Whither Geography?

Abstract

I argue that scientific disciplines are esteemed, supported, and patronized largely to the degree to which they are perceived as providing a “return” on invested societal resources. This “return” takes the form of scholarly products that help answer deep human questions or otherwise materially benefit members of the society whose resources they are. Such a view implies that disciplines exist in a “market” in which members compete for these limited resources by delivering products seen as valuable. In such a market, disciplinary relevance and survival are ultimately tied to decisions individual scholars practicing within the disciplines make about which research they pursue, the greater the perceived “return” the better for the long-term health of the discipline.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.