USA300H1 Lecture Notes - Regional Geography, Geopolitics, Scientific Method
23 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
USA300H1 – Geographies of Conflict
• Matthew Farish and American Studies Geography
o Segue into thinking self-consciously about the discipline
▪ I Betee ‘egios, Faish and Barnes pointing towards the institutional
structures that come to bear on scholarly work
▪ Interrogation of the ideological forces shaping scholarship
• An example of how geography as a field changed at a precise historical
moment in response to events in geopolitical history
• Placing the university within an ideological, political, historical context
wherein academic study is shaped by– agled ith– these forces
o “tutuig eaple of the shiftig defiitio of the te/oept of egio; hige
moment of hat egio eas efoe ad afte WWII
▪ Shaping of the study of regions by historical imperatives of conflict, threat
• Geography as a matter of region and shifts in geographical study
o Old conception of region: unscientific, description over estimation, eclecticism over
instrumentalism, case-by-case over systematic approach, words over numbers, etc.
▪ Scientific discourse: invested in claims to objective, singular truth as opposed to
the unsystematic subjectivity of old geographical method
▪ Perceived inadequacy of scientific method: geographers believed region to be
more various, unsteady than scientific methods could describe
• Ealuatio of the geogaphes ailit ol to desie; the
irreproducible, unsystematic itepetatio of uiue ases
• Not an approach structured around problems and solutions; not
funneled directly enough towards use-value, any certain ends
o Global shifts provoking change in the field of geography: 20th century wars
▪ Indicating geography as a product of geopolitics; as a field not just influenced by
insular academic sea change, but affected by big historical/political events
▪ WWII America makes an unprecedented strategic use of academic information
• Americans mobilized fields like geography to tactical wartime advantage
• The end of WWII, the Cold War and conflict of ideologies
o The Cold Was eooi, oal, ad goeetal oflit of ideolog
▪ A mutually exclusive binary: neither tended to see a middle ground between
itself ad the othe; oes suess thought to spell the othes destruction
▪ Bridging between political and ethical values: freedom, individualism,
collectivism, conformity, etc. implicated into capitalist-communist struggle
o Technology, the atomic bomb and the end of the second world war
▪ Perception of the destruction of WWII soled Aeia sietifi ailit
and ingenuity via the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki
▪ Technological upscale necessitated by the war: huge volume of scientific
innovations directed towards the war effort
• America assumes a global position as proponents of science: scientific
advancement conflated with national advancement
• New developments seem to prove the inarguable utility and benefit of
siee ut dot tell the postodeists that
o Science understood to have the power to achieve national
security goals; seen as a potentially war-winning tool
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