Volume 62, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2024 (pp. 1-23) Joseph Chellis United States Military Academy Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering Abstract The Military Survey of Scotland (1747-1755) was an influential document in the history of cartography. Commissioned in response to the last Jacobite Rebellion (1745-1746), it systemized cartography in the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. Researched from primary sources and existing literature, this paper emphasizes the importance of the survey in increasing the number of surveys and maps produced in the British Empire, creating a “family” of maps in places as distant as Ireland, British North America, and India. The most important legacy was the creation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791, due to the efforts of William Roy, the lead engineer on the Military Survey of Scotland. (pp. 24-43) Mukunda Mishra Department of Geography Dr. Meghnad Saha College Abstract The last hundred years have been meaningful in terms of the evolution of geography. This essay is an effort to document geographic paradigms—the trajectory through which geography has emerged as a unique discipline to serve the scientific community with the power of describing the distribution and interaction of biotic, abiotic, and socio-cultural objects, processes, or phenomena on the earth’s surface. Both the internal fragmentations and interactions with other streams of knowledge have resulted in a synthesis of knowledge to address complex processes. However, most existing literature and textbooks discussing the evolution of ideas and thoughts in geography concentrate on the evolution of a particular branch. It keeps the discussion incomplete about how the discipline of geography as a whole has come to address various complexities raised from the critical human-nature-society-culture-politics within a spatiotemporal framework. Geographers’ unique problem-solving methods evolved during the last hundred years have made them fit to address sustainability. This article will discuss how all these discourses have left the discipline of geography with not only a powerful legacy of systematic and ordered representation of the world, but also a transformation in its current role as a science of sustainability. HIGHER EDUCATION FUTURES AND GEOGRAPHY (pp. 44-49) M. Duane Nellis Past President, American Association of Geographers President Emeritus and Trustee Professor Ohio University Introduction Accelerated by COVID and global social media complexes, our post COVID world is experiencing ever increasing and accelerating changes in higher education. Geographers and geography programs across the United States are certainly influenced by these dynamics, but also have an opportunity to adjust and impact such changes across the higher education landscape. Through strategic positioning and decision making, geographers and geography programs can strengthen their role at the broad spectrum of universities in our country (Nellis 2017), while remaining true to their institution in which the department is situated and its composition, regional setting and how the program fits within the overall discipline of geography. This review essay provides a brief overview of post COVID, accelerating global social media and artificial intelligence dynamics impacting higher education and how geographers and geography programs can position themselves strategically to contribute toward strengthening their institutions as well as their programs for the future. |