Geography and Geographical Practice

Geography and Geographical Practice

To see the video of Katherine and Susan’s conversation please visit http://bcove.me/5rpdb6fy

Katherine Gibson What brought you to geography?

Susan J. Smith Well, the honest answer is that geography is a big school subject in the UK, it happened to fit in, it was a subject I was good at and I liked it because I was a rock climber so I was drawn to physical geography. One of the things I’m always very grateful for is that undergraduate courses are very often so integrated so I spent my whole undergraduate time doing a mix of physical and human geography. I think if I’d have had to choose early on, I would have done physical geography – sand dunes, rocks and relief – and the fact that I was able to balance the two sides of the discipline for so long gave me enough time to work out that it was the human and social world that I was most interested in.

Katherine That’s fascinating because I have a similar background in a way. As a child, we had a lot of interest in geology because my mother had been sent out on field work and doing things like that with her mother who had trained as a geologist. So we had a lot of interest in landscape and what was out there in the world. I also did geography at school and loved it and went into university doing both geology and geography and at one point thought I might go on with geology. But in my third year of geography at university one of the lecturers, who was actually an agricultural geographer, got us thinking about epistemology and I thought ‘this is the first time I’ve come across the thought that you can think about what does it mean to think this way versus that’.

And so, even though geography often seems a very practical kind of a study, it was one of the first places I actually got involved in more theoretical thinking. So from then on it became a place where you could explore both the world and what was going in practice within the world but also some way of stepping back and considering what questions are we asking of it. So in a way for me geography was a very free kind of discipline.

[Page 756]Susan Yes, that’s right. Lots of colleagues are engaged in disciplines which, quite rightly, are very focused on particular specialisms – and they are quite easy to identify in a way: there’s a focus and there’s a theme that the core discipline has. What I’ve always liked about geography is that its specialism is making connections between all these different areas. For me, that’s really attractive – the idea that you can look at a range of different themes and topics. I guess that one of the intellectual legacies of a century of geography is to give you a framework in which to look for connections between them [the themes and topics] and to be interested in the connections as much as in the entities that are being connected.

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