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i

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

METHODOLOGIES IN HUMAN
GEOGRAPHY

The Routledge Handbook of Methodologies in Human Geography is the defining reference for
academics and postgraduate students seeking an advanced understanding of the debates, meth-
odological developments and methods transforming research in human geography.
Divided into three sections, Part I reviews how the methods of contemporary human geog-
raphy reflect the changing intellectual history of human geography and events both within
human geography and society in general. In Part II, authors critically appraise key methodo-
logical and theoretical challenges and opportunities that are shaping contemporary research
in various parts of human geography. Contemporary directions within the discipline are
elaborated on by established and emerging researchers who are leading ontological debates and
the adoption of innovative methods in geographic research. In Part III, authors explore cross-​
cutting methodological challenges and prompt questions about the values and goals underpin-
ning geographical research work, such as: Who are we engaging in our research? Who is our
research ‘for’? What are our relationships with communities?
Contributors emphasize examples from their research and the research of others to reflect
the fluid, emotional and pragmatic realities of research. This handbook captures key methodo-
logical developments and disciplinary influences emerging from the various sub-​disciplines of
human geography.

Sarah A. Lovell is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Health at the University of Canterbury,
New Zealand.

Stephanie E. Coen is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of

Nottingham, UK.

Mark W. Rosenberg is a Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and

Planning and cross-​appointed as a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
ii
iii

THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF
METHODOLOGIES IN
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Edited by Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and

Mark W. Rosenberg
iv

Cover image: ‘City’, an original mixed media painting by Carla Lam

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Rosenberg, Mark W., editor. | Lovell, Sarah, editor. | Coen, Stephanie, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of methodologies in human geography /
Sarah Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg
Other titles: Handbook of methodologies in human geography
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge international handbooks |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022009361 (print) | LCCN 2022009362 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367482527 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032313795 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003038849 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human geography–Research. |
Human geography–Methodology. | Human geography–History.
Classification: LCC GF26 .R67 2022 (print) |
LCC GF26 (ebook) | DDC 304.2072–dc23/eng20220716
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009361
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009362
ISBN: 9780367482527 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032313795 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003038849 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003038849
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
v

COVER ARTIST

Carla Lam is an academic refugee turned painter who works in multiple media (especially
acrylic, oil and pastel) and favors creative mark making, and letting the process inform the
subject. Her work is experimental, intuitive, and color-driven, and the result is emotionally
evocative, abstracted nature and other landscapes. She is based in Edmonton Alberta with deep
roots in New Zealand and the Canadian Maritimes. Find out more at carlalam.com.
vi
vii

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  xi
List of Contributors  xiii

Introduction  1
Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg

PART I
Origins, Reflections and Debates  7
Mark W. Rosenberg

1 The Great Debate in Mid-​Twentieth-​Century American Geography:

Fred K. Schaefer vs. Richard Hartshorne  9
Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

2 The Archive and the Field: Methodological Procedures and Research

Outcomes in the Work of Carl O. Sauer (1889–​1975)  24
W. George Lovell

3 The Quantitative Revolution  39

Mark W. Rosenberg

4 Towards Interdisciplinarity: The Relationship between GIS/​GIScience/​

Cartography and Human Geography  47
Alberto Giordano

5 Reflections on Human Geography’s Methodological ‘Turns’  61

Robin Kearns

vii
viii

Contents

6 For an Intersectional Sensibility: Feminisms in Geography  70

Karen Falconer Al-​Hindi and LaToya E. Eaves

7 Making Space for Indigenous Intelligence, Sovereignty and Relevance

in Geographic Research  83
Chantelle Richmond, Brad Coombes and Renee Pualani Louis

8 Geohumanities: An Evolving Methodology  94

Sarah de Leeuw

PART II
Methodologies of Human Geography’s Sub-​Disciplines  105
Sarah A. Lovell

9 Affective Landscapes: Capturing Emotions in Place  109

Ronan Foley

10 Geography’s Sexual Orientations: Queering the Where, the What,

and the How  123
John Paul Catungal and Micah Hilt

11 Political Geographies: Assemblage Theory as Methodology  134

Jason Dittmer, Pooya Ghoddousi and Sam Page

12 Indigenous Geographies: Researching and De-​colonising

Environmental Narratives  144
Meg Parsons and Lara Taylor

13 Storytelling in Anti-​Colonial Geographies: Caribbean Methodologies

with World-​Making Possibilities  161
Shannon Clarke and Beverley Mullings

14 Historical Geographies: Geographical Antagonism and Archives  173

David Beckingham and Jake Hodder

15 Black Geographies: Methodological Reflections  183

Renato Emerson dos Santos and Priscilla Ferreira

16 Digital Geographies and Everyday Life: Space, Materiality, Agency  196

Casey R. Lynch and Bahareh Farrokhi

17 GIScience: Addressing Aggregation and Uncertainty  207

Hyeongmo Koo and Yongwan Chun

viii
ix

Contents

18 Health Geography and Big Data Adventures: Methodological

Innovations, Opportunities and Challenges  227
Malcolm Campbell and Lukas Marek

19 Geographies of Disability: On the Potential of Mixed Methods  244

Sandy Wong and Diana Beljaars

20 Methodologies for Animal Geographies: Approaches Within and

Beyond the Human  257
Guillem Rubio-​Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan

21 Urban Geographies: Comparative and Relational Urbanisms  270

Kevin Ward

22 Economic Geographies: Navigating Research and Activism  279

Kelly Dombroski and Gerda Roelvink

23 Geographies of Education: Data, Scale/Mobilities, and Pedagogies  295

Yi’En Cheng and Menusha De Silva

24 Children’s Geographies: Playing with Participatory Methods  306

Nicole Yantzi and Janet Loebach

25 Anarchist Research Within and Without the Academy: Everyday

Geographies and the Methods of Emancipation  322
Richard J. White and Simon Springer

PART III
Cross-​Cutting Issues in Human Geography Methodologies  337
Stephanie E. Coen

26 Politics, Institutions and Place: Researching Sensitive Subjects in

Urban Contexts  339
Peter Hopkins and Robin Finlay

27 Navigating Ruralities in Human Geography Research: Reflections from

Fieldwork in Complex Rural Settings  348
Moses Kansanga, Elijah Bisung and Isaac Luginaah

28 Participatory Geographies: From Community-​Engaged to

Community-​Led Research  358
Heather Castleden and Paul Sylvestre

ix
x

Contents

29 The Methodological Implications of Integrating Lived Experience in

Geographic Research on Inequalities  371
Claire Thompson

30 What Role for More-​Than-​Representational, More-​Than-​Human

Inquiry?  381
Richard Gorman and Gavin Andrews

31 Dear Feminist Collective: How Does One Take Up Slow Scholarship

(in the Midst of Crises)?  395
Jenna M. Loyd, Stepha Velednitsky, Ileana I. Diaz, Sameera Ibrahim,
Carla Giddings, Kela Caldwell, Roberta Hawkins, Alison Mountz and
Anne Bonds

32 Refining Research Methodologies to Make a Difference in Policy  407

Carolyn DeLoyde and Warren Mabee

Index  418

x
xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
1.1 Richard Hartshorne defends the regionalist position at the 1960
Lund seminar in urban Geography, 16 August 1960  11
1.2 Kurt Schaefer’s 1933 ID he brought with him as a refugee  14
2.1 Man in Nature  30
2.2 Illustrations by Antonio Sotomayor  32
2.3 Sotomayor’s “animated or living map of North America in
Indian days”  33
4.1 The dispersed stage of the Budapest ghetto  51
4.2 The International ghetto and the Pest ghetto  52
4.3 Measures of concentration: Location of ghetto houses  53
4.4 Walking distances to market halls  54
12.1 The Four R’s  145
12.2 Decolonising the environmental research sector through empowering
Indigenous knowledge, people, and resources  149
12.3 One framework for bridging the divide between different worldviews
from Aotearoa New Zealand  150
12.4 Continuum of Indigenous involvement in research  150
17.1 Visualization of uncertainty using (a) side-​by-​side mapping and
(b) bivariate mapping  211
17.2 Three configurations for uncertainty mapping with bivariate mapping 213
17.3 An illustration of ‘confidence level’ between two normal distributions 215
17.4 An illustration of the separability index mapping using the median
household income in Texas from the 5-year (2009–2014) ACS data.
(a) a choropleth map and (b) a plot of the classification result with the
attributes and their 95 percent confidence intervals (horizontal bars)  216

xi
xii

List of Illustrations

17.5 Optimal map classification with uncertainty for the median household
income in Texas from the 5-year (2009–2014) ACS data. (a) an
illustration of a network structure for map classification, (b) an optimal
map classification result with the class separability index, and (c) an
optimal map classification result with Bhattacharyya distance  217
17.6 A simulation result of Moran’s I values using attributes from the 5-​year
(2009–​2014) ACS data. (a) median household income for Texas counties
and (b) median household income of Hispanic households for census
tracts in Dallas county  218
17.7 Moran scatterplot of the median household income in Texas from the
5-​year (2009–​2014) ACS data  221
18.1 Fixed (static) and mobile (dynamic) exposure spaces: Authors analysis
and data  229
18.2 Static (fixed) and Dynamic (mobile) exposures  231
18.3 Static (fixed) and Dynamic (mobile) exposures with temporal
constraints  233
18.4 Apple mobility data, Auckland, New Zealand during COVID-​19
restrictions, 2020  236
22.1 The economy iceberg  284
22.2 Floating coconut economy  285
24.1 The Eureka moment  307
24.2 Meaningful roles for young people  311
24.3 Purple’s photograph  314
24.4 Environmental audit map produced by student co-​researchers  316
24.5 Environmental audit map produced by student co-​researchers  316
24.6 Activity map of play yard activity produced by student co-​researchers  317
32.1 Modifying the scientific method to facilitate better policy uptake  409

Table
22.1 The diverse economy of Tūaropaki Geothermal Enterprise  286

xii
xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Editors
Sarah A. Lovell is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Health at the University of Canterbury,
New Zealand. She is a health geographer and her PhD at Queen’s University in Canada
examined the use of community based participatory research. In the years since, her funded
research projects have addressed access and delivery of care in the community, with a particular
focus on sexual and reproductive health. Dr Lovell has published widely in journals such as
Social Science & Medicine and Critical Public Health. She has over ten years of experience super-
vising postgraduate students and teaching qualitative research methods.

Stephanie E. Coen is a health geographer using participatory and arts-​based approaches to

interrogate how micro-​scale environments of everyday life are implicated in health inequities.
Her research focuses largely on gendered inequities in physical activity and socio-​environmental
influences on young people’s health, along with a parallel focus on creative methods as a substan-
tive research area in relation to questions of rigour and knowledge translation. She is Associate
Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham (UK).

Mark W. Rosenberg is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and

Planning and cross-​appointed as a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair
in Aging, Health and Development. His research is on aging, health, health care, and health
and the environment. While he began his career as a quantitative researcher, he became
an early proponent of mixed methods research in human geography. Publications from his
research can be found in the leading journals of geography, gerontology, social science and
medicine.

Contributors
Karen Falconer Al-​Hindi is Professor of Geography at the University of Nebraska at Omaha,
where she directs the women’s and gender studies program. Her research and teaching explore
feminism, identities, social structures, disadvantage and materiality in different contexts. She uses

xiii
xiv

List of Contributors

collective biography as an explicitly feminist methodology for investigating power and survival.
She is keenly interested in intersectionality as theory and methodology and its role in centering
Black feminism in feminist geography. Her recent research argues that intersectionality is cru-
cial for understanding and addressing the effects of COVID19; other recent work examines
feminism and agency in the academy, in communities, and in families.

Gavin Andrews is a health geographer based at McMaster University in Canada. His empirical
interests include aging, holistic medicine, health care work, phobias, fitness cultures, health his-
tories of places, and popular music. Much of his work is theoretical and positional considering
the state-​of-​the-​art and future of health geography. In recent years he has become interested
in the potential of posthumanist and non-​representational theory for conveying the emergence
and performance of health and wellbeing. His current projects examine a range of concepts
used in health contexts and studies, and explore their further explanatory potential, including
‘world’, ‘entropy’ and ‘onflow’.

Trevor Barnes is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia where he

has taught since 1983. His research interests are in economic geography and the history of
geographical thought. His most recent book is jointly edited with Eric Sheppard, Spatial
Histories of Radical Geography (2019). He has been keenly interested, occasionally obsessed, by
the Hartshorne-​Schaefer debate since he was an undergraduate. He is glad at last to get it off
his chest.

David Beckingham is an Associate Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the

University of Nottingham. His research investigates the historical geographies of governance
and regulation, primarily connected to alcohol consumption and control in Great Britain in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. David’s publications have examined social, legal,
and medical responses to alcohol, analysing the temperance movement, policing and alcohol
licensing, and dedicated reformatory regimes.

Diana Beljaars is a Research Fellow at the Geography Department of Swansea University,

UK. She approaches her interest in the geographies of culture, disability, and health through
postphenomenological and posthumanist theories in human geography in combination with
the medical humanities and the Tourette syndrome-​related biomedical and clinical sciences.
She currently works full-​time on the EU-​funded project COVINFORM to analyse the effect-
iveness of Covid responses, in particular with reference to vulnerable groups in Wales. She
co-​edited Civic Spaces and Desire (Routledge), and her monograph Compulsive Body Spaces
(Routledge) is due to be published by late 2021.

Elijah Bisung is an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at
Queen’s University, Kingston ON, Canada. He is a health geographer whose primary area of
research focuses on social and environmental production of health and wellbeing.

Anne Bonds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of

Wisconsin-​Milwaukee. She is a feminist urban economic geographer whose work focuses on
race and racialization, feminist political economy, critical poverty studies, and carceral and abo-
lition geographies. She is an editor of Urban Geography and chair of the Urban Geography
Speciality Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).

xiv
xv

List of Contributors

Kela Caldwell is a M.S. student in the Department of Geography at the University of

Wisconsin-​Madison. Her research explores Black geographies and encounters of disaster and
crisis.

Malcom Campbell is an Associate Professor in human geography at the University of

Canterbury in New Zealand. His expertise is in health and medical geography (spatial epi-
demiology) as well as regional science/regional analytics. Dr. Campbell is working on a series
of projects which attempt to examine and understand social and spatial inequalities in different
contexts. He also has an interest in developing and applying novel methods to geographical
problems.

Heather Castleden is a Professor and Impact Chair in Transformative Governance in the

School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. Her research program is
community-based and participatory, primarily in partnership with Indigenous peoples, and
focuses on relational ethics and the politics of knowledge production in environment and health
justice.

John Paul Catungal is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British
Columbia, where he is currently Interim Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration
Studies program. A queer, first-​generation Filipinx Canadian settler living in unceded Coast
Salish territories, JP is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in the nexus of critical human geog-
raphies and intersectional feminist and queer of colour theorizing. His research, teaching and
public facing work generally concern the community organizing and cultural production
practices of migrant, racialized and LGBTQ+​communities, with particular interests in the
fields of sexual health, education and social services. JP was co-​editor of the landmark 2012
volume Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility (University of Toronto Press), as well as spe-
cial issues of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies and TOPIA: Canadian Journal
of Cultural Studies on sexuality, race and nation in Canada. He was a past faculty fellow of
UBC’s Public Humanities Hub and the Green College Leading Scholars Program. He has
been a member of the editorial collective of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies
since 2017.

Yi’En Cheng is Research Fellow in Asia Research Institute at the National University of
Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities
in Asian cities. He is currently researching on how international student mobilities in East and
Southeast Asia are being reconfigured through shifting cultural and geo-​politics of the Belt and
Road Initiative and the COVID-​19 pandemic. More information at chengyien.wordpress.com.

Yongwan Chun is an Associate Professor of Geospatial Information Sciences at the University

of Texas at Dallas. His research interests are in Geographic Information Science (GIS) and spa-
tial statistics methodologically and lie in urban geographical issues as substantive research area.
Specific research topics include quantitative methods (especially, spatial statistical approaches)
for geographical research, geographic data uncertainty, population migration, public health, and
urban crime. His research has been supported by funding agencies including the US National
Science Foundation and the US National Institutes of Health.

xv
xvi

List of Contributors

Shannon Clarke is a PhD candidate in human geography at Queen’s University, in Canada.

She is researching urban governance, migration, and anti-​colonial geographies, with a focus on
Caribbean thought.

Brad Coombes is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Environment, University of

Auckland, Aotearoa/​New Zealand. Kati Mamoe and Ngati Kahungunu are his iwi (tribes).
A geographer and lawyer by training, he researches at the interface between indigenous
livelihoods, political ecology and environmental justice, and regularly contributes to the
Waitangi Tribunal’s settlement process for Maori land and resource claims.

