- What is social geography?
- Research methods of social geography
- Object of study of social geography
- Auxiliary sciences of social geography
We explain what social geography is, its object of study and its research methods. Also, what are your auxiliary sciences.
What is social geography?
Social geography is a discipline which is part of the human geography, and that studies the relationships between the different societies human, and the territory they occupy, as well as their reciprocal way of affecting and conditioning themselves. In some academies, such as the German one, this social science it is known by the name of critical geography, which comes to be an equivalent.
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 founded in its own way a field of geographic study focused on the mode of life of human being.
These trends prevailed until the 1970s, when the discipline 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 that social geography today adheres to a perspective more centered on the idea of population, including its internal inequalities, its organizational dynamics and its link with the territory they occupy. Everything that concerns populations as long as systems humans interrelated with their environment, is of interest to this discipline.
Research methods of social geography
As with many other social sciences and branches of geography, social geography is in constant evaluation and rethinking of its Research Methods, using the new technologies available thanks to computing and the society of Information.
In this sense, techniques such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) constitute an important source of data. So can massive surveys and consultations, carried out today much more easily through Internet.
Given that its main task is to get 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 to social experience that you want to examine.
Object of study of social geography
Social geography studies how subjectivity is exercised in a given territory.
As we said before, social geography mainly studies human populations and their respective dynamics with the geographic environment, that is, with their environment natural. Put more synthetically, it studies the human being and the territory in which it operates.
This happens not only by the way of occupying the territory and distributing the population in it, but also by 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, the sociology, the demography, the economy and the Political Sciences, to have a more vision holistic of the society.
In addition, it approaches the history, social communication, urban planning and philosophy to look for possible sources of interpretation and subjectivities. At the same time, you can use concepts and tools from math, statistics, climatology and from other branches of geography.