Željka Šiljković
IS GEOGRAPHY AS A SCIENCE NECESSARY FOR MODERN SOCIETY?
DOI: 10.35666/28310438.2025.6.341
UDC: 911.5/.9:910"19/20"
Numerous natural and social sciences are expanding their research areas into the realm of geography, thereby encroaching on its primary scientific and research domain—space. As a result, geography faces the challenge of its own identity and definition. Since the early 20th century, when agricultural geography abandoned the study of crop-environment relationships and left this to agronomists, pedologists, climatologists, and botanists, and similarly relinquished the issue of waste management not only to biologists and chemists but also to sociologists, psychologists, engineers, and other social, humanistic, and technical sciences, geography has itself narrowed its scientific scope. Its foundational roots have been forgotten, leading to a cycle of traditional geography or the turn towards new geographic disciplines, often invented or New Age geographies (such as the geography of childhood and youth, Life Without Borders, Psychology of Trees and Forests), all in an effort to compete with other sciences within the framework of so-called intellectual imperialism. Despite the varying priorities of geographic research across different countries, it is evident that, in the era of global academic neoliberalism, the status of geography is being leveled across all countries. Our primary thesis should therefore be to insist on the re-evaluation and redefinition of geography as a science and profession, and its foundational knowledge, which has long become the basis for all contemporary science and its overall and individual development.
Keywords: geography, science, philosophy of geography, intellectualism.