Sarah de Leeuw is a cultural-historical geographer, anti-colonial feminist activist, award-

winning poet and literary essayist, and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health
Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program, a distributed site of the University of British
Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine. In 2017 she was appointed to the Royal Society of Canada’s
College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

Carolyn DeLoyde is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University. Carolyn is a Member of

the Canadian Institute of Planners and a Registered Professional Planner. Her research is in
geography, urban planning, and cities with a focus at the intersection of the natural environ-
ment and the urban form.

Menusha De Silva is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, National University of

Singapore. Her research examines the intersections of transnational migration and ageing,
within the context of Sri Lankan migrants’ later-​life mobility and negotiations of transnational
citizenship, and eldercare relations within transnational families. She teaches modules in social
and cultural geography, and her recent work on pedagogy focuses on online teaching and
learning, and collaborative approaches.

Ileana I. Diaz is an Afro-​Caribbean-​Latinx feminist transdisciplinary researcher, thinker, and

learner currently living on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and
Neutral peoples. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental
Management at the University of Waterloo. Broadly her academic work explores the politics
of race, gender, imperialism, and environmental issues. She is a SSHRC Bombardier Doctoral
Scholar, American Geographical Society Council Graduate Fellow, and the recipient of five
teaching awards.

Jason Dittmer is a Professor of Political Geography and Head of Geography at University

College London. He writes about diplomacy, heritage, and militarism using assemblage theory.
His most recent books are Diplomatic Material: Affect, assemblage and foreign policy (2017) and
Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, Second Edition (with Daniel Bos, 2019).

Kelly Dombroski is an Associate Professor of human geography at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa

| Massey University, in Aotearoa New Zealand. She co-​ chairs the research cluster for
Community and Urban Resilience, and is a member of the Community Economies Institute
and the Community Economies Research Network. She recently co-​edited The Handbook of
Diverse Economies (2020) with J.K. Gibson-​Graham, and undertakes and supervises research
in feminist economic geography and community development throughout the Asia-​Pacific
region.

xvi
xvi

List of Contributors

Renato Emerson dos Santos is a Professor of Human Geography in the Urban and
Regional Planning Research Institute (IPPUR/​UFRJ) at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
(Brazil). His research is focused on spatialities of social movements, cartographical activisms
and Brazilian Black Movement’s struggles. He has published books in Brazil like Diversity, Space
and ethnic/​race relations: blacks in Brazilian Geography (2007), Social Movements and Geography: the
spatialities of action (2011) and Racism and Urban Questions (2012). He was president of the
Brazilian Geographers Association (2012-​2014).

LaToya E. Eaves is a native of Shelby, North Carolina. She earned her PhD in the Department
of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University in Miami. Her small-​
town, Southern upbringing informs her research, which combines insights from Black geog-
raphies, Black feminisms, queer studies, and southern studies in order to engage spatial processes
of home, community, and belonging. Her work has been supported by the National Science
Foundation. LaToya is currently an assistant professor in the Department Geography at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a founder and past chair of the Black Geographies
Specialty Group with the American Association of Geographers (AAG).

Bahareh Farrokhi is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of

Nevada, Reno. Prior to joining UNR she received her BA and MA in geography and urban
planning from the University of Tehran. Her research interests include urban planning, sustain-
ability, social justice, GIS, and health geography.

Priscilla Ferreira, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Latinx and Caribbean
Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow
in Black and Latinx Studies in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora
Studies and the Dept. of Mexican American and Latina/​o Studies at the University of Texas
in Austin (2019–​2021). Dr. Ferreira is an engaged geographer and sociologist whose scholar-
ship is informed by longstanding grassroots organizing, and popular education experiences.
Her research focuses on Black community economies, Black urban geographies, Afro-​Latinx
geographies, and decolonial research and pedagogical praxis. She has published on cognitive
injustice, Black community economies, and feminist solidarity economics.

Robin Finlay is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology at Newcastle University, UK.

Ronan Foley is an Associate Professor in Health Geography and GIS at Maynooth University,
Ireland, with specialist expertise in therapeutic landscapes and geospatial planning within health
and social care environments. He has worked on a range of research and consultancy projects
allied to health, social and economic data analysis in both the UK and Ireland. He is on the
Editorial Board of Health & Place, edited Irish Geography between 2015 and 2022 and was an
Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury (NZ) in 2015. His current research focuses
broadly on relationships between water, health and place, including two authored/co-edited
books, Healing Waters (2010) and Blue Space, Health and Wellbeing: Hydrophilia Unbounded (2019)
as well as journal articles on auxiliary hospitals, holy wells, spas, social and cultural histories of
swimming and ‘blue space’.

Carla Giddings is an occupational therapist and PhD Candidate in the Department of

Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph on the Treaty lands and

xvii
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List of Contributors

Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Her research explores the experiences
of care and belonging through the Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program. She cur-
rently works as a mental health clinician at the Canadian Mental Health Association and is a
co-​chair of the Occupational Justice for Newcomers Network.

Alberto Giordano is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Texas State University,

a former President of UCGIS, the University Consortium for Geographic Information
Science, and a Fulbright Specialist in the Department of History at the University of Vilnius in
Lithuania. Alberto is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a net-
work of researchers and scholars interested in bringing geographical approaches, methods, and
perspectives to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides. He is also involved in projects
related to spatial applications to forensic anthropology, most recently on migrant deaths at the
U.S-Mexico border.

Pooya Ghoddousi is ESRC Post-​doctoral Fellow in Human Geography at Queen Mary

University of London. He was a Teaching Fellow in Global Migration at University College
London where he also did his PhD on transnational assemblages of identity, belonging and col-
lective action among Iranians in London. His research, activism and writing are inspired by the
concepts of assemblages and nomadism by Deleuze, Guattari and Ibn Khaldun.

Richard Gorman is a more-​than-​human health geographer currently based at Brighton and

Sussex Medical School in the UK. Rich’s work is concerned with how, and for whom, matters
of care come to be enacted, how different knowledges interact, and how different interests
are spoken for. Previously, this has involved examining nature and animal-​assisted therapies,
practices of laboratory animal research, and cultures of patient involvement. Rich’s engagement
with posthumanist theory and interest in the potentials of a ‘more-​than-​representational’ geog-
raphy have led to an enthusiasm for finding creative and sensitive methodological approaches
for encountering liveliness and vitality within multispecies worlds.

Roberta Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment

and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. Her research uses principles from feminist geog-
raphy to examine ethical consumption campaigns and their discursive and material connections
to the environment, social justice, and international development. She also theorizes and
advocates for slow scholarship and the possibilities of a feminist academia.

Micah Hilt is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is an

urban geographer working at the intersection of governance, mobile forms of networked policy
and expertise, and queer geographies across the global North and South. His work contributes
to evolving understandings of urbanization across urban studies, STS, queer theory, and urban
political ecology. His current work examines the contested development of urban space in
Vancouver’s West End as well as the development of resilience policy. Micah’s interest in critical
urban theory and geography is inspired by and grounded in his work as the lead seismic policy
planner for the City of Vancouver. Prior to this, and to UBC, Micah worked as an urban planner
and deputy resilience officer for the City and County of San Francisco and has received masters
degrees in both urban planning and photography in the Bay Area. His research has focused
on urban resilience policy implementation in Durban, South Africa, Huangshi, China, and
Los Angeles, California. His photographic practice is similarly driven by his interests in global
urbanisms and is focused on capturing urban typological forms and the urban experience.

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Jake Hodder is Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.
His research examines the entangled histories of two key geographical concepts: internation-
alism and race. His previous work has explored the role of black internationalism in the post-​
war civil rights, anti-​colonial and peace movements and more recent research has investigated
the relationship between black activism and the emergence of global governance in the twen-
tieth century, particularly in relation to the League of Nations.

Peter Hopkins is a Professor of Social Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology at Newcastle University, UK, and Distinguished International Professor at Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Sameera Ibrahim is a M.S. student in the Department of Geography at the University of

Wisconsin-​Madison.

Moses Kansanga is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the

George Washington University. He is a critical geographer whose research focuses on questions
at the intersection of sustainable food systems and natural resource management from a political
ecology perspective. Dr. Kansanga has worked extensively with smallholder farmers in different
countries in sub-​Saharan Africa.

Robin Kearns is a Professor of Geography in the School of Environment, University of

Auckland. His PhD at McMaster in Canada was supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship
and examined the urban city experience of impoverished psychiatric patients. In the decades
since he has continued to explore links between health and place. He is an editor of the journal
of the same name. Papers on the nature of place in medical/​health geography in Professional
Geographer (1993) and Progress in Human Geography (2002) are among the most cited in the
subdiscipline. As a methodologist he has a particular interest in experiential and observational
approaches.

Hyeongmo Koo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geoinformatics at the

University of Seoul, Korea. His research interests lie in Geographic Information Science (GIS)
and spatial data analysis. Specific research topics are visualizing and modeling spatial data uncer-
tainty, developing spatial data analysis methods, exploring urban issues including public health,
housing, crime, and population migration, and analyzing hydrological and environmental
models incorporating data and model uncertainties.

Janet Loebach is the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor for Child Development in the
Department of Design +​Environmental Analysis at Cornell University. Dr. Loebach also serves
on the Board of Directors of the International Play Association (Canada), the Editorial Board of
the journals Children, Youth & Environments, Cities for Health and PsyEcology, and as the Co-​
Chair of the Children, Youth & Environments Network of the Environmental Design Research
Association (EDRA). Dr. Loebach is also the lead editor on the 2020 Routledge Handbook of
Designing Public Places for Young People: Processes, Practices and Policies for Youth Inclusion.

Renee Pualani Louis is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi associate researcher at the University of California
at Davis Native American Studies and the University of Kansas Institute for Policy & Social
Research. She theorizes as a Kanaka Hawaiʻi scholar of Indigenous cartographies, Indigenous
geographies and Indigenous research methodologies.

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List of Contributors

W. George Lovell is a Professor of Geography, emeritus, at Queen’s University in Kingston,

Ontario and visiting professor in Latin American history at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in
Seville, Spain. Central America, Guatemala in particular, has been the regional focus of much
his research. In 1995, the Conference of Latin American Geography honoured him with its
Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award and, in 2018, with its Preston E. James Eminent
Career Award.

Jenna M. Loyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University

of Wisconsin-​Madison. She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on health politics,
carceral and abolition geographies, and the politics of asylum, refugee resettlement, and deter-
rence in U.S. migration policy. She is the co-​editor (with Matthew Mitchelson and Andrew
Burridge) of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis; author of Health Rights
Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-​1978; and co-​author (with
Alison Mountz) of Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration
Detention the United States.

Isaac Luginaah is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of Western

Ontario, Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and Member of the College of the Royal
Society of Canada. For over 20 years, Dr. Luginaah has led several projects in smallholder
farming contexts across Africa.

Casey R. Lynch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University

of Nevada, Reno. His research examines the politics of urban social and technological change,
with a focus on emerging digital technologies and competing visions of the futures they enable.
His current work considers the development and deployment of socially-​interactive robots in
the spaces of everyday life, as well as the use of blockchain technology in remaking urban econ-
omies and government.

Warren Mabee is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at Queen’s University, where he
serves as Director of the School of Policy Studies and Associate Dean, Arts & Science. His
research is in renewable energy and its role in our transition to a sustainable, low impact, inclu-
sive economy.

Lukas Marek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Currently, he is working on the Sensing City project where he is exploring the possibilities of
smart city and real-time monitoring to improve people’s health.

Michiel van Meeteren. Following Peter Gould’s advice that a geographer should always resist
specialization, Michiel van Meeteren’s research agenda covers urban, economic, financial geog-
raphy and the discipline’s post-​1930 history. After studying human geography in Amsterdam
(BA, MA) and Ghent (PhD), and passing through Brussels, he currently is a lecturer in Human
Geography at Loughborough University (UK). He is particularly interested in how the different
traditions of human geographical praxis can be integrated in a contemporary disciplinary and
transdisciplinary critical social science.

Alison Mountz is a Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration
at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research explores how people cross borders, access asylum,
survive detention, resist war and incarceration, and create safe havens. Mountz’s books include

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List of Contributors

Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minnesota); Boats, Borders, and
Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States (with Jenna
Loyd); and The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minnesota).
Mountz directs Laurier’s International Migration Research Centre and edits the journal Politics
& Space.

Beverley Mullings is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the

University of Toronto, whose work is located within the field of feminist political economy and
engages questions of labour, social transformation, neoliberalism, and the politics of gender, race
and class in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is interested in the ways that evolving racial cap-
italist regimes are recasting and transforming work, divisions of labour, patterns of urban gov-
ernance and ultimately, responses to social and economic injustice. Her research has appeared in
a number of journals including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Gender, Place
and Culture, the Journal of Economic Geography, Antipode, Review of International Political Economy,
Small Axe and Geoforum. Beverley is currently engaged in three major research projects: one
examines the financialization of Caribbean remittance economies; the second explores the
possibilities that diasporic dialogue holds for reviving Caribbean Radical Traditions; the third
project traces the impact of the Black middle-​class on social transformation in post-​Plantation
Economies.

Sam Page is a political geographer and independent research living in Helsinki. His PhD
research at University College London studied the UK Labour Party’s 2015 General Election
campaign and the Deleuzo-​Guattarian concepts of assemblage and affect has contributed a
novel approach to political parties and electoral geography. He has also written on the topics of
Donald Trump’s presidency of the US, and on the recent resurgence of breweries in London.

Meg Parsons is of New Zealand Māori (Ngāpuhi), Lebanese, and Pākehā/​European heritage,
Parsons’ is a historical geographer whose research adopts transdisciplinary and decolonizing
approaches to examine how Indigenous communities understand and respond to intersecting
processes of social and environmental changes. The majority of her research and teaching
focuses on bringing a decolonial lens to theories, policies, and practices surrounding climate
change adaptation, environmental governance and management, and sustainable transform-
ations. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland and a contributing author to the
Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Chantelle Richmond (Anishinaabe Biigtigong) is an Associate Professor in the Department

of Geography & Environment at Western University in London, Ontario, where she holds
the Canada Research Chair on Indigenous health and environment. Her research is based on
a community-​centered model of research that explores the intersection of Indigenous people’s
health and knowledge systems within the context of local and global environmental change.

Gerda Roelvink is a member of the Community Economies Institute and the Community
Economies Research Network. She is the author of Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of
Collective Action (2016) and co-​editor of Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies
(2015) with Kevin St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-​Graham. Her research on collective action and
hybrid collectives brings theories of affect and embodiment into economic geography. She also
holds an adjunct position in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University.

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List of Contributors

Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His

work combines perspectives from animal studies, political ecology, the environmental human-
ities and geographies of national identity. His research is grounded in Catalonia and Scotland
where he investigates a diversity of animal nationalisms through cases ranging from animal
agriculture to biodiversity conservation and environmental conflicts. He has collaborated with
the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and earned his MPhil in Development,
Environment, and Cultural Change at the Centre for the Development and the Environment
in Oslo.

Simon Springer is a Professor of Human Geography, Head of Discipline for Geography

and Environmental Studies, and Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at
the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research agenda explores the social, political, and
economic exclusions and violence of capitalism. Simon’s books include A Primer on Anarchist
Geography (2021), Fuck Neoliberalism (2021), The Anarchist Roots of Geography (2016), The
Discourse of Neoliberalism (2016), Violent Neoliberalism (2015), and Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order
(2010). His edited books include Energies Beyond The State (2021), Inhabiting The Earth (2021),
Undoing Human Supremacy (2021), Vegan Geographies (2021), The Handbook of Neoliberalism
(2016), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2016), The Practice of Freedom (2016), The
Radicalization of Pedagogy (2016), and Theories of Resistance (2016). He also serves as Editor for
the Transforming Capitalism book series published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Krithika Srinivasan’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology,
post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research
in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society
relations. Through empirical projects on street dogs and public health, biodiversity conserva-
tion, animal agriculture, and non-elite environmentalisms, her scholarship focuses on decolon-
izing and reconfiguring approaches to multispecies justice.

Paul Sylvestre is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at Carleton University. His current research examines how innovations in settler colonial
policing help manage settler state’s legitimacy crises in relation to the material and discursive
demands of Indigenous social movements.

Lara Taylor is of New Zealand Māori (Ngāti Tahu, Te Arawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, Kai Tahu),
Pākehā and Dutch descent. Taylor is an Indigenous Māori researcher supporting and enabling
Māori, and equitable partnerships between Māori and others, in various spaces of environ-
mental planning, policy, and practice. Taylor focuses on holistic governance and management
at multiple scales, across real and imaginary boundaries. She contributes towards hopeful and
transformative philosophical, attitudinal and behavioural changes in the way humans interact
with and care for our environment.

