Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 21ACTIVITY 1.2Read Box 1.2 and also the part of the previous section where cognitive,moral, aesthetic, descriptive and normative knowledges were defined.Once you’ve done this, answer the following question: which of theseknowledges do geographers produce in their research and then disseminatethrough their teaching and external activities?What is your answer? It’s likely that, using Box 1.2, you think geographersare producers of formal, expert knowledge for a range of addressees,including students, other academics and outside bodies like governments.If this was your answer you’d be correct.There’s nothing tacit, for example,about human geographers’ theories of uneven development, while aphysical geographer’s research into gravel-bed rivers is hardly intendedfor consumption by the general public.What, though, about the five knowledgetypes discussed in the previous section? Chances are you rightlyidentified that geography produces a lot of cognitive knowledge. But didyou know that geographers also make moral and aesthetic claims, oftenof a normative sort? For instance, several human geographers write aboutspatial injustice (as when people in one place suffer lower levels ofhealth-care provision when compared with other places in the samecountry), and still others have examined our emotional attachments toparticular landscapes. So, to summarise, professional geographers producea wide range of higher-level, formalised knowledges. Simplifyingsomewhat, we can say that the discipline generates cognitive knowledgefor the most part, with human and environmental geographers also producinga fair amount of moral knowledge, and human geographers nota little aesthetic knowledge.So much for knowledge in general.What about geography and knowledgesof nature? I introduced the previous section by talking about academicgeography’s origins as a ‘bridging’ subject that crossed the Maginot linesdividing specialist understandings of the world. I also observed that, overtime, anglophone geography has split into two ‘halves’ with a shrinking‘middle ground’. I’ll say more about the two halves below, but let me beginby discussing this middle ground. It may well be shrinking, but it has byno means disappeared.The ‘nature’ that environmental geographers study