Progressive Geographies

The Guardian has a gallery of striking images of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet melt.

ClustrMaps, which this blog uses to track where visitors are from, cleared my two-year old map and started a new one a month ago. In that month there were just over 10,000 discrete visits – only counting people who visited multiple pages on a visit just once. Clicking on the map (or this link) will take you to a more detailed view. Over half from the US and UK, but quite a broad spread beyond that. On this compressed image, a similar distribution to the previous two years. Thank you all, wherever you are…

Details of the Durham Doctoral Studentships and ESRC studentships – the most common funding schemes used in Human Geography – are available here. Details of the department’s programmes, research topics, etc. are available here.

At Books and Ideas, a wide-ranging interview with Étienne Balibar.

In the Politicised Literary Geographies event, one of the things discussed was the relation between the discipline of Geography and the Humanities. Geography is often put in a Social Sciences faculty (which can be seen as an issue by Physical Geographers) or in a Science faculty (potentially a problem for Human Geographers), but rarely in the Humanities – I’m happy to be told of examples though. But why does Human Geography research not orientate itself towards the Humanities at least as much as to the Social Sciences? There are counter-examples of course, but the links to literature, philosophy, art etc. and their ways of working seem to be outweighed by the links to economics, anthropology, political science and sociology. History in historical geography is perhaps the key area in which the Humanities remains crucial. The two books pictured below – GeoHumanities and Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds were attempts to begin just such a dialogue, and were partly successful in that. But even those Geographers who read, engage with and try to influence Humanities are often asked to justify their work in Social Sciences terms. Perhaps Geography’s engagements with new areas like the digital humanities and medical humanities will change the balance somewhat.

Open access discussed