Claire Thompson is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and works
on the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (East of England). She completed a PhD
in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Claire is a qualitative health
researcher working largely within the disciplines of geography, sociology, and public health.
Her research interests lie in the lived experiences of urban health inequalities and particularly
around the topics of the food and alcohol environments, food poverty, and urban regeneration.

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In terms of methods, Claire is interested in Discourse Analysis, Qualitative Longitudinal

Research (QLR) and visual methods.

Stepha Velednitsky is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of

Wisconsin-​Madison. She conducts participatory research with a workers’ rights organization
supporting migrant caregivers in Israel/​Palestine, particularly those from the former Soviet
Union. In her academic work, Stepha explores how economies of social reproduction shape
differential experiences of embodiment and dis/​ability among migrant caregivers. Her research
interests include regimes of labor migration, Israel/​Palestine, social reproduction, settler colo-
nialism, disability, embodiments of trauma, and care.

Kevin Ward is a Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Manchester Urban
Institute at the University of Manchester. He has published numerous books and journal art-
icles over the years. Currently he is editing a book with others, entitled Infrastructuring Urban
Futures, as well as researching and writing on US municipal finance under COVID 19. Kevin
is the current editor in chief at Urban Geography.

Richard J. White is a Reader in Human Geography at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Greatly influenced by anarchist praxis, his work explores a range of ethical, economic, and
activist landscapes rooted in questions of social and spatial justice. Richard has published his
research widely, including contributions to A Historical Scholarly Collection of Writings on the Earth
Liberation Front (2019); Education for Total Liberation (2019); Animal Oppression and Capitalism
(2017); Critical Animal Geographies (2014) and Defining Critical Animal Studies (2014). He has
co-​edited Vegan Geographies (forthcoming); The Radicalization of Pedagogy (2016); Theories of
Resistance (2016); The Practice of Freedom (2016) and Anarchism and Animal Liberation (2015).

Sandy Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State

University, U.S. As an interdisciplinary health geographer, she specializes in disability, accessi-
bility, and environmental influences on wellbeing; and applies geospatial, statistical, and quali-
tative techniques to the study of health inequities. She has published in journals such as Health
& Place, Journal of Transport Geography, Social Science & Medicine, and The Professional Geographer.

Nicole Yantzi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and

Environment at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her research examines the accessi-
bility and inclusiveness of children’s environments, and the positive and negative influences
on children’s environmental health. This research features valuable insights from children and
youth about their experiences, perspectives, and uses of their daily environments. Her work has
been published in several international journals including Children’s Geographies and Children,
Youth and Environments. She is first author of Childhood Gardens for Health Learning and Play, a
forthcoming book in Routledge’s series on Health and the Built Environment.

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INTRODUCTION
Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg

As the chapters in this volume were submitted, we observed our authors elaborate on the philo-
sophical commitments that shape their conceptualisations and practices of research. Ontological
reflection leads us to question the nature of being and its implications for our research
assumptions (Blaser, 2014; Joronen and Hakli, 2016). It guides our ethical commitments to our
participants, our conceptualisations of what data is and can be, and our “understanding of what
is possible in the world” (Dombroski and Roelvink, Chapter 22). The ontological emphases of
our authors depict a disciplinary research agenda concerned with the blurring of lines between
the subject and object of research, the interconnectedness between the researcher and the
researched, and the governance of research subjects/​objects.
Research methodology emerges at the intersections between the ontological commitments
of the researcher and the subject/​object of research. Bryman (2008, p.160), explains that one’s
chosen methodology guides the “practices and assumptions” that underpin one’s research.
Conventional understandings of research methodology equate the term with the lens through
which we undertake research, particularly the selection and deployment of research methods.
The chapters in this volume speak to the growing presence of participatory methodologies
(Chapters 23, 24, 28) and ethnography (Chapters 16, 23) but also forms of post-​qualitative
inquiry (Chapters 8, 30) (see McPhie, 2019). Critics of methodology argue it is a Western
Science construct that seeks to add validity to research by prescribing the selection and deploy-
ment of research methods (McPhie, 2019). Increasingly, we are seeing creative methods infuse
human geography research driven by the advent of new technologies, innovations in partici-
patory methods, and the blending of new theories/​methodologies (e.g., Ream, 2021)—​trends
which are apparent throughout this collection.
This volume speaks to the ethical shifts that have been made in human geography research.
In Doing Cultural Geography, Shurmer-​Smith (2002, p. 96) contrasted their immersive approach
to ethnographic research with “dashing into ‘the field’ with a dictaphone and a schedule of
interviews…” In this provocative critique, Shurmer-​Smith entwined their relationships in the
“field,” for lack of a better term, as supporting both a deepened understanding of the subject
and ethical commitment to their participants. Layered in this critique is an understanding
of interviews as capturing participants’ representations of the world, a position shared by a
growing number of non-​representational theorists in human geography (Chapters 11 and 30).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003038849-1 1
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Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg

In 2009, Tuck similarly concerned with the subjectification of research participants, called
for an ontological shift in our understanding and approach toward research with Indigenous
peoples. They wrote:

I want to recognize that, particularly in Native communities, there was a need for
research that exposed the uninhabitable, inhumane conditions in which people lived
and continue to live... I have boundless respect for the elders who paved the way for
respectful, mutually beneficial research in Indigenous communities. I appreciate that,
in many ways, there was a time and place for damage-​centered research. However,
in talking with some of these elders, they agree that a time for a shift has come,
that damage-​centered narratives are no longer sufficient. We are in a new historical
moment—​so much so that even Margaret Mead probably would not do research like
Margaret Mead these days.
Tuck, 2009

Tuck’s (2009) recognition of the need for research that aligns with the values of Indigenous
peoples is taken up in Chapters 7 and 12. These chapters by Richmond et al., and Parsons
et al., examine methods through which Indigenous research is currently undertaken and the
complex navigation of cultural values, traditions and hierarchies that are involved with being an
Indigenous researcher. These positions align with political debates that human geography has
been tackling for two decades, specifically, “how to make sense of and empower marginalized
human subjectivities that are conceived from the start as multiple, fractured, and fluid and that
defy efforts to impose order on them” (Knopp, 2004, p. 122). As our authors demonstrate, the
solutions are complex and varied aligning with the subjects, values, and commitments of the
researcher and the researched (see, for example, Chapters 7, 15, 22, 28).
Throughout this volume, the consideration of decision making in research as a political act
that serves to reinforce or resist existing power structures emerges as a predominant theme.
Research can be a tool for social and political change. Rationalist models of decision-​making
emphasise the influence of generaliseable research that provides evidence in support of a policy
solution, usually through research based on large datasets (e.g., censuses or population health
surveys) (see Chapter 32). Yet, the ontological commitments spoken to in this volume increas-
ingly consider the practice of research as a political act that, in itself, should be a commitment to
redressing silences and omissions (see Chapters 7, 12, 15). Thus, we witness researchers embra-
cing experimentation, moving away from prescriptive methodologies and carving out space
for activism and ontological reflection. Increasingly, human geographers are making note of an
ontological ‘turn’ in the discipline characterised initially as a post-​humanist acknowledgement
that the human and non-​human constitute an assemblage with the potential to affect change
(e.g., Gorman and Andrews, Chapter 30). Less certain is the future policy influence of human
geography as we move further from the quantitative orientations that are more widely accepted
in the public consciousness and transferable to government policy.

What This Volume Is/​Is Not

This volume engages with the key methodological debates and developments that are
transforming research in human geography. In its entirety, the edited collection reminds the
reader that contemporary developments within human geography are shaped by the onto-
logical, ethical, and political debates and practices of the past. Like Shurmer-​Smith (2002), we
acknowledge that the way a researcher approaches their work “becomes a part of what is being

2
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Introduction

studied.” As a result, we did not set out to create a book that would be a ‘how to’ guide to best
practice in research methods. Instead, we acknowledge the influence of the ethical dispositions
of the researcher, the pragmatics of conducting research in challenging settings, and the empir-
ical implications of contemporary thinking in geography.
In the well-​recognised words attributed to Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we
see them as we are.” As editors, each of us brings a lens to research that is shaped by the dom-
inant paradigms of the day and our observations of the changing discipline of human geog-
raphy. When I (Mark) commenced my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto,
the Quantitative Revolution was at its peak. I was part of a third generation of quantitative
geographers having been trained by such notable urban and economic geographers as Les
Curry, Larry Bourne, James Simmons and Allen Scott. By time I left the London School of
Economics, the first wave of critics such as James Blaut, Derek Gregory, David Harvey, Doreen
Massey, Richard Peet, Milton Santos and Andrew Sayer were already calling for the end of
quantitative research as objective and apolitical and proposing new research agendas based on
the inequalities and inequities of capitalism. Their critiques planted the seeds for a post-​modern
adoption of qualitative methodologies in human geography that were to follow.
When I (Sarah) embarked on my research journey in human geography, qualitative
researchers had grappled with debates over structure and agency and were in the midst of a
poststructuralist turn, that recognised societal structures as a human product (Kobayashi, 2010).
Kobayashi (2010) argues that “the most important result of poststructuralism, with its emphasis
on human social outcomes, has been recognition of the importance of studying the ways that
human beings, including geographers, create difference through social, cultural, political, and
economic practices.” As I undertook research into women’s access to health care, feminist
post-​structuralist methodologies offered an understanding of women as the central subject of
research; the ‘truth’ of their experiences was a response to the organisation of health services,
the provision of funding and their own personal histories. Some years later while undertaking
a PhD amidst the rapid growth in participatory research approaches, methodologies centred on
documenting women’s experiences no longer seemed sufficient for untangling power structures
(re)produced by traditional research approaches.
Human geography has arguably been engaging with different ways of knowing through cre-
ative practices for decades (e.g., Rose, 2001 on visual methodologies), but when I (Stephanie)
began my PhD the so-​called ‘creative turn’ in human geography was beginning to take an
even firmer hold. This movement toward the deepening of more creative geographies was
consolidated with the launch of the journal GeoHumanities by the American Association
of Geographers in 2015. Geohumanities, now a burgeoning sub-​field, reflects work at the
intersections of geographical scholarship/​ practices with arts and humanities scholarship/​
practices (see Chapter 8 by de Leeuw). I was drawn to the potential of creative approaches
to offer new windows into research questions, as methods that comprised both process (the
act of creating a ‘thing’) and product (the ‘thing’) (Guillemin, 2004; Coen, 2016). Further, the
potential for such approaches to be disruptive (of traditional research power imbalances) and
transformative (in terms of including previously excluded voices and experiences) resonated
with the critical aims of my work on gendered geographies of physical activity (de Leeuw &
Hawkins, 2017; Velasco et al., 2020). This prompted my foray into creative methodologies,
starting with drawing during my Ph.D., to poetry during my postdoc, and mostly recently
theatre and film as interventions for social change. As Harriet Hawkins (2019: 979) put it, “We
can and should understand the possibilities of the creative (re)turn as an inspiration not just for
how it opens up possibilities to do research differently, but also for the resources it offers us to
remake worlds, our own academic worlds included.”

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Sarah A. Lovell, Stephanie E. Coen and Mark W. Rosenberg

Organisation
The edited collection is divided into three parts. The first reviews the major methodological
and paradigmatic shifts in contemporary human geography and positions these developments
relative to the changing intellectual history of human geography and events both within human
geography and society in general (Part I). Among the series of chapters that make up Part I,
Chapter 4 examines how feminist influences provided the ontological space that facilitated the
widespread adoption of qualitative methods in human geography. Chapter 7 similarly engages
with the epistemological and ontological bases of knowledge, bringing together Indigenous
scholars from across the world to examine Indigenous ways of knowing and decolonising
methodologies in geography. Part I also critically documents the confluence of actors, social
movements, and theoretical developments influencing research within the discipline.
In Part II, authors critically appraise key methodological and theoretical challenges/​oppor-
tunities shaping contemporary research in various sections of human geography. Contemporary
directions within the discipline are elaborated on by established and emerging researchers who
are leading ontological debates and the adoption of innovative methods in geographic research.
The identification of chapters in this section pays attention to the sub-​disciplines that are influ-
encing research across human geography. This provides postgraduate students and more senior
academics alike with reference points for summative methods discussions within some of the
core sub-​disciplinary areas. In Parts II and III, authors emphasise examples from their research
and the research of others to reflect the fluid, emotional, and pragmatic realities of research. In
this way, our goal with these sections is to capture key developments and disciplinary influences
emerging from the various sub-​disciplines of human geography.
In Part III, authors take on debates that human geographers implicitly and explicitly engage
with in their thinking around methodology and the practice of research. The chapters contend
with familiar (and perennial) questions and issues in human geography methodologies from
ethics, to representation, to participation, and impact. Yet, in their treatment of these cross-​
cutting issues, the authors move our discussions forward by offering new ways of contending
with and conceptualising these issues in practice. As a whole, this section addresses key
challenges researchers face when designing studies in human geography with authors drawing
on their own empirical experiences and their methodological influences.
The chapters in this volume capture key developments and contemporary methodological
debates in human geography, which are moving forward disciplinary thinking. Collectively, this
volume holds a mirror up to the axiological assumptions, research methods, and the roles of
researcher and participant in research. In doing so, we contribute to the current state of meth-
odological maturity within human geography and hopefully, open the door to new methodo-
logical developments in the future.

References
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Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 49–​58. doi:10.1177/​1474474012462534
Bryman, A. (2008). Social research methods (Third ed.). New York. Oxford University Press.
Coen, S.E. (2016). What can participant-​gendered drawing add to health geography’s qualitative palette?
In: Fenton, N., Baxter, J. (Eds.), Practising Qualitative Methods in Health Geographies, pp. 131–​152. Oxon
& New York: Routledge.
de Leeuw, S., and Hawkins, H. (2017). Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/​turn: Poetics and
practices for new disciplinary spaces. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(3), 303–​324.
Guillemin, M. (2004). Understanding illness: Using drawings as a research method. Qualitative Health
Research, 14(2), 272–​289.

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Introduction

Hawkins, H. (2019). Geography’s creative (re)turn: Toward a critical framework. Progress in Human
Geography, 43(6), 963–​984.
Knopp, L. (2004). Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement: Queer quests for identity and their
impacts on contemporary geographic thought. Gender, Place & Culture, 11(1), 121–​134.
Kobayashi, A. (2010). People, place, and region: 100 years of human geography in the annals. Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, 100(5), 1095–​ 1106. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00045​
608.2010.523​346
McPhie, J. (2019). Mental health and wellbeing in the Anthropocene: A posthuman inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan.
https://​go.exlib​r is.link/​BjcTZ​smd
Ream, R. (2021). Rambling with(in) the Wairarapa: Revisioning arcadia through affective creativity. Area
(London 1969), 53(2), 211–​218. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​area.12446
Rose, G. (2001). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials.
(2nd ed.). London; Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Shurmer-​Smith, P. (2002). Doing cultural geography. London: Sage. https://​go.exlib​r is.link/​2yR
Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3),
409–​427. https://​doi.org/​10.17763/​haer.79.3.n0016​6756​61t3​n15
Velasco, G., Faria, C., and Walenta, J. (2020). Imagining environmental justice “across the street”:
Zine-​making as creative feminist geographic method. GeoHumanities, 6(2), 347–​370.

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7

PART I

Origins, Reflections and Debates

Mark W. Rosenberg

The concept of a method is easily understood as a systematic practice of collecting data defined
in the broadest sense and carrying out an analysis of the data collected. Doing a regression ana-
lysis on geocoded census data or carrying out focus groups and analysing the content for themes
are examples of quantitative and qualitative methods respectively. What is meant by methodology
is more abstract. The Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography defines methodology as:

How a study is conceived and operationalized. While methods are the specific
techniques used for data generation and analysis, methodology is the wider approach
and organization through which those methods are employed. It provides the justifi-
cation for the types of questions asked, how they are asked, and how they are analysed
and interpreted, as well as practical issues such as how data is sourced and the sam-
pling framework used. The methodology adopted by a researcher is informed by their
wider ontological, epistemological, and ideological beliefs as these define what is the
most appropriate and valid way to make sense of the world. In other words, meth-
odology is not simply about the practicalities of undertaking a study, but is a deeply
philosophical endeavour.

