Mei-Po Kwan

"The twentieth century has witnessed at least two major rifts in geography with lasting effect on the discipline. One is the separation of physical geography from human geography, which stemmed from the ontological separation of nature and society in geographic discourses. The other is the separation of spatial-analytical geographies from social-cultural geographies through attempts to create a mode of disembodied geographical analysis that separate spatial patterns and relations from social, cultural, and political processes. As a result of this separation and subsequent rounds of critiques through Marxist, humanist, feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonialist, queer, and other critical perspectives, social-cultural and spatial-analytical geographies are increasingly perceived or represented as irreconcilable spheres of geographical endeavors. In the process, human geographers have become identified in binary and pejorative terms: social theorists and postmodernists on the one hand, and spatial analysts, quantifiers, or GISers on the other."

"Lastly, what is crucial is the proliferation of hybrids, or geographies and geographers of the third kind: those that cut across the divides between the social-cultural and the spatial-analytical, the qualitative and the quantitative, the critical and the technical, and the social-scientific and the arts-and-humanities. It is a future not of ‘‘either/or’’ but of ‘‘both-and.’’"

"The UGCoP is a significant methodological problem because it means that analytical results can be different for different delineations of contextual units even if everything else is the same. It is perhaps a major reason why research findings concerning the effects of social and physical environments on health behaviors and outcomes are often inconsistent, given that past studies on the same issue (e.g., obesity) often used different contextual units."