Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 185ACTIVITY 4.1Imagine that you are a physical geographer employed full-time by auniversity. Your main specialism is landslides. Because it’s expensive toundertake, your research requires funding from outside bodies (likegovernment agencies). It also has an applied element because manyhuman populations live in potential landslide areas. Why would it beimportant to you to emphasise, or at least not downplay, the scientific andrealist character of your research?One obvious answer to the activity question is as follows: claiming that onecan produce an accurate (i.e. scientific) account of a real environmentalphenomena (in this case landslides) is a way of gaining trust – the trust offunding bodies and policy-makers, for example. If one were to deny thatlandslides really existed, or if one were to be perceived as an ‘unscientific’researcher, then it’s unlikely that one’s research would be funded, let alonebelieved. Since most people in academia and the wider world are ultimatelyrealists, then the claim to be investigating reality ‘scientifically’ becomesthe chief means by which researchers can establish a privileged statusfor their knowledge.As Gieryn (1983) pointed out, science is a normativeterm that allows those who appropriate it to perform ‘boundary work’.To say that one is a scientist is to distinguish oneself sharply from thosepeople who produce supposedly ‘lesser’ knowledge (i.e. non-scientists).In Demeritt’s (1996: 485) words:‘Debates about science . . . are debatesabout what will count for real knowledge and whose voices will be heardin struggles to define it’. Or, as Derek Gregory (1994: 79) put it in a similarvein,‘Science is a weasel-word . . . [I]t is much used (and abused) as a termof approbation or condemnation, made to stand for a system of knowledgeto which we are enjoined to aspire’.I am not suggesting that physical geographers are party to some grandconspiracy – one that involves using the label science for purely self-servingreasons! This suggestion would be cynical and unjustified. I am simplyasking why a commitment to the ideas of science and realism are so deeplyinsinuated into their self-understanding.The issues of trust and boundaryworkaside, there are other reasons why physical geographers might wishto perpetuate the view that their research is scientific and realist (these can