While not every author in Part I or indeed in the other two parts of this collection neces-
sarily draws the distinctions between method and methodology in such a clearcut fashion, what
is indeed important in reading the chapters in Part I and beyond is how the authors reflect
on key geographers, groups, and the debates that took place as the palette of methods used in
human geography evolved and expanded. As a section, the overall goal of Part I is to provide
readers with a sense that the current methods being used and the methodologies with which
they are associated are not isolated constructs and processes but have their origins in the intel-
lectual development of human geography over time and within the context of broader techno-
logical and societal changes that took place especially post World War Two.
It is important to acknowledge that prior to World War Two, there were important meth-
odological, epistemological and ontological changes in geography. Accounts of them can be
found in various books that have been written on the history and philosophic underpinnings of
human geography (e.g., Cresswell, 2012). Part I does not try to cover all of the methodological

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Mark W. Rosenberg

debates that have taken place in human geography. We purposefully chose to start with the
debate between Hartshorne and Schaeffer (Chapter 1) because of the profound changes that
resulted methodologically in human geography as an increasing number of human geographers
rejected regional approaches and adopted quantitative approaches in their studies. In Chapter 2,
Lovell reflects on the importance of Carl Sauer’s ideas emphasizing the importance of land-
scape in shaping human geography, while Rosenberg (Chapter 3) argues how the Quantitative
Revolution was really a methodology based on models and systems thinking. Paradoxically,
Rosenberg also argues that the theoretical and methodological limitations of the Quantitative
Revolution spurred the theoretical critiques and the decline of statistical and mathematical
modelling in favour of qualitative methodologies on the one hand and geographic informa-
tion systems on the other hand. Giordano (Chapter 4) traces similar paths and connections
among historical research, cartography and GiScience in a provocative chapter that draws on
his research on the Holocaust. Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 can be read as alternative ways human
geographers have rejected quantitative research in favour of alternative methodologies, epis-
temologies, and ontologies. In a chapter driven by personal reflection, Kearns (Chapter 5) takes
the reader on a journey of “turns” that led him to embrace qualitative methods and ultimately
focus on “embodied mobility and engaged visual methods.” Central to Chapter 6 by Al-​Hindi
and Eaves is the role that intersectional feminist thinking increasingly plays in human geog-
raphy. In a unique mode of presentation, the three authors of Chapter 7 each provide a sense of
Indigenous ways of knowing from their own Indigenous backgrounds in Canada (Richmond),
Hawaii (Pualani) and Aotearoa (Coombes) and their sense of the challenges of seeing human
geographies from their Indigenous ways of knowing. In Chapter 8, DeLeeuw shows us how
the methods of the arts and humanities offer another avenue for exploring human experience
and places from a geographic perspective.
As such, Part I interrogates the epistemological and ontological groundings of human geog-
raphy, to understand how geographers make sense of the world and how these perspectives
influence contemporary research in the discipline. For example, while some aspects of quali-
tative research have their starting point in the rejection of quantitative research by feminist
geographers, other qualitative methods (e.g., historical/​archival research) date back to the
beginnings of modern human geography. Part I is really a choice of appetizers that hope-
fully encourages the reader to delve more deeply into the methodologies and methodological
challenges that are the choices for main course in Part II and the desserts in Part III.

Bibliography
Cresswell, T. (2012) Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. London: Wiley-​Blackwell.
Rogers, A., Castree, N. and Kitchin, R., eds. (2013) Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford
University Press, (online version).

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1
THE GREAT DEBATE IN
MID-​T WENTIETH-​C ENTURY
AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY
Fred K. Schaefer vs. Richard Hartshorne

Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

Introduction
Since geography’s establishment as a university-​based discipline in Western Europe during the
mid-​to-​late nineteenth century its methodology was primarily descriptive. Geography relied on
the gathering and recording of raw empirical detail, displayed as factually laden essay-​style prose,
assorted typologies, tables of numbers and perhaps most importantly maps. There was very little
of what we would now call theory, explanation or analysis. The heyday of geography’s descrip-
tive methodology was during the 1920s and 1930s. In an era when the Internet was a distant
future, compilation and curation of relevant facts on a subject was a valid academic endeavor
and arduous work. And in many places in the world geographers commanded respect for their
ability to synthesize knowledge about distant places. Nevertheless, there grew an increasing sense
of an intellectual gap between descriptive geography and the methods of other disciplines. This
was certainly the case for the physical sciences that were rigorously theoretical, quantitative,
and often experimental, but also social sciences like economics, political science, sociology, and
psychology. In the social sciences, change had been especially afoot from the 1930s, and once
the Second World War ended, those disciplines became increasingly like the physical sciences,
deploying formal theory, pursuing generalization, carrying out measurement using quantitative
data and strictly defined statistical techniques for testing and verification (Mirowski, 2001; Abbot
and Sparrow, 2007). Carl Schorske (1997, 295) called this move by those social sciences, “the
new rigorism”, a “passage … from range to rigor, from loose engagement with a multifaceted
reality historically perceived to the creation of sharp analytical tools that could promise certainty
where description and speculative explication had prevailed before”.
But not so much in geography, despite its claim that it was the discipline par excellence to
bridge natural and social worlds. The discipline seemed rather lightweight and naïve, continuing
to peddle “mere” description, compiling dull gazetteer lists of facts. Neil Smith (1989) likened
the state of at least American geography until the early 1950s to a museum-​like existence; in
effect, it was preserved under glass, unchanging, stuck in a past era. The methodological debate

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

that we review in this chapter set in the early post-​Second World War period changed all that.
It was an iconoclastic moment when the museum display cases were smashed open, and the
present came storming in. The change that the debate wrought was fundamental. For those
participating, it did not involve just tweaking the existing methodological position around
its edges, but invoked vast wholesale transformation. Louis Althusser (1972, p. 85) used the
(geographical) metaphor of discovering a new continent to denote a fundamental alteration in
knowledge acquisition. The debate we review here was about discovering a new continent by
a young generation of geographers, opening territory they thought was never explored before,
producing possibilities never previously imagined.
Lasting between 1953 and 1959, the debate was between Fred K. Schaefer (1904–​1953) at
the University of Iowa and Richard Hartshorne (1899–​1991) at the University of Wisconsin
180 miles (290 kms) up the road. For these two protagonists, the dispute was about the very
soul of geography. It turned on fundamental questions around the nature of geographical prac-
tice, the correct method, and the definition of disciplinary progress. Bill Bunge (1928–​2013)
(1968, p. 12), an acolyte of Schaefer, but early on a student of Hartshorne, thought the contro-
versy was the historic battle of the discipline, likening the clash to that “between Michelson and
Newton, or Hegel and Feuerbach”.
For those like Bunge who framed Schaefer versus Hartshorne as geography’s “great debate”,
the central issue was about the appropriate geographical method. Should it stay with its histor-
ically descriptive method, known as the idiographic approach, that focused on the assembly and
careful arrangement of unique geographical facts, Hartshorne’s view? Or, instead, should it be
like the physical sciences and some social sciences and seek laws expressed mathematically and
as rigorously defined abstractions, a nomothetic approach, and Schaefer’s view?1
In reviewing Anglo-​American geography’s mid-​twentieth century great methodological debate,
we divide the chapter into three sections. First, we discuss the state of Anglo-​American geog-
raphy before the debate broke out in the early 1950s as well as introducing its dramatis personae,
Schaefer and Hartshorne. Second, we provide an account of the dispute, starting with Schaefer
(1953), followed by Hartshorne’s (1954, 1955, 1958, 1959) responses. Finally, we discuss the
aftermath and disciplinary consequences.

Context and Dramatis Personae

A key methodological dualism in geography is between “systematic” and “regional” geog-
raphy first articulated by Varenius in 1650 (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 41). If geography is about
understanding variation on the earth’s surface, should the geographer prioritize general
mechanisms causing geographic difference –​systematic geography –​or begin by detailed
documenting of areal variation –​regional geography?
Systematic geography was originally defined by analogue to “systemic science” as the
search for “general laws” (Hartshorne, 1959, p. 109). As the discipline specialized, systematic
geography was subsequently understood as thematic specialization such as economic, trans-
portation, or political geography (Ackerman 1945), although the older causal connotation
remained resonant (Schaefer, 1953). Both Hartshorne (1939, p. 456–​459) and Schaefer (1953)
acknowledged that both systematic and regional perspectives mattered for geographical prac-
tice. They differed, though, in their assessment about which approach should be the ultimate
disciplinary goal and justify geography as a “science”.
During the second quarter of the twentieth-​century, American geography was dominated
by regional geography. The earlier search for causal geographical laws had been discredited
around the 1930s, associated with a crude environmental determinism linked to racist and

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

Western supremacy theories (Martin 2015). The prime methodological goal for Hartshorne’s
generation became the preservation of geography as a science while purging a malignant envir-
onmental determinism. To do so they changed the object of study of geography from the causal
relationship between the environment and humans to the synthetic study of the region. But
what kind of scientific object was the region, and methodologically how should it be studied?
These were key questions for Hartshorne and his peers (Martin 2015).
Their problem was that the synthetic “science of regions” did not always produce appealing
studies. John Leighly (1937, p. 127) lamented that regional geography was often “a vision of
the whole surface of the earth plastered with topographic descriptions –​like the luggage of a
round-​the-​world tourist with hotel stickers … . [It] terrified even the most tolerant reader of
regional descriptive literature”. Instead, Leighly (1937, p. 131) proposed that regional geog-
raphy be an “art” in which the “skill and intellectual integrity” of the geographer-​artist created
a synthesis of regional features.
Hartshorne disagreed with Leighly that geography’s methodological problem could be
resolved by an appeal to art. Instead, he argued resolution would best come from studying
recent developments in German geography. In fact, American geography had been largely
erected on German foundations, but direct intellectual exchange between geographers from
the two countries dried up after the First World War (Martin 2015). Hartshorne, who spoke
German and met many German geographers during a year of fieldwork in Germany in
1931 (Martin 2015, p. 890), thought Germanic foundations remained useful in addressing
geography’s key methodological problem. That this usefulness was not already recognized,
he believed, was a result of bad translations of German works and inept interpretations. After
voicing his dissatisfaction to Derwent Whittlesey, the editor of the Annals of the Association
of American Geographers, Hartshorne was invited, “to write a “statement … it can be brief ”
(Hartshorne 1979, p. 63).
Hartshorne got down to work. He believed once he finished, there would be no more
misunderstandings. But his statement got quickly out of hand. In April 1938, it was 61 manu-
script pages (Hartshorne 1979, 70). By July 1938, on the eve of Hartshorne’s academic leave to
Vienna where he planned to study boundary issues in the mid-​Danube region, it had grown
to 194 pages (Hartshorne 1979, 71). The Nazi Anschluss that occurred in March 1938 put
paid to Hartshorne’s plans for fieldwork in that country. Instead, he hit the library stacks at

Figure 1.1 Richard Hartshorne defends the regionalist position at the 1960 Lund seminar in urban
Geography, 16 August 1960 (Photos: Chauncy D. Harris)

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

the University of Vienna, giving him access to many German-​language sources unavailable in
the US (Martin 1995, p. 906). When the manuscript was finally completed in April, 1939, in
Meilen, Switzerland, where Hartshorne had gone for safety fearing a German war with Poland
(and for good reason), it weighed in at over 600 pages (Hartshorne 1979, p. 73). This hefty
manuscript became The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of
the Past, whose publication required two full issues of the Annals of the American Association of
Geographers (Hartshorne 1939). The volume meticulously explicated, rigorously justified, and
genealogically fixed the discipline like no other English language volume before it.
Nature conceived geography as a science, although Hartshorne recognized that it was a
different kind of science compared to the systematic sciences that he variously also called
the “exact sciences,” “natural sciences,” or “physical sciences” (Hartshorne 1939, p. 367).
Hartshorne leaned on the German definition of science, wissenschaft. It implied a broad sys-
tematic pursuit of knowledge, learning and scholarship, but not the imposition of a singular
methodology or set of ends. The Anglophone conception was narrower, conceiving science as
concerned with generalization and the ultimate generalization, a law. For Hartshorne, under
the broader German wissenschaft definition, geography was a science but it did not necessarily
pursue generalizations and laws. As he elaborated in Nature, the science of geography was
defined by the objective understanding of complex geographical phenomena made possible by
precise description, meticulous citation practice, and expertise in relevant methods including
fieldwork, cartography and statistics.
Given that definition, Hartshorne (1939, p. 468) believed that the science of geography was
best realized by regional geography; that is, by the description of regional or areal difference.
Systematic geography could help in identifying factors that contributed to areal differentiation,
but as a pursuit it was secondary to regional geography.
Regions therefore became the building blocks of the discipline, with all geographical infor-
mation organized through them. Note, though, that for Hartshorne the regional division of the
world was not a “naively given fact” (Hartshorne 1939, p. 275). Rather, the researcher imposed
regional demarcation. As Hartshorne (1939, p. 275) put it:

Regional entities [...] are … in the full sense mental constructions; they are entities
only in our thoughts, even though we find them to be constructions that provide
some sort of intelligent basis for organizing our knowledge of reality.

Specifically, Hartshorne defined a region as a complex combination of hard facts and causal
relations objectively described (Entrikin, 1981). He called those combinations an “element
complex”. Importantly, their combinatorial character made each region unique, not found
anywhere else in the world (Sack, 1974, p. 441). To use Hartshorne’s illustration, while sev-
eral regions might share one common element, say, producing grain –​for example, the Po
plain, the Middle Danube plain, and the American Corn Belt –​this did not then make those
regions identical. This is because none of them shared in exactly the same combination all
the other objective geographical elements found in those specific grain producing regional
complexes (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 392). Accordingly, each region “occurs but once on the
earth” (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 393). Therefore, “regional geography … is … concerned with
the description and interpretation of unique cases....” (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 449). While the
region is the core idea in Hartshorne’s approach, he nonetheless recognizes that systematic
geography might still be useful in determining the components and their relationship within
them (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 457).

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

A critically important methodological corollary stemmed from Hartshorne’s claim of

regional uniqueness. As discussed, unlike the German wissenschaft, the Anglophone tradition
equated science with the formulation of general laws. Such laws, however, cannot be expressed
for combinatorial entities like Hartshorne’s region. For a scientific law to be stated, the entities
on which the law bears must be homogenous. Because regions are not a uniform class of phe-
nomena –​each is unique –​then no law can ever be derived.
Because for Hartshorne regions are never the same, the making of law-​like statements
that define Anglophone systematic science cannot apply; it has no purchase. As a result, as
Hartshorne (1939, p. 446) noted, “we arrive, therefore, at a conclusion similar to that which
Kroeber has stated for history: ‘the uniqueness of all historical phenomena.... No laws or near
laws are discovered.’ The same conclusion applies to the particular combination of phenomena
at a particular place.” Thus, for regional geography, unlike systematic geography, we cannot
explain, or predict, or knowingly intervene but only describe: “Regional geography, we con-
clude, is literally what its title expresses: ... a descriptive science” (Hartshorne 1939, p. 449).
Although Hartshorne (1939, p. 430) surmised that a generic classification of regions might
one day progress “to the statement of general principles [i.e., laws]”, he also warned that “any
principles we attempt to develop can have no more validity than the ‘objects’ [i.e. regions] we
have constructed as their foundation”.
The publication of Hartshorne’s book represented a crossing of the Rubicon for English-​
language geography. Never before had there been a book published like it with the ambition
both to define the discipline historically and to lay out a meticulously justified methodology.
Hartshorne’s star necessarily rose. In 1940 he moved from the University of Minnesota to
become full Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The next year he was appointed
Chief of the Geography Division at the Research and Analysis Branch of America’s mili-
tary intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (Barnes and Farish
2006). In 1949 he became President of the Association of American Geographers, the pro-
fessional organization of the discipline within the US. Consequently, by 1953 at the start of
the Schaefer-​Hartshorne debate, he was likely America’s most well-​known geographer. That
said, Hartshorne’s methodological position enunciated in Nature was not uniformly accepted
or praised. Some of the younger geographers, including those he hired at OSS, such as Edward
Ackerman (1911–​1973), thought Hartshorne’s regional geography made geographers a jack of
all trades and master of none (Ackerman, 1945).
Hartshorne’s fame was in stark contrast to the man who debated him, Fred K. Schaefer.
Very few had heard of him. Hartshorne (2004a, p. 277) later said he was “an essentially
unknown professor of geography”. Schaefer was trained as a metal worker in Berlin immedi-
ately after the end of World War I. In 1925 he went back to school as a mature student and in
1931 he graduated from the University of Berlin with a Diploma primarily in economics. His
politics were left-​wing. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 that was enough for him to
be blacklisted, then arrested and sent briefly to a concentration camp. The writing was on the
wall. Later that same year he obtained a permit to travel to Switzerland for a skiing trip. He
never returned. A political refugee in England, 1933–​1938, he worked primarily for various
left-​wing organizations collecting data and carrying out statistical analyses. In 1938 he left for
America, moving to the Scattergood Hostel for European refugees run by a Quaker society,
the American Friends Service Committee, in Iowa City, Iowa. After a short stint as a house
painter, in 1939 he began to teach part time at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and because
of his training in economics he lectured at the College of Business. Harold McCarty (1901–​
1987), a Professor at the College of Business, and the future founding chair of the Geography

