ABSTRACT
The academic discipline of geography has changed very substantially in recent decades, in both substance and method. It has also expanded very rapidly, with more geography students in higher education institutions, and more staff both teaching them and undertaking original research in the discipline. This chapter looks at those two phenomena, with particular reference to the situation in the United Kingdom (on the necessity of which, given the relatively short length of the treatment, see Livingstone 1995), and argues that they are linked in the growth of specialisms within the discipline. Geography is now a very fragmented discipline. Indeed, its fragmentation is the dominant theme of this chapter: within less than a century, and mainly over the last forty years, we have witnessed within the discipline the demise of the ‘all-round geographer’ and the rise to preeminence of the topical specialist.
