We explain what social geography is, its object of study and its research methods. Also, what are its auxiliary sciences.
What is social geography?
Social geography is a discipline that is part of human geography, and that studies the relationships between different human societies, and the territory they occupy as well as their reciprocal way of affecting and conditioning each other. In some academies, such as the German one, this social science is known as critical geography, which is equivalent.
The social geography saw its beginnings in the first decades of the 20th century when the main geographical currents of the academy were interested, some in the urban world (the so-called Chicago School) and others in the rural world (the so-called French School). Each one founded in its own way a field of geographical study focused on the way of life of human beings.
These trends predominated until the 1970s, when the discipline was refounded to emphasize the main problems of the post-industrial world, such as the distribution of wealth, the rural exodus, the development-underdevelopment dialectic, among others.
So social geography today adheres to a perspective more focused on the idea of population including their internal inequalities, their organizational dynamics and their link with the territory they occupy. Everything that concerns populations as human systems interrelated with their environment is of interest to this discipline.
See also: Political geography
Research methods of social geography
Like many other social sciences and branches of geography, social geography is constantly evaluating and rethinking its research methods, using the new technologies available thanks to computing and the information society.
In that sense, techniques such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) constitute an important source of data. They can also be surveys and massive consultations carried out today much more easily through the Internet.
Given that its main task is to delve into the way of inhabiting a territory that a certain community has, its conceptual tools tend to be more humanistic, that is, to be quantitative or qualitative, depending on the type of approach of the social experience that one wishes to examine.
Object of study of social geography
As we said before, social geography mainly studies human populations and their respective dynamics with the geographical environment that is, with its natural environment. Said more synthetically, it studies the human being and the territory in which he or she operates.
This happens not only through the way of occupying the territory and distributing the population within it, but also through the different types of communities that make up a population the possible groupings that arise from them, their needs and ways of exercising subjectivity within the confines of a given territory.
Auxiliary sciences of social geography
Social geography relies on other sciences and disciplines to complement its approach, drawing on knowledge from anthropology, sociology, demography, economics and political sciences, to have a more holistic vision of society.
Furthermore, it approaches history, social communication, urban planning and philosophy to search for possible sources of interpretation and subjectivities. At the same time, it can use concepts and tools from mathematics, statistics, climatology and other branches of geography.
Continue with: Cultural geography
References
- “Social geography” on Wikipedia.
- “Population as a central theme of social geography” in Aportes.educ.ar.
- “Social geography. “Man and territory” (video) in Educatina.
- “Social Geography” at the Institute of Geography of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
- “What is Social Geography?” (video) at The Audiopedia.
- “Social Geography” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