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

Department, invited him to teach courses on Eastern Europe. In 1943 Schaefer was hired full
time in Business, and appointed Assistant Professor. Fluent in English, Russian and German,
interested in geopolitics, and having taken courses in political and economic geography in
Berlin, in 1946 Schaefer was asked by McCarty to become a member of the brand-​new Iowa
Department of Geography.
While Schaefer may have been a novice geographer, it did not deter him from being David,
trying to slay the disciplinary methodological Goliath, Richard Hartshorne. Schaefer’s sling-
shot was a version of logical positivism developed by members of the Vienna Circle during the
1920s (see Sigmund, 2017, for a situated introduction). Logical positivism claimed that there
were only two kinds of meaningful knowledge. The first were empirical truths verified by
methods of the systematic sciences. The second were truths that were correct because of the
very meaning of the terms in which they were expressed such as logic or mathematics. Logical
positivists believed that unless claims to knowledge met either of these two criteria, knowledge
was unreliable and spurious. Further, for logical positivists, the highest form of empirical know-
ledge was a universal law. It took the logical form: if cause A, then for all time and all places the
same effect, B. For example, Newton’s law of gravity says if a pair of planetary masses then for
eternity and everywhere the gravitational force between them is proportional to their respective
sizes divided by the square of the distance that separates them.
It was logical positivism that Schaefer critically brought to bear on Hartshorne’s Nature.
In doing so, he got inside help from a colleague in the University of Iowa’s Philosophy and
Psychology Department, Gustav Bergmann (1905–​ 1987) (Heald, 1992). Bergmann was a

Figure 1.2 Kurt Schaefer’s 1933 ID he brought with him as a refugee (Collection: American
Geographical Society, AGS-​NY AC1 -​Box 338 -​Folder 7)

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

member of the Vienna Circle, originally a mathematician, later a philosopher. Smoothing the
relationship between the two men was also that they were a similar age (Schaefer was a year
older), were native German speakers, were political refugees from the Nazis –​Schaefer because
of his left-​wing political views, Bergmann because he was Jewish –​were employed by the
University of Iowa in the same year, 1939, and perhaps most importantly, were unreservedly
champions of systematic science.
Going to this last point, for Schaefer the fundamental problem with Hartshorne’s approach to
geographical knowledge, as understood by logical positivism, was its unscientific character. And
if it was not scientific, necessarily it was unreliable and spurious. For Schaefer, Hartshorne had
denied the possibility of scientific geographical knowledge when he denied geographical laws. In
doing so, he consigned the subject to a study of the unique and the exceptional, an idiographic
discipline. In contrast, Schaefer aimed to make the subject a systematic science, capable of formu-
lating its own laws, a nomothetic discipline. For Schaefer, the scientific task of geographers was
to discover laws that explained and predicted the spatial distribution of phenomena. They would
complement the laws in economics, sociology and other social sciences (Schaefer, 1953, p. 248).
From Schaefer’s perspective, Hartshorne’s (1939, p. 551) claim that geography was scientific
because of its unique “point of view, a method of study” was rejected. If regional geography could
not generate laws, it was simply not a science. Claiming to be a special discipline was an appeal to
“exceptionalism”. For this reason, regional geography could not be the scientific core of a discip-
line. It was at best only a data vault to inform systematic geographical inquiry (Schaefer, 1953).

The Debate
Strictly speaking the Schaefer-​Hartshorne debate was not a debate. By the time Schaefer’s
(1953) “Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination” was published in the
Annals of the Association of American Geographers in September, 1953, its author had been dead for
three months. Consequently, Schaefer was in no position to hold up his end in any argument.
He suffered a fatal heart attack while attending a matinee at an Iowa City movie theatre in early
June of that year. While Schaefer may not have gotten to defend himself against the series of
ferocious rebuttals that Hartshorne subsequently published in the Annals in 1954, 1955, 1958
and in another monograph in 1959, the consensus is that he carried the day anyway, at least for
a while. Clyde Kohn (1972, p. i), likely one of the original referees of Schaefer’s paper at the
Annals, reflected in 1972:2

Schaefer’s article must be cited as one of the more important contributions to geo-
graphic methodology in the history of our discipline. The “revolution” which
followed in the late 1950s, and the continued search since then for laws containing
spatial variables, demonstrate the vitality and challenge of the ideas set forth by
Schaefer in 1953.

Schaefer initially met Hartshorne the first year he was a geography professor at Iowa. They
were on a panel together at a regional economics conference in Chicago talking about the
Soviet Union. Hartshorne remembered only pleasantries over a cup of coffee, with Schaefer
saying that he was interested in his “work in methodology which he would like sometime to
discuss … at length.”3 That opportunity came four years later when Hartshorne was invited
by McCarty to the Iowa Department of Geography to participate in among other things
Schaefer’s graduate seminar on methodology where he was asked to speak about The Nature of
Geography. Schaefer acted as a facilitator, with Hartshorne kept on his toes by sharp but always

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

polite questions from the well-​informed graduate students.4 Schaefer wrote to Hartshorne after
the event congratulating him on his “fortitude” and “splendid response to the questioning.”5
Hartshorne later reflected, “we all seemed to enjoy ourselves.”6
Hartshorne’s next encounter with Schaefer was less enjoyable. In October, 1953, he picked
up from his mail box at Science Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a copy of the
latest edition of the Annals to read Schaefer’s paper that was just published. Schaefer submitted
his paper on December 4th, 1952. According to Bunge (1968, p. 20), before Schaefer sent off
the paper, he had walked into Harold McCarty’s office, and with his hands “trembling” put the
paper on his desk and said, “This is my existence in geography”. Although this anecdote may
be apocryphal, it expresses at least for some the elemental power of Schaefer’s paper and its sig-
nificance for the discipline.
It was only once Hartshorne began reading the paper that he first learned of Schaefer’s
death. It did not soften his reaction, however. He was incandescent with rage, but also non-
plussed. The paper violated all the rules on methodological debate he had so meticulously set
out (Hartshorne, 1948). There were so many things that he did not understand including the
word “exceptionalism” in Schaefer’s very title. He tried to look it up in the Encyclopaedia for
the Social Sciences but “there were four or five different meanings, so that wasn’t very helpful”
(Hartshorne, 2004b [1986], p. 294). Schaefer, though, was clear in his paper about its defin-
ition. It was the view that because of their subject matter some disciplines were unable to for-
mulate scientific laws about the material they studied. Of course, this was Hartshorne’s view
about regional geography.
In the standard model of explanation and prediction in systematic sciences, the existence and
identification of scientific laws are crucial. Once a law is established it is used either to explain
or predict. Explanation and prediction are flip sides of one another, both the consequence of
having established a scientific law. But because Hartshorne denied for regional geography the
possibility of scientific laws, there could be neither explanation nor prediction. It was against
such exceptionalism that Schaefer’s paper railled.
Specifically, Schaefer’s critique of Hartshorne followed two strategies. The first was to
counter Hartshorne’s interpretation of the German historical writings that justified the def-
inition of the region as unique. If Schaefer could show that those German authors on whom
Hartshorne relied did not define the region as unique, he could argue that there was no reason
to abide by exceptionalism. Regional geography could then join with other systematic sciences
and seek laws, as well as explain and predict and not merely describe.
The second was to make explicit the kind of regional geography that was possible once the
discipline’s “exceptionalism [was] disposed of ” (Schaefer, 1953, p. 242). It would be a regional
geography unified with, not separate from, the systematic sciences, law-​seeking and concerned
with explanation and prediction. Here Schaefer (1953, p. 239) imagined the kinds of laws that
geographers might discover:

Spatial relations among two or more selected classes of phenomena must be studied all
over the earth’s surface in order to obtain a generalization or law. Assume, for instance,
that two phenomena are found to occur frequently at the same place. A hypothesis
may then be formed to the effect that whenever members of the one class are found
in a place, members of the other class will be found there also, under conditions spe-
cified by the hypothesis.

The prose is stilted, but Schaefer is setting out here the structure of a geographical law
conforming to the classic configuration within logical positivism, if A, then B. What makes a

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

law geographical is that the instances making up the homogenous classes A and B are indexed
by location. In Schaefer’s example, every case of A occurs at the same geographical location as
every case of B. That is, there is something about the geographical location that ensures, if an
instance of A, then an instance of B. It is the indexing the instances of A and B by location that
makes the law a geographical law.
Schaefer also says that the type of laws geographers would most likely draw up are “morpho-
logical”, that is, “containing no reference to time and change” (Schaefer, 1953, p. 243). They
would take the form, if spatial pattern A, then spatial pattern B. There is no temporal process
in this formulation. It involves only a spatial relation. Schaefer thought geographers might also
refer to “process laws” (i.e., those involving time), but morphological laws highlighted the
discipline’s special interest and expertise.
Hartshorne was having none of it, however. A week after Hartshorne read Schaefer’s
paper he wrote to the editor of the Annals, Henry M. Kendall, cataloguing Schaefer’s “major
errors and mis-​statements.”7 A week later he was even madder. Publishing Schaefer’s paper,
Hartshorne charged, had “create[d]‌a mess, for me, and for American geography… .” The paper
was “a palpable fraud, consisting of falsehoods, distortions and obvious omissions.”8 Hartshorne
never got over it. In 1955 Hartshorne was still writing to the Annals’ editor, by then, Walter
Kollmorgen: “In whatever sense it is possible for a learned journal to commit a crime … The
Annals has committed a crime unparalleled in its history” (quoted in Martin, 1989, p. 76). Even
at age 89, two years before he died, Hartshorne continued to fume, in this case writing cor-
rective letters to both Derek Gregory and Fred Lukermann for giving credence in their writings
to Schaefer’s paper when it was so obviously demonstrably wrong.9
Hartshorne wrote several formal replies to Schaefer. The 1954 reply was a two-​page letter
outlining his main criticisms and anticipating the full-​blown critique to follow the next year in
a second paper. The letter was a blistering attack on Schaefer’s scholarship, or more precisely,
the absence of scholarship. It pulled no punches. The Annals editorial assistant, sister of the
Editor, Walter Kollmorgen, was forced to “excise the color words” from the letter before it was
deemed acceptable for publication.10
The 1955 reply was 40 printed pages long, with over 100 footnotes. On many pages
the footnotes occupied more of the page space than the main text. In the reply, Hartshorne
concerned himself exclusively with defending himself from Schaefer’s critique of his historical
scholarship, while at the same meting out corrosive criticisms of Schaefer’s own scholarship.
Hartshorne was extraordinarily well prepared to undertake both tasks. He spent that 1938–​
1939 sabbatical year at the University of Vienna Library reading all there was to read in German
on geographical methodology. Further, he often read those German texts with the University
of Vienna’s Professor of Geography, Johan Sölch, literally by his side. With Sölch, Hartshorne
made exact translations of key texts, or at least as exact as was possible given it was German
academic prose (Hartshorne, 1979).
Drawing on his extensive knowledge of German geography accumulated in the preparation
of writing Nature, Hartshorne made mincemeat of Schaefer’s argument that he had misun-
derstood German geographical scholarship. In contrast, Hartshorne with relish as the great
corrector systematically, line-​ by-​
line, word-​by-​word, demonstrated Schaefer’s own shoddy
textual interpretations that were filled with misunderstandings, misquotations, and mistaken
citations; in short, it was Schaefer’s scholarship that was egregious, sloppy and slapdash. None
of Hartshorne’s textual corrections have been ever challenged, even by some of Schaefer’s most
fanatical supporters, and they could be crazily fanatical.
But it did not matter. Schaefer’s shocking historical scholarship was beside the point.
American geographers who took up Schaefer’s cause –​Bill Bunge, but other “space cadets”

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

who will be discussed in the next section –​were not concerned one whit with a set of long-​
dead German geographers. Indeed, in the immediate post-​World War II environment, associ-
ating yourself with German thought was a liability and especially in geography that had a lot of
dirty laundry (Michel, 2016). Moreover, the imperative to professionalization was moving the
discipline away from regional geography, viewed as amateurish (Ackerman, 1945).
As Bunge wrote to Hartshorne in 1959: “I do not care about the historical scholarship.
I consider it irrelevant” (quoted in Martin, 1989, p. 79). The critically important point was that
Schaefer’s paper opened up geography to the methods of systematic science, allowing explan-
ation, prediction, and the search for laws as well as corollary practices such as measurement,
quantification and theorization. Bunge was saying, in contrast to Hartshorne, that there was
nothing about the kind of material that geographers studied that prevented them from drawing
on the methods of systematic sciences.
All this criticism was not entirely fair. Hartshorne tried to adapt during the 1950s and clari-
fied and restated himself in other publications, including an abridged and revamped version of
the argument developed in Nature, Perspective on the Nature of Geography (Hartshorne, 1959).
He courted and encouraged the mathematically oriented geographers in Schaefer’s old depart-
ment to deepen their methods in a way that was compatible with Hartshorne’s methodology.11
Moreover, at the end of his 1959 reformulation Hartshorne (1959, p. 182) admitted that “as in
any science, [geography] seeks to secure that approach to certainty and universality of know-
ledge that is made possible by the construction of generic concepts and laws of interrelations
among factors”.
Nonetheless, he could not help holding on to his earlier position:

the manifold variety of different and incommensurable factors involved in many

features of our object of study, the complex world of the earth surface permits inter-
pretation only of a part of our findings by that desired method.
Hartshorne 1959, p. 182

But Hartshorne’s 1959 qualification to his argument no longer mattered. The modern era of
“sputnik” had begun, filled with young people experimenting with new technology and possi-
bilities (Van Meeteren, 2019). During this period epitomized by divided generations, there was
no one more “old guard” imaginable than Richard Hartshorne promoting long-​dead German
scholars. Young scholars preferred learning FORTRAN than German as a second language. In
that world, math skills mattered more than access to a Viennese library. As Davies (1966, p. 127)
put it: “acceptance of geography as a science can only be made if it places itself within the
current methodological conception of a science, and uses its techniques, instead of harking back
to the science of other eras”. Almost at the end of his life, Hartshorne seemed to finally get it.
In a 1986 interview he realized that he “hadn’t met his [Schaefer’s] logical thesis” (Hartshorne,
2004b [1986], p. 278). But that was the thesis that mattered, that propelled the aftermath.

The Aftermath
The force of Schaefer’s thesis convinced at least a number of younger American geographers
during the 1950s to abandon the methodological injunctions of Nature and to do geography
differently; to do it as systematic science. All of those geographers at least until the late 1960s
were male. In part, this reflected the historically discursive character of geography established as
a “manly science” as well as more general structural barriers that obstructed and discriminated
against women from entering Mary McCarthy’s “groves of academe” (Monk, 2004). In the

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

United States it was further propelled during the early post-​war years by passage of the GI Bill
that gave large numbers of especially young men who had been enlisted in the military cheap
loans to attend university including graduate school (Abbot and Sparrow, 2007, p. 292–​293).
American universities, including Departments of Geography, were flooded with young male
students, while the limited number of talented women that graduated often left academic
research to pursue teaching, government and administrative careers (Monk, 2004).
One of the young male geographers who served as a navigator for USAF bombers in the
Pacific Theatre, and central to what came after the publication of Schaefer’s paper, was William
Garrison. He had completed a PhD in geography on the GI Bill at Northwestern University
during the late 1940s drawing on Hartshorne’s regionalist method. As he put it in a memoir, his
dissertation research had involved just “a lot of walking around, … classification and descrip-
tion” (Garrison, 2002, p. 103). He was so dissatisfied with the result that he subsequently
stole his dissertation from Northwestern’s library to prevent anyone ever reading it. His first
appointment in 1950 was at the Geography Department at the University of Washington,
Seattle. There he began to undertake a different kind of geography, rigorous, systematic, logical,
quantitative and scientific. Schaefer’s paper profoundly resounded with him. In 1955, he wrote
exuberantly about Schaefer’s paper to a colleague at the Department, Edward Ullman, another
of Schaefer’s positive reviewers (Martin, 1989), who had similar intellectual leanings, but who
also had a longstanding relationship with Hartshorne from the OSS:

I was and still am excited by Schaefer. Now you may present me with formal proofs
(1) that all German geographers are deaf, dumb, and unable to write and (2) that
Schaefer was cruel to little children, and I would still be excited by Schaefer. Excited
simply because Schaefer seemed to know in some crude way of the world of science
of which geography is a part.
cited in Martin 1989, p. 77

