new research
agendas. If one of the core strengths of geography is its ability to offer synthesis and a
conceptual underpinning based on notions of space, place, people and environment, the
geographer faces a growing challenge: synthesising an exponential growth in
'geographies of leisure, recreation and tourism' within the context of an exponential
growth in human knowledge from both academic and the public/private sector, made
available by the electronic age.
This final chapter will briefly revisit the place of tourism and recreation geography in
the applied geography tradition. It will then discuss the contributions that geography can
bring to the study of tourism and recreation and highlight a possible future for the field.
GEOGRAPHY—THE DISCIPLINE: DIRECTION AND
PROGRESS
According to R.J.Johnston (1985b: 326), 'geographers, especially but not only human
geographers, have become parochial and myopic in recent decades' and have been
accompanied by a disengagement from close field contact and a global concern with
human phenomena. The disengagement from the region has been seen as a mechanism to
synthesise systematic investigations. In seeking to advance the discipline, Johnston
(1985b) argued that geographers need both a theoretical appreciation of the general
processes of the capitalist mode of production and an empirical appreciation of the social
formations that result. The discipline versus detachment from the skills of fieldwork,
observation and description continue to remain fundamental weaknesses, and in many
respects the 'core' elements of a geographical education at university level now reflect
the often fragmented specialisation that characterises many geography curricula. In fact,
geography is a subject in retreat in many contexts, particularly in Australia where the
specialisation function has now led to the dissipation of geography departments and the
emergence of more multidisciplinary groupings focused on environmental science, for
