Considering Refugees Through 100 Years of Geographical Review

Abstract

Given the role of the American Geographical Society and its flagship journal, Geographical Review, in the Paris Peace Conference and its prominence in the discipline of geography ever since, this paper considers how the journal takes account of refugees in its pages from 1916 to 2018 using a bibliometric approach. The term “refugee” was tracked in every Geographical Review article published during this time period, using content to generate data and analysis in ivo. First, we identify key trends in scholarship over time, then we note the rise and fall of important key terms, and finally, we examine both the countries analyzed and how these geographies change over time. The results of this bibliometric analysis of refugees in Geographical Review reflect both global geopolitical dynamics and refugee governance structures, and broader trends in epistemology in the discipline of geography. Observations made on these trends and variations indicate a need to further explore shifting paradigms and master narratives, both past and emerging, built around the “refugee” concept and its treatment within the discipline of geography.

• refugees
• geography
• epistemology
• paradigms
• bibliometric analysis
• NVivo

Notes

1. It should be noted that we cannot measure the relative importance of refugees compared to other subjects in the journal since our database only selected articles that mentioned the term “refugee*” and did not include the entire collection of articles in Geographical Review during the study period (which would have numbered over three thousand). We invite other researchers interested in performing similar content analyses of other topics within the pages of Geographical Review to contact the authors for the database that provides baseline yearly article publication totals for the journal.

2. The “Google Books Ngram Viewer” is a database that allows the user to search the contents of any books available in Google for particular phrases. Very interestingly, the trends from a search of the term “refugee*” establishes the prevalence of the term in published works from 1916 to 2008 available via Google Books. The graph indicates that geographers publishing in Geographical Review kept pace with other outlets in regard to the production of refugee‐related research. See: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=refugee&year_start=1916&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crefugee%3B%2Cc0 (accessed 1 August, 2018).

3. Several of those articles that mention the United States are not necessarily about U.S.‐refugee dynamics. This is true for all countries analyzed in the bibliometric approach. Determining in what context a country is mentioned and/or its relationship to refugee studies would require a qualitative reading of each article and is beyond the scope of this analysis. Nonetheless, the results illustrate frequency of mentions over time and therefore, provide a picture of changing geographies in the journal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Skop

Emily Skop, Professor, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Columbine Hall 2021, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Pkwy, Colorado Springs, CO 80918; [[email protected]].

Joel Tonyan

Joel Tonyan, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Pkwy, Colorado Springs, CO 80918; [[email protected]].

Arielle Cassiday

Arielle Cassiday, Lecturer, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Columbine Hall 327, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Pkwy, Colorado Springs, CO 80918; [[email protected]].