For Garrison, Schaefer was the brand-​new exciting future of the discipline, Hartshorne its
moribund past. Something had gone seriously awry in the intellectual core of geography he
believed. As evidence, Harvard had closed down its geography department in 1948, its uni-
versity president, the chemist, James Conant, declaring that geography was “not a university
discipline” (quoted in Smith, 1987, p. 159). In his paper, Schaefer used the terms “isolationist,”
“complacent” (p. 226), “apologetic” (p. 227) and “somewhat lacking” (p. 227) to describe the
discipline. He thought it was not practised as a serious subject, confined by Hartshorne to “mere
description” (p. 227). But it did not need to be that way. That was what so excited Garrison
about Schaefer’s paper. It showed that geography could link to contemporary philosophical
discussions about science that extended from logical positivism. And even more importantly,
it showed that as a scientific discipline of spatial relations, spatial science, geography could join
methodologically with other social sciences that had made similar moves to connect themselves
with science such as economics, psychology, sociology, and political science (Schorske, 1997).
All of this was possible Garrison believed. “There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time
has come, and the time had come for Schaefer by the decade of the ‘50s”, he said.12
Schaefer of course could not take up the mantle because of his premature demise. Garrison
could, though, and did at the University of Washington. In annus mirablus 1955, Garrison along
to a lesser extent with Edward Ullman and the Department’s cartographer, John Sherman,
began to assemble a group of young male graduate students, the “space cadets”, who were to
pioneer the new scientific geography that Schaefer anticipated. They included Brian Berry,
Ronald Boyce, Richard Morrill, and John Nystuen, who joined an earlier student of Garrison’s,

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Trevor Barnes and Michiel van Meeteren

Duane Marble. Within two years Art Getis, Waldo Tobler, and Bill Bunge, a refugee from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Hartshorne had flunked him in his doctoral compre-
hensive exams, also joined that group.13
Collectively they committed to geography as science, to Schaefer’s vision of the discipline.
Richard Morrill (1984, p. 59) remembers: “we were introduced to [Schaefer’s article] quite
soon –​I think in that first year ’55-​’56 by Garrison.” But Morrill also says, “Hartshorne was
what we were against”. To that larger end of doing scientific geography, they took courses
in mathematics and statistics. In 1955, Garrison gave the first ever statistics course (Geog
426: Quantitative Methods in Geography–​a “baptism of fire”; Morrill, 1984, p. 60) in an
American geography department. They also taught themselves how to operate a computer. This
was no mean feat. The first computer ever on the University of Washington campus arrived
in 1955, an IBM 650, and was located in the attic of the Chemistry Building. It came with no
formal programming language, and no hard disk for memory storage. Using the computer was
a bootstrap operation, learning by doing, and usually for the space cadets that happened in the
very early hours of the morning when no one else on campus wanted to use it. And finally,
and maybe most importantly, they tried to practice an exact, formal scientific theory, with the
ultimate goal of achieving Schaefer’s aspiration of geographical (morphological) laws.
In 1959 it seemingly all came together in a volume Garrison and his students wrote, a “revo-
lutionary book” according to Morrill (1984, p. 61), one of its co-​authors, Studies of Highway
Development and Geographic Change (Garrison et al., 1959). It was a remarkable publication,
crammed with calculations, data matrices, statistical techniques, costs curves and demand
schedules, and conventional maps overlaid with numbers, arrows, starburst lines, and balancing
equations. The real revolution, however, was the changed conception of the region. It was no
longer conceived as a Hartshornian element complex, but as a scientific theoretical object after
Schaefer, capable of explanation, prediction and law-​like statements.

Conclusion
As the Washington students (and indeed Garrison himself) left Seattle for new jobs, they took
with them the new conception of geography as a science that later came to permeate and
irrevocably alter American geographical thought. Schaefer won the debate, not by proving
Hartshorne was wrong in his historical sources or interpretations, but by profoundly chan-
ging disciplinary thought and practices (Davies, 1966). Geographers increasingly came to
live in Schaefer’s world, not Hartshorne’s. The Hartshorne-​Schafer debate, as interpreted
by Schaefer’s followers, travelled, influencing other national geographical traditions, stimu-
lating similar transformations elsewhere in the world. Eventually, it contributed to re-​writing
geography’s history in Germany itself (Harvey and Wardenga 1998). The victory tour lasted
until Schaefer’s world met its own limits, when the search for spatial laws came up empty-​
handed (Barnes, 2004). One might think that would have vindicated Hartshorne, but it did
not. Although there have been recurring calls to renew regional geography (Gregory, 1978;
Johnston et al., 1990), there have been few calls to renew Hartshorne. He remained trapped
in historiography, viewed as a past figurehead of a dreary regional description. Ironically,
Hartshorne is now remembered less as a champion of the region than as an opponent of
Schaefer’s geographical scientific revolution. His masterpiece is seldom interpreted beyond
Schaefer’s scathing verdict, and with knowledge of the discipline’s German roots squarely
beyond the rear-​view mirror. Such can be one’s fate in methodological debates within
geography.

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The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography

Notes
1 The distinction between idiographic and nomothetic was first made in the late nineteenth century by
two German philosophers, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert (Staiti 2013). They divided
disciplines into two kinds: the idiographic was concerned with the unique (history was their exem-
plar); and the nomothetic concerned with making generalisations, the ultimate of which was a scien-
tific law (their examples were chemistry and physics).
2 There is no definitive proof that he submitted a review. Unlike the other two reviewers, Edward
Ullman and Stephen Jones, Kohn’s review if it existed, has not survived (Martin 1989).
3 “Summary,” August, 1969, p. 1, Richard Hartshorne Papers (RHP), Box 192, Schaefer and the origins
of exceptionalism, file E, Library of the American Geographical Society, University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee.
4 The essay of one of Schaefer’s students, Miss Martha Corry, made such an impression on Hartshorne
that her paper was taken back to Madison to be discussed and commented by Hartshorne’s own graduate
students, including David Lowenthal, who was studying at the history department. Correspondence
from 1950 shows that much of her critique echoes the concerns that Schaefer would publish three years
later. Subsequent communication after the debate broke suggests that Hartshorne even contemplated
that Schaefer had plagiarized his student’s essay. See RHP, Box 6, Folder 8, Schaefer’s seminar at Iowa,
1950-​1954.
5 Fred K. Schaefer to Richard Hartshorne, May 17, 1950, RHP, Box 192, Schaefer and the origins of
exceptionalism, file B.
6 “Summary,” August, 1969, p. 1, RHP, Box 192, Schaefer and the origins of exceptionalism, file E
7 Richard Hartshorne to Henry M. Kendall, 29 October, 1953, RHP, Box 192, Responses –​Origins
of exceptionalism, file G.
8 Richard Hartshorne to Henry M. Kendall, 6th November, 1953, RHP, Box 192, Responses –​Origins
of exceptionalism, file G.
9 See Richard Hartshorne to Fred Lukerman, July 26, 1989, RHP, Box 194, Correspondence –​Fred
Lukerman, File S; and Richard Hartshorne to Derek Gregory, October 19, 1989, RHP, Box 195,
Correspondence/​D-​E, File D.
10 Richard Hartshorne to Harold McCarty, September 4, 1969, RHP, Box 6, folder 7, personal views,
1952-​1969.
11 Richard Hartshorne to Harold McCarty, April 30, 1956, RHP, Box 5, folder 8, Correspondence
Miscellaneous, A-​Z, 1930-​1992.
12 William L. Garrison, no title, no date, RHP, Box 192, Responses –​origins of exceptionalism, File J.
13 None of the space cadets were women. Women were actively discouraged from doing quantitative
work with its connotation of masculine rationality. In 1967, when the geographer Susan Hanson
entered graduate school at Northwestern University, one of the holy sites of quantitative geography,
she was discouraged by the Chair of the Department, Ed Espenshade. As Hanson (2002) put it,
Espenshade could not understand ‘why you would be in graduate school if you were female and
already had a child. He just couldn’t understand it. … When he spoke, he only asked how the family
were, but never asked about scholarly work. Realistically as a woman in grad school at that time, one
did not expect anything different! We knew very well that we were entering male turf.’

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Althusser, L. (1972) Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx. London: New Left Books.
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2
THE ARCHIVE AND THE FIELD
Methodological Procedures and Research
Outcomes in the Work of Carl O. Sauer
(1889–​1975)

W. George Lovell

A half-​century after his death, Carl O. Sauer’s inspirational presence continues to hover over
the discipline of geography, his legacy unmatched by any other twentieth-​century geographer
of standing. He started out early –​an “Outline for Field Work in Geography” (co-​authored
with Wellington D. Jones) was published in 1915 –​and finished late, Seventeenth-​Century North
America, the last of twenty book titles, appearing posthumously in 1980. While three musings
on methodology discussed below are noteworthy –​the first, “The Morphology of Landscape”
(1925), not only advanced the construct of a “cultural landscape” but spelled out a modus oper-
andi –​Sauer was avowedly concerned more with geographical practice than pontificating about
procedure. For him, creativity of endeavour counted above all. His lifetime accomplishment
was bountiful, the fruit of an inquisitive bent and investigative drive that combined archival
foraging –​assiduous, patient, persistent –​with dogged fieldwork. Sauer’s vast output is here
scrutinized with methodological matters foremost in mind, his strategies of how to conduct
scientific inquiry related to specific outcomes, including the production of a little-​known text
for elementary schoolchildren besides scholarly monographs cited still in the literature to which
they pertain.

Beginnings, Schooling, and Academic Career

Born on Christmas Eve, 1889, of German immigrant stock in Warrenton, Missouri, at the
time a farming community some 50 miles west of St. Louis, Sauer’s European roots did much
to shape him, as did being raised a Christian by deeply religious parents. His father, William,
was one of the first teachers (of music and French) to hold a position at Warrenton’s Central
Wesleyan College. William’s belief that a good education began with the best of elementary
schooling saw him take his family –​wife Rosetta Johanna Vosholl, first-​born son Albert, and
nine-​year-​old/​second-​born Carl –​to Calw (near Stuttgart) in Germany, where the young Sauer
was a pupil for two years at the local gymnasium. Its strict regimen, he later acknowledged,
was not entirely to his liking, but its emphasis on learning how to learn served him well. Upon
returning to Warrenton in 1901, Sauer’s intellect was of such a calibre that, aged 16, he enrolled
at Central Wesleyan College, in 1906 its youngest-​ever student. His studies continued first in

24 DOI: 10.4324/9781003038849-4
25

The Archive and the Field

geology (two semesters only) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then the
University of Chicago, where his graduate career in geography began in September 1909. He
defended his doctoral dissertation, “The Geography of the Ozark Highland of Missouri,” on
December 15, 1915, describing the work as “the outgrowth of a long acquaintance with the
area and of a deep affection for it” 1. A seven-​year spell at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, which made him a full professor at age 33, ended when Sauer accepted an offer from the
University of California at Berkeley to found and chair its Department of Geography, which
he did for over thirty years. It was at Berkeley that Sauer’s star assumed a meteoric trajectory 2.

The Morphology of Landscape

Upon arrival in California in 1923, Sauer was keen to engage firsthand the America that lay
south of the Río Grande, but that would have to wait. He had unfinished business, of sorts, to
settle with the American Midwest that had once been home but no longer was, his penchant to
move on as much intellectual as it was residential, if not more so. Old ways of thinking about
geography, Sauer soon would urge, must be replaced.
Sauer had begun graduate studies in geology before moving to geography, its human subjects
capturing his imagination more than its physical components, though these would always be
taken into account. Human geography then was very much dominated by the tenets of envir-
onmental determinism, whose emblematic champion, Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–​1932),
was Sauer’s most esteemed teacher at the University of Chicago 3. The highest of regard in
which he held her, however, was tempered by Sauer’s conviction that Semple’s reading of
Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1882) was misconstrued, that her advocation of the
geographic method and the understanding it encapsulated, was overly deterministic 4. His
“Morphology of Landscape” (1925) was a definitive rejoinder, a treatise that emphasized envir-
onmental possibilism as opposed to environmental determinism, the agency of humankind not
the primacy of nature. Laying out an alternate agenda for human geography, Sauer ([1925]
1963, p. 343) writes:

The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture
is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result. Under
the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes
development, passing through phases and probably reaching ultimately the end of its
cycle of development. With the introduction of a different –​that is, an alien –​culture,
a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on
remnants of an older one. The natural landscape is of course of fundamental import-
ance, for it supplies the materials out of which the cultural landscape is formed. The
shaping force, however, lies in the culture itself. Within the wide limits of the physical
equipment of area lie many possible choices … . This is the meaning of adaptation,
through which … we get the feeling of harmony between the human habitation and
the landscape into which it so fittingly blends. But these, too, are derived from the
[human] mind, not imposed by nature, and hence are cultural expressions.

Henceforth, the study of cultural landscapes assumed a pivotal role in human geography, if
not its primary focus. Sauer never conceived of “The Morphology of Landscape,” however, as
a programmatic directive, that following its lead amounted to some kind of dictate. However,
many whose formulations he sought to challenge, and thereby offer alternatives to, saw things
differently, interpreting Sauer’s views –​as Michael Williams (2014, p. 59) puts it –​as dogmatic

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———
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———
I am coming, I am coming, when this fitful dream is o’er,
To meet you, my beloved ones, on that immortal shore,
Where pain and parting are unknown, and where the ransomed blest
Shall welcome treasures left on earth, to Heaven’s eternal rest.

