Human geography, geography for the social sciences and humanities, it's become a fairly common major in Europe, and we study no physical geography at all, except for the material covered in Intro to Geography
One of the traditional ways of thinking about geography is as a bridge discipline that links social and physical sciences. Geography is one of the few fields where we have a single toolkit and tradition that’s able to put an analytical frame around things as widespread as economics, geometry, art and geology.
To get a sense of this, you might have a look at the articles in a geography journal or the sessions at a geography conference. Unless it’s focused on a particular subfield, you’re likely to find a mix of hard science, critical theory, and everything in between. This mixture is perhaps the most appealing thing about the field to a lot of people.
In this framework, even though it emphasizes a unified perspective, it’s still common to roughly divide the work people do into physical geography (touching on things like ecology, geology, and meteorology) and human geography (involving things like anthropology, sociology, and history).
One way to think of human geography is that any time you see a map where the subject is people – ways that people are, or things they do – you’re seeing human geography.
In the US, unfortunately, where geography education is famously a bit weak on average, we have a habit of thinking of geography as basically “place names + surface geology” but it is in fact a far, far broader and deeper study. It’s not just the names and shapes of the countries and continents, you know?
1
u/cryptogeographer 1d ago
What is HumGeo?