Geog 609

Entering Graduate School

The “Elevator Definition” Assignment

Ron Abler, Past Chair of the Department of Geography at Penn State and past Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers, challenged all geographers to have a brief definition of geography that could be used when encountering the question: “So, what do geographers do?”  Such questions often arise in the fleeting moments of casual conversation that occur in airports, buses, or… in elevators, especially at AAG meetings when non-geographers notice your name tag – hence the need for “elevator definitions.”

The following list represents the elevator definitions provided by the 2005 & 2007 incoming graduate class in the Department of Geography, University of Oregon.  

• Geography is the study of the distribution and variation of features across the earth's surface

• Geography examines the variability of physical and human phenomena, the systems that link those phenomena, the impacts of the relationships amongst those phenomena, and then studies all those things in specific areas.

• Geography is the study and analysis of the relationships between place, space, scale, and landscape - how humans interact with and shape places and environments; also, how physical landscapes are constructed physically and ideologically. Human geographers tend to study the former, physical geographers the latte

• Geography is more of a discipline than a specific body of knowledge.  It’s the analysis within a particular field (or fields) of data characteristics with emphasis on relationships and associations, especially across space, time and scale.

• Geography is the study of spatial inter-relationships on the earth.

• Geography is the study of anything with a spatial context - or - Geography is where people/things are, why they are there and the implications thereof.

• Geography is studying anything or anyone at anytime that is connected to a place.

• Geography is a spatial perspective from which to study the human and physical environments and to examine the relationships within and between them. 

• The interaction of human and natural phenomena in space and place.

• Geography looks at just about any topic matter by examining spatial relationships.

• You can study landscapes and physical processes, or you can study people, including their cultures and interconnections.  Alternatively, you can study how the two affect each other in an endless variety of ways.  Geography encompasses all of these realms, but what makes it geography is the idea that location and situation, physically and/or in terms of people and cultures, matter a great deal in understanding these relationships.

• Geography studies the same subjects as the other physical and social sciences, however we are concerned with analyzing these ideas by how and why the 'where' affects them.

• The study of people and/or phenomena as they act and interact in space