Suchergebnisse

This textbook on political geography is devoted to a discipline concerned with the spatial dimensions of politics. This course is an introduction to the study of political science, international relations and area studies, providing a systemic approach to the spatial dimension of political processes at all levels. It covers their basic elements, including states, supranational unions, geopolitical systems, regions, borders, capitals, dependent, and internationally administered territories. Political geography develops fundamental theoretical approaches that give insight into the peculiarities of foreign and domestic policies. The ability to use spatial analysis techniques allows determining patterns and regularities of political phenomena both at the global and the regional and local levels.

Behavioral geography encompasses a broad field of human geography that became influential during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged in reaction to the "quantitative turn" associated with the spatial sciences paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s. A fundamental goal of behavioral geography is to understand how and why people perceive environments in the way they do, and how these perceptions influence actual spatial behavior. Behavioral geography, which was largely responsible for introducing behavioralism to human geography, is best thought of as an approach rather than as a separate subdiscipline, given the breadth of philosophical perspectives, research foci, and methodologies that it fostered. Behavioral approaches in human geography were applied to a range of topics, including natural hazards, urban and rural residents' cognition of their built and natural environments, and people's affective belonging to place. Although segments of the approach were criticized for their, inter alia, positivism, lack of scientific rigor, and failure to challenge the status quo of society, the behavioral approach to human geography facilitated a greater engagement with philosophical and epistemological issues, forged productive interactions and relationships with cognate disciplines, and helped lay the conceptual and methodological groundwork for human geographers to engage with contemporary social, environmental, and political issues of public policy relevance.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- General Editors' Preface -- List of Maps and Diagrams -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Nature of Agricultural Geography -- 2 Enterprises and Systems -- 3 The Farm Firm: Problems of Decision Making -- 4 Agricultural Activity and the Physical Environment -- 5 Land, Labour and Capital -- 6 Scale of Production -- 7 Marketing and Supply -- 8 Government Policy -- 9 Data and Classification -- 10 Patterns of Distribution -- Bibliography -- Appendix: The Metric System Conversion Factors and Symbols -- Index.

1. The nature of an academic discipline -- 2. Foundations -- 3. Growth of systematic studies and the adoption of scientific method -- 4. Human geography as spatial science -- 5. Humanistic geography -- 6. Radical geography -- 7. Postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism -- 8. Feminist geography -- 9. Applied geography and the relevance debates -- 10. A changing discipline?.