Abstract
There are many definitions for geography, most contain the word space or place. In order to foresee the future of geography, let us first examine the presence of the discipline, in particular, its variation in space. This chapter illustrates the distribution of global leading higher education institutions and compare that with the distribution of those leading the study of geography. Are they mostly overlapping? Or in some countries, do they deviate from each other? Among the leading institutions for the study of geography, are they focusing on physical geography, human geography, geographic information science, or all sub-disciplines? Among the leading institutions that are not strong in the study of geography, what are the related disciplines they choose to focus on? Is there a geographic variation in the composition of geographic education? If yes, how to describe it, and how to explain it? Do these patterns reveal any insight to the future of the discipline?
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks David Liu, a high school student intern at Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis in the summer of 2019 and now a student at Brandeis University, who collected most of the data used in this study. This chapter is revised from a position paper presented in the Future of Geography Conference in 2019.
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Guan, W.W. (2022). The Geography of Geography. In: Li, B., Shi, X., Zhu, AX., Wang, C., Lin, H. (eds) New Thinking in GIScience. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3816-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3816-0_8
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