Nature - autonomous learning

252 essays and exam questionsWhat can geographers learn from the ‘Sokal affair’?‘In so completely denaturalising nature . . . the agency of nature . . . was denied’(Wolch and Emel 1998: xv). How applicable is this claim to recent humangeography research on nature?Write a critical review essay about one of the following books: The Bell Curve,Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports, A Natural History of Rape.‘Geography has no “nature” because the nature that geographers study extendswell beyond the non-human world’. Discuss.‘To explain the history of geographers’ changing understandings of nature one hasto look outside the discipline’. Evaluate this contention.Human and physical geography: trial separation or permanent divorce?‘The concept of nature is politics by other means’. Using examples, discuss thisassertion.Offer a critical analysis of one of the following ideas: wilderness, race, the rural.‘Landforms may have epistemological value in that they facilitate the productionof knowledge about the earth’s physical landscape, but the question remainswhether landforms have ontological status i.e. whether they consist of somethingmore than assemblages of physical, chemical and biological properties andthe relations among these properties. If, for example, it could be convincinglydemonstrated that landforms are artificial constructs devised solely for methodologicalconvenience and that in fact the surface of the earth is a morphologicalcon-tinuum governed by seamless spatial variations in chemical, physical andbiological properties, the need for a distinct science focusing on “landforms”would be challenged’ (Rhoads, 1999: 766). Do physical geographers study ‘naturalkinds’?Does the ‘nature of environment’ pose a problem or an opportunity for a moreunified physical geography?Assess whether ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ is the more important factor in explaining oneof the following: physical disability, sexuality, mental illness.