Geography between situation and criticism

Abstract

Geography has witnessed many profound transformations despite its short academic history. One of the goals or motives of these transformations was to give a scientific and utilitarian character to geography, meaning the ability to formulate generalizations, laws, and applicable theories, but most of them did not succeed in their endeavor. Perhaps the latest of these transformations is the view of the phenomenon (or phenomena) that geographers analyze from the perspective of critical social theory, which opposes the positivist perspective that sees knowledge as only coming from direct or indirect experience through observations and measurements, through which the knowledge of the subject, i.e., the phenomenon under study, aims to apply the formulated laws in light of natural laws. This led geographers to what became known as the quantitative revolution in geography. Meanwhile, critics believe that science, especially social science, serves some political purposes, including serving the established social order traditionally and enabling it to survive. Therefore, critical geography seeks to uncover alternatives to the dominance of the state and capital, whose features include inequality, crime, pollution, poverty, wars, marginalization, persecution of minorities, oppression of women, and others. Therefore, the research aims to clarify the impact of situational philosophy on geography and its reflections on the emergence of critical geography and to determine its relationship with critical social theory after defining their nature, along with identifying the geographical distribution of critical geographical intellectual output globally, and the main challenges facing this output.
The legitimacy of the research stems from the necessity of following the recent changes in geography, directing the attention of specialists to these changes, and the possibility of examining, verifying, and applying them. This field of geographical research is scarce in the Arabic language, so it was necessary for its foundation to rely on foreign sources. Therefore, the research is considered one of the first preliminary attempts in the Arab world - to the best of the researcher's knowledge - to present the ideas of critical geography, which is a subject open to development, modification, and application.