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———
BY SYBIL SUTHERLAND.
———
 CHAPTER I.
“You look sad to-night, Alice,” was the remark of Mr. Colman as
his young wife entered the sitting-room, and took a seat beside him
with a countenance expressive of unusual dejection; “and where is
Maggie this evening that you have been obliged to take upon
yourself the duty of nursery-maid to our little ones?”
“Maggie has gone upon an errand of mercy—to watch over a sick
and suffering fellow creature,” replied Mrs. Colman. “It is a long
story,” she added, in answer to the look of inquiry which her
husband cast upon her, “but I will endeavor to relate it if you will
listen to it patiently. This morning, Harry, after you had left home, I
resolved to set forth in search of a seamstress who was making
some dresses for our little girl. She had failed to bring them home at
the time appointed, and as I had never employed her before, and
knew nothing of her character, I felt rather anxious concerning the
safety of the materials I had given her to work upon, and
determined to go to the dwelling which she had described as her
residence and learn the cause of her disappointing me. The house
was in a miserable street some distance from here, and I hurried
along till I came to it. It was a wretched-looking dwelling, such as
none but the very poorest class would have chosen. The door stood
open, and several ragged little Irish children were playing upon the
steps. I inquired of them if Mrs. Benson, the seamstress lived there?
They did not seem to recognize the name—but they told me that a
young woman who took in sewing hired the back rooms of the third-
story. Following their direction, I ascended three flights of stairs and
found myself at the door of the apartment, where I knocked, and a
faint voice bidding me enter, I unclosed the door and stood upon the
threshold. What a strange and unexpected sight now met my gaze!
Upon the floor, almost at my feet as I entered, lay a young and very
beautiful girl apparently bereft of all consciousness. She looked so
thin and pale that at first I thought her dead, and starting back in
horror I was about to leave the place, when a feeble voice, the same
which told me to come in, besought me to stay. Looking round to
discover whence it proceeded, I saw the emaciated form of a man
reclining upon a couch in a distant part of the room. Hastily I
approached him, for I felt it to be my duty to render what aid I
could. As I drew nearer to his bedside, I read the tale of confirmed
disease in that pallid face and in the wild sunken eyes whose gaze
met my own. In a few words he informed me that the maiden who
lay there senseless was his daughter. While busily engaged at her
work about an hour previously, she had fallen from her seat and
remained thus in a state of unconsciousness. He said that his limbs
being palsied he was unable to help her, and so he had lain upon his
couch agonized by the thought that his child was dead, or that she
might die for want of proper assistance. And he now besought me to
endeavor to discover if there were any signs of life, and if possible to
restore her to her senses. The appeal was not in vain. I turned from
him to his inanimate daughter, and raising that light and fragile form
in my arms, placed her upon a couch in a small closet-like apartment
adjoining the one I had first entered. For a long time every means of
restoration were vainly tried—but at length my strenuous efforts
were rewarded, and the young girl once more unclosed her eyes.
But she evidently recognized nothing about her—those dark and
strangely beautiful orbs glared wildly around, while a few broken,
incoherent sentences burst from her lips, and as she sunk again
upon the pillow the bright fever flushes rushed to her cheek, and I
knew that her brain was suffering. Great was her parent’s joy that
she once more breathed—but my heart was full of sadness, for I
could not help feeling that her life was in jeopardy. It was my wish
to have a physician summoned, but I knew not how this was to be
done, for I dared not leave my charge, and there was no one near to
help me. At this moment I heard footsteps in the hall, and quickly
opening the door, beheld a boy ascending the stairs. The promise of
a piece of silver easily procured his assent to go for the nearest
doctor, and accordingly he set off, while re-entering the room I
resumed my station by the sick girl’s bedside. In a few minutes the
physician arrived and my suspicions of the nature of the young girl’s
disorder were confirmed, for he pronounced it to be a fever of the
brain, and said that his patient would require constant watching and
careful nursing. The father listened anxiously and attentively to the
doctor’s words. His countenance fell as he caught the last sentences,
though he said not a word. It was not till after giving his
prescription, the physician left, promising to call early on the
morrow, that he spoke what was passing in his mind.
“‘Julie must die!’ he said, bowing his head upon his hands, while
bitter, hopeless anguish was depicted upon his face, ‘for I have no
means of obtaining for her the care she needs.’ It was all that
passed his lips, but it spoke volumes to my heart, and my resolution
was instantly taken. I told him that I would not desert his child, that
I would continue with her part of the day, and when I was obliged to
leave that I would send some one to take my place. Oh, Harry! if
you could only have seen how grateful that poor invalid looked! Most
amply repaid was I by that glance for whatever I had undertaken. I
remained with the sick girl several hours longer, and in the intervals
when she slumbered, I had time to observe the appearance of
things around me. The furniture was mean and scanty. There were
but two chairs in the room, and the carpet was worn almost
threadbare. Every thing betokened extreme poverty—but neatness
was plainly perceptible in the arrangements of the apartment, and I
felt from the appearance of its occupants that they had seen more
prosperous days. A book lay upon a table close at hand, I took it up,
and discovered it to be a volume of Bryant’s poems. On looking over
the pages, I found several of the most beautiful passages marked.
Upon one of the fly-leaves was written, ‘To Julie—from her father.’
The book was evidently the young girl’s property. There was also a
small portfolio of drawings upon the table, which evinced signs of
both talent and cultivation. For an hour after the physician’s
departure the parent of Julie—for by her name I may as well call her
—showed little disposition to converse. He seemed exhausted by the
emotions of the day—but I knew that though he said nothing, his
gaze was often upon me when he imagined that I did not observe
him. At last he roused himself to answer some inquiries which I
thought it necessary to make. He told me that he was very poor, and
that for more than a year, during which his infirmity had appeared
and increased, his daughter had maintained him by the proceeds of
her needle. He said also that two years previously he had resided at
Baltimore as one of its wealthiest merchants—but having failed
under circumstances that cast a cloud upon his character, though he
was in reality innocent of intentional wrong, he had left the city of
his birth and hastened with Julie, his only child, to New York, where
he would be sure of never more meeting the scornful gaze of those
who had been his friends ere misfortune overlook him. Here he
hoped to procure employment—but fate seemed against him. Shortly
after his arrival in this city, he was seized with a dangerous illness
which left him in his present helpless condition, and his lovely and
accomplished child found herself very unexpectedly thrown upon her
own resources for her support and that of her invalid parent. Bravely
for many months had she borne the burden, but continued anxiety
concerning the means of obtaining life’s necessaries had at last done
its work—and in the delirium of fever, the fair and noble girl now
tossed restlessly upon her bed, a mere wreck of what she had once
been.
“This brief sketch of their history, as you may imagine, dear
Harry, interested me greatly. And when, at its conclusion, the
speaker again expressed his fears for the future and his doubts as to
the recovery of his child, for whom he had no power to provide
necessary attendance, I again assured him that I would watch over
her until she became quite well, and that after this I would endeavor
to find some more healthy and suitable employment for her than
that in which she had latterly been engaged.
“Toward the close of the afternoon, being desirous of going home
for awhile, I dispatched the boy whom I have once before
mentioned, for Maggie, that she might supply my place as attendant
upon the sick Julie, until evening, when I proposed to bear her
company and resume my post at the bedside. She came, and her
sympathies were soon all enlisted by the tale which I hurriedly
repeated to her. But she decidedly opposed my wish to return—
reminded me of my late indisposition, and declaring that I was not
strong enough to bear the fatigue of sitting up all night, insisted
upon being allowed to exercise her skill as nurse without any other
assistance. I thanked her for her consideration, while I felt that she
was right. So I left her and proceeded home, where, as you may
suppose, I was welcomed most joyfully by little Willie and his sister,
who had mourned incessantly over mamma’s protracted absence.
“And now, Harry, that I have finished my somewhat lengthy
narrative, tell me whether you approve of what I have done and
promised to do?”
“Certainly, dearest Alice,” replied Mr. Colman, affectionately
pressing the little hand that rested within his own, “while you
continue to follow, as you have hitherto done, the dictates of your
own pure, loving heart, I can never do aught but applaud you. The
present objects of your benevolence, are I am sure from the
account, well worthy of whatever you may do for them, and I would
advise you to persevere in your efforts for their welfare. But you
quite forgot to tell me, my dear, if you discovered in your protégé
the seamstress for whom you were searching.”
“No, indeed,” she replied, while her countenance wore a look of
vexation, “my seamstress was a very different sort of a being from
this beautiful Julie. Nor do I think that I shall ever discover her, for
just before I returned home I made inquiries as to whether a person
answering her description lived in that house, and was assured that
no one of that name had ever dwelt there. How foolish I was to trust
those dresses to an entire stranger.”
“And pray what may be the name of the family whose history has
interested you so deeply?” asked Mr. Colman.
“The father’s name is Malcolm—Walter Malcolm, as he informed
me. With the daughter’s I believe that I have already acquainted
you.”
“Walter Malcolm! Julie Malcolm! And you say they are from
Baltimore?” As he spoke Mr. Colman’s cheek grew suddenly pale, and
rising from his seat he paced the apartment with a hasty and
agitated step.
“Why, what is the matter, Harry?” exclaimed his wife in a tone of
the deepest solicitude, as she sprung to his side, “pray tell me what
has moved you thus?” But it was some moments ere he seemed able
to reply. At length with emotion he said—
 “Alice, what if I were to tell you that this man—this Walter
Malcolm is my brother—the brother who in my early youth drove me
away from his luxurious home, an orphan and unprotected, to seek
my fortune in the wide, wide world?” Alice Colman started and
raised her eyes wonderingly to her husband’s face, and after a brief
silence he resumed with a sternness unusual to him—
“In that hour, Alice—in that hour of utter desolation, when lonely
and uncared for I left my brother’s roof forever, a fierce, burning
desire for revenge took possession of my soul. In the first bitterness
of despair I called upon Heaven to avenge my wrongs. I wished that
Walter’s wealth might take to itself wings—that one day he might
come to me for bread; and I resolved were this ever the case, to
give him—a stone! My desire has been fulfilled, and my proud and
unfeeling brother is now a beggar at my door!”
He paused—while his wife shuddered and looked appealingly up
into his face.
“Harry!” she exclaimed in a low, earnest tone, “you surely do not
mean that you will not forgive the sorrow your brother’s conduct
once caused you—that you will now look exultingly upon his woes,
and turn a deaf ear to the wants of his sweet and suffering child?”
The reproving expression of the dear face now anxiously
upturned to his, at once recalled the husband to a sense of error,
and drawing the form of the beloved one closer to his side, he said—
“Oh! how fervently should I thank Heaven who has given to me
such a monitor in the hour of temptation! Pardon me, my Alice, if by
giving way to impulse I have wounded your sensitive spirit, and that
in the moment when passion held its sway, I slighted the divine
lesson of forgiveness, through your influence first impressed upon
my soul. Nay, dearest, look not thus surprised, for it was really by
your means that the wish to quell the thirst for revenge upon my
brother, entered my heart; and if you will listen a few seconds I can
explain to you the words that at present may well seem mysterious.
You will doubtless remember, Alice, that some months before our
marriage, I experienced a severe fit of illness. One pleasant Sabbath
evening shortly after I was declared convalescent, I was reclining
upon a sofa in the sitting-room at your uncle’s residence. My spirits
were just then very much depressed—I felt inwardly fretful and
uneasy—and as is not uncommon at such a time, many little
circumstances which before had been almost forgotten, rose up in
my mind, and woke anew in my bosom sensations according to their
nature, of pain, anxiety, or indignation. Among other things came
forcibly to view the memory of the grievous wrong I had received at
the hands of him who should have been a parent to me; and a
feeling of the deepest hatred toward my brother stole to my heart,
together with a hope that at some future time a chance might be
mine of returning him measure for measure of the unkindness which
he had so unsparingly dealt out to me.
“At that instant, Alice, you re-entered the room from which you
had been a few minutes absent, and at the request of your uncle,
opened the family Bible and began your usual Sabbath-evening duty
of reading a series of chapters from the holy book. There was a
passage in the first which you read that affected me strangely—for it
came as a reproof from Heaven delivered to me through the medium
of one of earth’s angels. It was the following—‘Avenge not
yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written,
vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine
enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing
thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’ The sentences awed me,
coming upon my ear as they did at a period when my spirit needed
the precious warning and rebuke contained in them, and I breathed
a silent prayer to Heaven for strength to enable me to heed it. The
hour of my trial has arrived, and to-day have I again felt the
promptings of the tempter. You cannot imagine with what force
these old feelings have been driven back upon my soul, but, Alice,
your voice has once more stilled the tempest, and I know that I
have passed the ordeal in safety.”
Harry Colman ceased, and this time as his gaze met that of his
companion he saw that her eyes were full of tears—but they were
tears of grateful joy. For a little while there was silence between
them, but at length Mr. Colman continued:
“Let me recount to you, Alice, as briefly as possible, a few
circumstances connected with my early history. I have never done so
before, because the effort was a painful one, and there was no exact
necessity for the repetition. As you are aware, I was so unfortunate
as to lose my father when I was a mere infant, and my mother lived
only till I had attained my twelfth year. I was the child of her second
marriage, and she had one son by a previous union who was many
years my senior. At the period of my mother’s death, my brother,
Walter Malcolm, had been married nearly five years, and was now a
widower and the father of one little girl, who had just reached her
third summer. Upon her death-bed my parent left me beneath his
care, desiring Walter to attend to my wants and to be kind and
gentle to me when she was no more. As soon as the funeral was
over, my brother took me with him to his own dwelling. I was now
entirely dependent upon him for maintenance. Walter Malcolm was
wealthy, for a large estate had descended to him from his father,
who had also left my mother a life-annuity, which while she lived had
supported us. At her death I was of course unprovided for, for my
own father had possessed no worldly goods to bequeath me. My
new home seemed very different to me from the hearth of my early,
sunny childhood. I was lonely and desolate—for between Walter and
myself brotherly love had never existed. Not that I would have
denied him his meed—but I was too proud to award the gift that I
was confident would never be valued, for my memory could not
boast a single instance wherein he had evinced for me the slightest
regard. Nay, I even felt that I was an object of dislike to him, though
I knew not the cause. During my mother’s life I had been greatly
indulged, and it was scarcely to be wondered at that I was
frequently very wayward. Upon such occasions, a word of love had
always been sufficient to control my passionate nature; but when
the sweet affectionate tones that ever had power to calm me, were
hushed in the tomb, my faults were met by my new guardian with
harshness and contempt, and this never failed to rouse a spirit of
continued opposition. There was but one voice in my brother’s
household that ever spoke lovingly to me. It was that of his child—
the little Julie. From the first hour of my residence beneath Walter’s
roof, the little creature had conceived a passionate attachment to
me, preferring my presence to that of her nurse or even her father.
And, as you may imagine, Alice, I did not slight her proffered
affection, and during the three years that we dwelt together the little
one was the sole sunbeam upon my shadowed life-path. How gladly
did I greet her graceful bounding step! How dear was the sound of
her clear ringing laughter as I joined in her sports!—and more
precious still were the moments when weary of play, she would steal
to my side, and twining her tiny arms about my neck, murmur forth,
in lisping accents, her sweet child-like terms of endearment.
“I had reached my fifteenth year when the incident occurred that
separated me from my brother. An error was laid to my charge of
which I was really guiltless—and as I proudly refused to
acknowledge and repair the fault—Walter Malcolm turned me from
his dwelling, declaring that thenceforth and forever he disowned me!
Time was merely given me to collect a few little articles that I could
really call my own—I was not allowed to bid farewell to the child
whom I yearned to look upon once more before I went—and so, an
outcast, I passed from that stately mansion. Alice, I dare not linger
over a description of my sensations in that hour of anguish—for it
might perhaps arouse them again within my soul. You know the rest
of my history—the circumstance of my adoption by your uncle who
was then visiting Baltimore, and first beheld me in a store where I
had entered in quest of employment. To him I confided the facts
relating to my former life; he pitied and sympathized with me, and
bore me with him to his own home in this city, and from that day
was in every respect to the lonely orphan all that a kind and
generous parent could be to his only son.”

——
 CHAPTER II.
The morning succeeding the events last recorded, at an early
hour, Mrs. Colman was on her way to the dwelling of the now
destitute and infirm Walter Malcolm. She had new motives for the
advancement of her charitable purposes, and her interest in the sick
girl had deepened since she knew her to be the one whose infant
steps her own husband had guided. Hastening up the stairs she
knocked at the door, which was soon opened by Maggie, who looked
weary enough with the fatigue of the past night. The young girl had
been very restless, she said, and she believed that the fever was
rapidly progressing. “But is she not a beautiful creature?” remarked
Maggie to her mistress, as she bent over the couch and parted the
rich curls from the fevered brow, “ah, ma’am, I have nursed many a
one before this in sickness—but never a person whose appearance
so won upon me as hers has.”
Alice Colman did not wonder at the observation—but as she now
glanced round the room she met the gaze of Julie’s father, and her
morning salutation to him was full of gentleness and sympathy.
Through the whole of that day Mrs. Colman maintained her
station in the chamber of sickness and poverty. The physician came
at the appointed hour, and gave it as his opinion that Julie was
growing rapidly worse and that there were even doubts whether in
any case her life would be spared. Oh! how the thought of her dying
affected Mrs. Colman.
“Let every thing be done that may be of benefit to her,” she said
anxiously to the doctor, “spare no expense whatever if you think you
can by any means preserve her from the grasp of death. I will be
answerable for whatever remuneration you may require.”
And not even content with his advice, she sent for her own family
physician determined to try all the means she could for the
preservation of the life of her husband’s niece. She noticed that
Walter Malcolm looked very pale all day, but attributed it to anxiety
for his daughter. He seemed too languid to converse—but once, as
she handed him a glass of water, he said—“Lady, Heaven will reward
your kindness to the suffering.”
That evening when Alice Colman returned home, her husband
surprised her with the intelligence that Walter Malcolm was aware of
her relationship to him. Before she went there in the morning, Mr.
Colman had advised her on no account to allow his brother to
suspect from whom he received the needful aid, for he feared that
Walter still entertained against him the old feeling of hatred, and
that it would awaken unpleasant emotions in his heart if he knew
that the brother he had deserted was now destined to be his chief
reliance. But the caution to his wife was unnecessary. Walter
Malcolm had made inquiries of Maggie concerning the family to
whom he was indebted, and from their minuteness Harry Colman
was confident that he had been recognised. And that his brother had
not forgotten his former aversion to him he deemed evident from
the fact that he had said nothing of his discovery, during the day, to
Mrs. Colman. The latter however thought differently. Julie’s father
had spoken his thanks for that draught of water too earnestly for her
to join in her husband’s belief, and she expressed her conviction that
he repented his past conduct, and that he merely wanted courage to
confess his penitence.
But day after day passed on, and yet there was no allusion to the
subject on the part of Walter Malcolm. Meanwhile his daughter had
passed the crisis of the fever and was declared convalescent. If the
appearance of Julie Malcolm in the hour of delirium had attracted
the fancy of Alice Colman and her nurse, how much more were they
drawn toward her when her mind was freed from the chains that
bound it—for gentle and loving-hearted, her grateful spirit
manifested itself in various little touching ways toward those who
had watched over her during her dangerous illness. When she grew
stronger and was able to enter into conversation, a perfect
understanding arose between Mrs. Colman and herself that they
were always to be friends. Alice Colman felt that she already loved
Julie dearly—and the latter was not slow in returning the affection of
one whose timely succor had saved her life. Still the young girl
suspected not that they were kindred by law as in heart.
 It was soon settled that when Julie became entirely recovered,
she should undertake the duties of governess to Mrs. Colman’s
children, and this new office was to afford her the means of support.
A more suitable residence had been sought by Alice Colman for Julie
and her father, and they were to remove into it as soon as the
former had gained sufficient strength to bear the fatigue. Two more
weeks elapsed ere this last project was effected—and they were
then comfortably settled in their new abode.
And still there was no sign from Walter Malcolm that he knew of
his brother’s agency in the change wrought in his affairs. He was
now generally reserved when Mrs. Colman was near, and his
countenance often wore a deep shade of gloom.

