This month's Why Social Science? post comes from Lisa Schamess from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) about celebrating Geography Week and how geography is essential to our daily lives.
By Lisa Schamess (American Association of Geographers)
When I was in elementary school, the way we studied geography was...not fun. It involved a lot of memorizing: state capitals, rivers and mountains, maybe a famous place from history or two.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that places and names are just a fraction of what geography is all about. In fact, geography is a social science that explores much more than the points on a map. It is a discipline that asks how? and why? as much as it asks where?
Geography embraces many disciplines across the humanities and sciences: history, demography, anthropology, cartography, climate science, geology, technology, political science, and economics, to name just a few. You could say that the study of geography is about everything that relates to a place.
Geography is a highly interdisciplinary practice. That means it combines many ways of understanding what is happening in places all over the world. Some geographers study tree rings and local history to understand climate change; others work closely with communities to share knowledge about where they live or travel over time; some geographers study techniques and traditions in agriculture, or work to improve human health, or spot banking trends, or connect pop culture to social changes. Geographers work at all scales, whether studying world events and big trends (geopolitics) or focusing on a single block of a city street. There are even geographers whose work involves the social and technological geographies of the Internet and media.