Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 87women suffered the twin oppressions of gender discrimination and classdiscrimination in the workplace, while having their domestic labourundervalued by men.They argued that only a dismantling of capitalism andpatriarchal attitudes and practices would liberate women.As feminist geography became more influential, other geographers wereattempting a rapprochement between the structural–social relationsperspective of Marxist geography and the free-will–individualist perspectiveof the humanistic geographers. This rapprochement was inspiredby the work of sociologists like Anthony Giddens, whose ‘structurationtheory’ provided concepts that promised to overcome the dualism between‘structure and agency’. In human geography, figures like Derek Gregory,Allan Pred and Nigel Thrift all adapted Giddens’s work to show how theactions of people in specific places were conditioned by social forcesoperating at much larger geographical scales. This chimed with theaspirations of TWPE (though TWPE rarely used Giddens’s ideas). Overall,the 1980s erasure of nature from human geographers’ research wasin keeping with the broader thrust of social science. Following Peter Winch’s(1958) The Idea of a Social Science, sociologists, political scientists andanthropologists all gradually left the study of nature to the physical, medical,engineering and behavioural sciences.Arguably, the only intellectual development of the 1980s that might haveheld human and physical geographers closer together was ‘transcendentalrealism’.This ungainly name refers to an overarching philosophy pioneeredby Roy Bhaskar and Rom Harre. Developed from the 1970s onwards,transcendental realism was a critique of conventional understandings ofscience (including positivism). It was, in essence, an attempt to explain toresearchers in all disciplines the nature of reality (social and environmental)and how best to study it. Bhaskar and Harre believed that too manyresearchers operated with a flawed understanding of that which theystudied.They took it as axiomatic that both societies and physical systemsare overdetermined: that is, they are a complex, dynamic and not always stableamalgam of different causal powers.These causal powers are ones that arepossessed by specific social and environmental phenomena by virtue oftheir internal structure (e.g. gunpowder has the power to explode becauseof its chemical composition) or the necessary relations they have with otherphenomena (e.g. parents are normally responsible for their children becauseof law, custom and love). Quite how different causal powers interact is,Bhaskar and Harre insisted, a contingent question.The ‘order’ inherent in both