——
 CHAPTER III.
The first day that Julie Malcolm felt equal to the exertion was
spent at the house of her new friend, and then it was that for the
first time since her childhood, Harry Colman beheld his niece. So
strongly impressed upon his mind was the recollection of her early
fondness for him, and the soothing influence which her winning,
affectionate ways had possessed over his spirit, that had he now
obeyed the voice of impulse he would fain have clasped Julie once
more to his heart; for though he now looked upon a beautiful and
graceful maiden of eighteen, he could scarcely view her in any other
light than as the darling child whose caresses had so often
comforted him when greeted by every other voice with coldness. Yet
recalling the fact that their relationship could not be breathed to her
by himself, he was obliged to meet her with the reserve of a perfect
stranger. But all formality between them soon vanished, and an hour
after their introduction found them conversing together with the
ease of old acquaintanceship. Nor had Julie forgotten, in her own
frank earnest manner, to thank him again and again for the services
his family had rendered her father and herself—while her soft dark
eyes filled with tears as she spoke of the debt which by gratitude
only she could repay. Harry Colman longed to tell her that he was
the debtor—and that by his wife’s attention to her, Julie had but
been rewarded for the love she had accorded him when all other
hearts were steeled against him.
Mrs. Colman saw with delight her husband’s increasing
predeliction for his niece—for by renewing his former affection for
Julie, she hoped to make the young girl at some future day, the
instrument of reconciliation between the estranged brothers.
The day of Julie’s visit to the Colmans was a happy one to all
parties. Even little Effie Colman and her brother Willie, though at
first rather shy of the lady, who, as they were told, was to initiate
them into the mysteries of the primer, had become very fond of her,
and were exceedingly loath to let her go when the time appointed
for her return home arrived. Then, with her arms entwined about
Julie’s neck, little Effie besought her to say when she was coming to
them daily—and the following week was accordingly named for the
commencement of her career as preceptress to the children.

——
 CHAPTER IV.
The morning agreed upon by Julie and Mrs. Colman for the
beginning of the former’s labors arrived, but the young girl did not
appear. Knowing well her eagerness to enter upon her new duties—
the eagerness of a noble spirit to throw off the yoke of dependence
—Alice Colman might well feel anxious at Julie’s non-fulfillment of
her promise. For the first time a thought crossed her mind that the
suspicions of her husband concerning his brother’s continued ill-
feeling toward him, might be just, and that Walter Malcolm had
resolved to oppose his daughter’s constant association with them.
But not long would she allow herself to imagine thus. Perhaps Julie
was ill again—or some unforeseen circumstances had prevented her
coming. So Mrs. Colman determined to wait till the following day,
when if the object of her solicitude was still absent, and she received
no message from her, she felt that she would then be more capable
of judging the matter.
It was not until near the close of the afternoon that she was
relieved of uncertainty upon the subject by the reception of a note
from Julie. The latter stated that her father was very ill of a
dangerous fever, brought on, as the physician averred, by distress of
mind—and that it was doubtful whether in his enfeebled condition he
could live a week longer. She added that only a few hours previously
he had informed her that their benefactress was the wife of his
brother, and also of the unfeeling treatment which that brother had
received from him. And Julie said that from the hour when he had
learned the circumstance of their relationship, remorse and the
knowledge of his unworthiness to accept assistance from the one
whom he had injured, preyed upon her father’s spirits, and at last
caused the fever that threatened soon to terminate his existence.
His last earthly wish now was to see his brother and ask forgiveness
of the past—and Julie concluded by begging Mrs. Colman to use all
her influence in order to bring her uncle to her parent’s couch, if it
were possible, that very evening.
 And that evening Mr. Colman, accompanied his wife to the abode
of Walter Malcolm. The meeting between the brothers was a painful
one. There was mingled shame and penitential sorrow on the part of
the elder, while the countenance of the younger was expressive of
the deepest agitation as he stood by the bedside of him who had
cast so dark a cloud upon his youth. Harry Colman had yielded to
the entreaties of Alice for this interview, while he felt that it would
have been wrong to have denied it—but it was not until he looked
upon Walter’s pallid face, and heard that once stern and familiar
voice supplicating forgiveness, even with the humble avowal that it
was undeserved, that the lingering spark of resentment was entirely
extinguished within his breast—and when he breathed the much-
desired word of pardon they were truly heart-felt.
And by returning good for evil he had indeed “heaped coals of
fire” upon the head of his brother.
“From your birth, Harry, you were the object of my bitterest envy
and hatred,” was the confession of Walter Malcolm, “for upon you
was freely lavished the love of that mother whose affection I had
never possessed. She had been forced by her family into a union
with my father while her heart was another’s—and when her
husband died and she was free to wed again, she married the one
who had first gained her regard. This was the key to your superior
claim upon our mother’s love. I will not now blame her for the wrong
of partiality, though it was the basis of my demeanor toward
yourself. I should have had sufficient strength of mind to have
resisted its influence—but in this I was sadly deficient. To the last
hour of her life my mother’s chief thought was of you. Yes, even in
her dying moments her principal anxiety was for your future
happiness, while there was but little reference to the welfare of her
eldest child. When she was no more, and you came to dwell beneath
my roof, I scrupled not openly to show the sentiments which during
our parent’s life-time I was obliged to conceal. And I had now an
additional cause of dislike. I secretly accused you of robbing me of
the affection of my little girl, who, as you will perhaps remember,
always manifested a decided preference for your society. I did not
reflect that my manner toward her was often cold and distant, and
widely different from your own; and with such feelings of jealousy
concerning you in my heart, it was scarcely to be wondered that I
seized the first opportunity of ridding myself of your presence.
Though I knew you to be guiltless of the fault for which I blamed
you, I drove you from my dwelling, refusing from that moment to
own you as a brother. Nor did I then experience the least remorse
for the act—and during the years that followed I strove to forget that
you had ever existed.
“It was only within the past twelvemonth, when surrounded by
poverty, and the victim of an incurable malady, that as I lay
restlessly upon my bed, the memory of my cruel conduct toward my
innocent brother has pressed heavily upon my mind. Often have I
busied my brain with vain conjectures respecting your fate—whether
you still lived—and if you had escaped the whirlpool of crime and sin
within which the young and unadvised are but too frequently
engulfed. When I thought, as I sometimes did, that you might have
fallen—my sensations were those of the most acute anguish, for I
felt that the sin would all be mine, and that at the judgment day I
should be called to the throne of God to hear him pronounce the
fearful penalty for the murder of a brother’s soul.
“At length, through the illness of my daughter, who was very
unexpectedly thrown upon the benevolence of your wife, I obtained
from your servant some information concerning the family to whom I
owed so much, and discovered in the hand stretched forth to aid my
child, the wife of my discarded brother. It would be vain to attempt a
description of my emotions as I learned this fact. Joy that you were
not forever lost, predominated—and then was added shame, and a
consciousness of my own unworthiness to receive the benefits which
henceforth you daily conferred upon me, as I felt that you must
have recognized me—for I had given to your wife an account of my
previous life. Each successive service lavished upon my family by
your own, sunk like a weight of lead upon my heart, while as I saw
how generously you repaid me for the evil I had committed against
you, I longed to cast myself at your feet and supplicate forgiveness.
But one thought deterred me. It was the fear that you might deem
me actuated by interested motives—by the desire to leave my
daughter at my death under the care of her now wealthy uncle. And
so, for a time, I set aside the yearning for a reconciliation. But it
returned with double force when this, which I know will be my last
illness, came upon me, and I felt that I could not die happily without
hearing from your lips a pardon for my misdeed.”
The weeping Julie had stood by the bedside listening attentively
as her father spoke, one hand resting affectionately in her uncle’s,
while the other was clasped in that of his wife. Though scarcely six
years old when Harry Colman was dismissed from his brother’s
house, she had ever retained a vivid recollection of the event. She
remembered how passionately she had wept when told by her nurse
that she would probably never again behold her favorite, and how
indignant she had felt when they said that it was owing to his own
naughty conduct he had been sent away—while her ignorance of the
fact that her uncle’s name was not the same as her father’s
prevented a recognition of him when they again met.

Walter Malcolm survived a week after the scene just described.

Having made his peace with earthly objects, his last hours were
devoted to solemn preparations for a future state, looking trustfully
for the mercy of Him who listens kindly to the prayer of the penitent.
His brother was constantly with him till his eyes were forever closed
in the death-slumber; and from the day when the remains of her
father were borne to their last resting-place, the orphan Julie found
a home with her uncle, to whose pleasant hearth she was lovingly
welcomed, while by every kind and sympathizing attention her
relatives strove to alleviate the sorrow for a parent’s loss, which at
first seemed almost insupportable.

THE UNSEPULCHRED RELICS.

 ———
BY MRS. L. S. GOODWIN.
———

“Far out of the usual course of vessels crossing that ocean, they
discovered an unknown island, covered with majestic trees. The
captain, with a portion of the crew, went on shore, and after traversing
its entire circumference without seeing a solitary representative of the
animal kingdom, were about to return to their ship, when the skeleton
of a man was found upon the beach, and beside it lay a partially
constructed boat.”
Bleaching upon the sands that pave
An unknown islet strand,
Where surges bear from mermaid cave
The music of her band,
A clayey temple’s ruin lies—
Of that grand pile a part
Whereon the Architect Divine
Displayed His wondrous art;
Its tenant long since hath obeyed
The summons to depart.

Mysterious, as dire, the doom

That cast a death-scene where
Deep solitude converts to gloom
What else were brightly fair:
Perchance wild waves that made a wreck
Of some ill-fated bark,
Giving his valiant comrades all
To feast the rav’nous shark,
Swept hither this lone mariner,
For misery a mark.

Yon half-completed boat his lot

In mournful tones doth tell;
With what assiduous zeal he wrought
Upon that tiny cell,
Which promised o’er the billows broad
The worn one to convey
Within compassion’s genial realm,
Where woes find sweet allay;
’Twere better e’en the sea should whelm
Than thus with want hold fray.

Believe you not that in his pain,

His agony of soul,
Flew o’er the dark engirding main
 The thoughts which spurn control?
Abiding with the cherished ones
Who blest a far-off home;
O how his sinking spirit yearned
To view once more that dome;
To hear young voices gayly shout
For joy that he had come.

He mused how love with pining frame

Her grief-fount would exhaust,
As on time’s laggard wing there came
No tidings of the lost.
Ah! who may speak the bitter pangs
That exile’s bosom knew.
As, day by day, and hour by hour,
Faint, and yet fainter, grew
The hope that erst had nerved him on
His labor to pursue.

To ply their wonted task, at length,

Refused his weary hands;
His form was stretched, bereft of strength.
Upon the burning sands.
Haply his latest wish besought
’Mong kindred dead to lie;
But fate denied the boon, and death
Seized him ’neath stranger sky;
While mercy drew a mystic veil
’Twixt him and friendship’s eye.

REMINISCENCES OF A READER.
———
BY THE LATE WALTER HERRIES, ESQ.
———
Oh! the times will never be again
As they were when we were young,
When Scott was writing “Waverlies,”
And Moore and Byron sung;
When “Harolds,” “Giaours” and “Corsairs” came
To charm us every year,
And “Loves” of “Angels” kissed Tom’s cup,
While Wordsworth sipped small beer.

When Campbell drank of Helicon,

And didn’t mix his liquor;
When Wilson’s strong and steady light
Had not begun to flicker;
When Southey, climbing piles of books,
Mouthed “Curses of Kehama;”
And Coleridge, in his opium dreams,
Strange oracles would stammer;

When Rodgers sent his “Memory,”

Thus hoping to delight all,
Before he learned his mission was
To give “feeds” and invite all;
When James Montgomery’s “weak tea” strains
Enchanted pious people,
Who didn’t mind poetic haze,
If through it loomed a steeple.

When first reviewers teamed to show

Their judgment without mercy;
When Blackwood was as young and lithe
As now he’s old and pursy;
When Gifford, Jeffrey, and their clan,
Could fix an author’s doom,
And Keats was taught how well they knew
To kill à coup de plume.
 Few womenfolk were rushing then
To the Parnassian mount,
And seldom was a teacup dipped
In the Castalian fount;
Apollo kept no pursuivant,
To cry out “Place aux Dames:”
In life’s round game they held GOOD hands,
And didn’t strive for palms.

Oh! the world will never be again

What it was when we were young,
And shattered are the idols now
To which our boyhood clung;
Gone are the giants of those days,
For whom our wreaths we twined,
And pigmies now kick up a dust
To show the march of mind.

THE GIPSY QUEEN.

———
BY JOSEPH R. CHANDLER.
———

[SEE ENGRAVING.]

Power, consequence, importance, greatness, are relative terms;

they denote position or attainment, comparable with some other.
And hence a queen is a queen at the head of a band of gipsies as
much as if she sat upon a throne, at the head of a nation whose
morning drum beats an eternal reveille. It was therefore, and for
another cause yet to be told, that I lifted my hat with particular
deference when I opened suddenly upon the head woman of a gipsy
tribe, as I was passing through a small piece of woodland. Though,
truth to say, I had been looking at her for some time, an hour
previous, as she was giving some directions to one or two of her
ragged and dirty train. Now I had known that woman in other
circumstances. I had seen her in the family, had heard her
commended by the men for her graceful movements, and berated by
the women for exhibiting those movements to the men, and being
as free with her tongue in presence of her female superiors as she
had been with her feet before her male admirers. But neither the
admiration of the men nor the rebuke of the women produced any
effect. All that this woman received from a long sojourn with the
people of the village, was a little loss of the darkness of the skin,
and a pretty good understanding of the wants and weaknesses of
society. Everybody knew that she had been left in exchange for a
healthful child—and some years before it had been discovered that
the healthful child would be worth nothing to the gipsies, and the
gipsy girl would, at the first opportunity, return to her “brethren and
kindred according to the flesh.” And such was the skill which she
manifested on her return, such her ability to direct, such her
knowledge of the wants of the villagers, and her power to take
advantage of these wants, that she became the head of the tribe
with which she was associated, and might have directed numerous
tribes, could they have been collected for her guidance.
I could not learn that there was much of a story connected with
the life of the queen, much indeed that would interest the general
reader. But she was a woman—and her heart, a mystery to the
uninitiated, would, if exposed, have been worth a world’s perusal. A
woman’s heart—alas! how few are admitted to loose the seals and
open that secret volume! How very few could understand the
revelation if it were made. I could not, I confess; and it is only when
a peculiar light is thrown upon here and there a pace, that I can
acquire even a partial knowledge of what is manifested. The Queen
of the Gipsies, though elevated by right, and sustained by
knowledge, was no less a woman than a queen. She could and did
command male and female, old and young. She was treated with all
that marked distinction which, even among her rude people,
continues to be paid to preeminence. And while she sought to do the
best for all, she received all this homage with that ease, and that
apparent absence of wonder, which denote the right to distinction—
this was a part of her queenly character admirably sustained,
natural, easy, dignified. But the queen was a woman. I had heard
her give orders, which sent certain of the most active of the young,
male and female, to the other side of the village, and then she gave
employment to the old and the young in the moving hamlet, and
seeing the first depart, and the last busy, she left the camp, and
took her way through the wood. I followed her and traced her rapid
steps to the burying-ground of the town, which stood a distance
from any dwelling.
Seating myself out of view, I saw the queen walk directly to a
recently sodded grave, upon which she looked down for a moment,
and then clasping her hands wildly above her head she threw herself
with a subdued cry upon the grave. I was too far from her to
distinguish all the words of her lament, but they were wild and
agonizing.
After a short time the woman arose, and said with a distinct,
clear voice, “With thee and for thee I could have endured the
mockery of their boasted civilization, and suffered the ceremonies of
their tame creed. With thee and for thee I would have foregone my
native tribe and my hereditary rights. So persuasive was thy
affection that I could have forgotten—or at least would not have
boasted—that I was of the glorious race that knows no manacles of
body or of mind, but what it chooses to impose. But thou art gone,
and with thee all my attraction to the idle, wearisome life of thy
race. I have returned to my people, and I may lead them, and power
and activity may for a time weaken my agony. I need no longer
sacrifice my love for my race—but yet one sacrifice I will make, and
thy grave shall be the altar. With thee my heart is buried. To thee do
I here swear an eternal fidelity—and year by year will I lead my tribe
hither, that I may pour out my anguish upon the sod that rises
above thee. And I may hope that such devotion may lead the spirit
that made our race for future happiness as for present freedom, to
give thee back to me when I enter on my world of changeless love
and glorious recompense.”
 Kneeling again, the Gipsy Queen kissed the grave, and gathered
a few blades of grass and one or two flowers, shook away the tears
which she had let fall upon them, and placing them in her bosom
turned and left the burying-place, and proceeded toward the camp. I
left my position by the other route, and passing through the wood I
met her. Her face was cleared from every cloud, no trace of a tear
was evident; she had prepared herself to meet her party in a way to
excite no inquiry.
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