Geography, Race, and Quantification

Abstract

This article reviews how race, quantification, and raced quantification have been used and written about in geography. Its two primary arguments are that race should be more central in the discipline and that a reluctance to address ontological and epistemological issues has left quantitative geography methodologically impoverished. These two issues merge in an examination of two cases where race is employed as a variable in quantitative models. The critique of these cases is not meant as a condemnation of quantitative geography but as an instructive example on which to construct a critical quantitative geography. The article ends by stressing the importance of quantification in geography and by presenting exemplars of race-critical quantification.

En este artículo se hace una revisión del tratamiento de los temas de raza, cuantificación y la cuantificación racializada en geografía, y cómo se ha escrito sobre esto. Se argumenta que (1) la raza debería ser más central en la disciplina y (2) que la resistencia a abordar cuestiones ontológicas y epistemológicas ha dejado empobrecida a la geografía cuantitativa desde el punto de vista metodológico. Estas dos proposiciones concurren en un examen de dos casos donde la raza es empleada como variable en modelos cuantitativos. La crítica que se hace sobre estos dos casos no debe entenderse como condena a la geografía cuantitativa, sino como un ejemplo instructivo a partir del cual construir una geografía cuantitativa crítica. El artículo termina subrayando la importancia de la cuantificación en geografía y presentando ejemplares de cuantificación crítica de los problemas de raza

Key Words:

• methodology
• quantification
• race

关键词:

• 方法
• 量化
• 种族

Palabras clave:

• metodología
• cuantificación
• raza

PERRY L. CARTER is an Associate Professor of geography in the Department of Economics and Geography at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409–1014. E-mail: [email protected]. His areas of interest include raced and gendered geographies; geographies of labor, tourism, and research methodologies; and quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis.

Notes

¹This accounting of research articles on public education in geography journals is based on Dwyer's (1997) survey of geographical research on African Americans and my own electronic database search of research articles in geography journals that had both the words race and school in their abstracts. The lone article found that was published in the last twenty years was Drennon (2006). Butler et al. (2007) and Hamnetta, Ramsden, and Butler (2007) are recent studies of race, public schooling, and space set in a British context.

²It needs to be noted here that this article was the inspiration for my dissertation research and I did not catch the rather serious flaw in it until I had read it a third or fourth time.

³This refers to groups of explanatory variables being introduced into the model in stages and not to the technique sometimes referred to as hierarchical regression but more commonly known as multilevel modeling.