Associate Professor
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies | California State University, Northridge
Geography is one of the most versatile and useful disciplines you can study, but it is very misunderstood. If you think you it's just memorizing the names of capitals and listing facts about places, this would be like thinking the biology just means memorizing the names of animals.
Like any research-based field, professional geography aims to understand complex patterns and processes that affect the world.
However, unlike many fields, geography is not a subject; it is a discpline. What does this mean? Geographers are not really defined by what they study, but by how they think and what kind of questions they ask. If there is any unifying subject, it is anything on or near the surface of the Earth (which is a very wide subject area!) The topics of study of incredibly varied, from music and film, to housing and real estate, to diseases and disasters, to environmental change and weather.
So what is it?
With so many topics, an effective way to understand geography is to recognize our research traditions. These might be called traditions, or lenses, or in other words, these are distinct ways of looking at the world and organizing information about it. Here are some of the key traditions that define geography and what geographers do:
This is the oldest tradition in modern geography. The aim is to be a bridge, or umbrella, that links natural science and social science. Another way of putting this is that geography has a very old tradition of not only studying both natural and social science, but also linking these two kinds of science.
Today, many people think geography means mapping. Spatial Science takes cartography (which is both a science and design field) and develops statistical techniques for the analysis of location patterns. Geographic Information Science is a more recent development of this tradition.
Places and landscapes are the real-world in which we all live our daily lives. They are complicated and messy, and geographers try to make sense out of all of this. Urban places, rural places, so-called "wildernesses" and so on are the frames through which this type of geography is done. It is kind of interdiscplinary because it takes everything that makes a place a place and makes sense out of it. This is a useful tradition for trying to figure out many important issues that are only able to be understood holistically. This tradition includes those geographers interested only in cultural issues, and those interested only in the natural environment. Recent decades have seen increasing interest in understanding the relationship between places, a key characteristic of globalization.
Interdisciplinary understanding of regions--for example, southeastern U.S., East Asia, etc., is another geographic tradition. This is another old tradition that declined in popularity as geographers became specialized in the late 20th century (a trend similar in other fields too). Regional geographers of the past (and present-day) aimed to integrate diverse topics such as weather, culture, economy, and environment, in order to understand development and change of regions.
It gets more complicated from here. You can further define geography as a collection of subfields (for example, urban geography, geomorphology, biogeography, and so on). There are also further distinctions in terms of how geographers think (for example, structuralism vs post-structuralism) that you would learn about as part of a degree program.
These traditions listed here, however, probably include any kind of geographer.
If you want to read more about this, I suggest the following: