A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Abstract

Methods and concepts from network analysis can provide valuable empirics and novel insights for critical physical geography and related fields.• Network approaches can help to bridge human-physical and qualitative-quantitative divides in geographical research. • Critical physical geographers and network scholars have much to gain from collaboration.Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests-knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations-can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for "science mapping" including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.

Federal policy discourses, local agricultural knowledge, and regenerating forest dynamics in Mexico’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor

“…For example, DNA has been applied to understand the multiple interacting discourses surrounding climate change politics (Fisher et al 2013; Ghinoi and Steiner 2020), energy policies (Rinscheid 2015), and environmental management (Rantala and Di Gregori 2014). DNA facilitates qualitative content analysis and quantitative network analysis to reveal the internal structure of a concept, through actors' multiple interacting ideologies (Chignell 2022). Subsequently, DNA highlights the mechanistic relationship between actors at multiple scales, like interpreting federal policy discourse alongside discourses of local smallholders who implement policy through land use.…”

Practicing critical physical geography: New trading zones and interactional expertise in an expanding field

“…Collaborative work like this, they argue, could meet CPG's calls for empirical and transformative understandings of eco-social hybrids in ways that posthumanist and animal studies or citizen science and ecology have not. Chignell (2022) encourages CPG scholars to explore the diverse theories and techniques of network analysis to examine the entanglements of biophysical processes and the sociopolitical dynamics of scientific knowledge production. He argues that network analysis offers a way for CPG scholars to analyze the eco-social interconnections that comprise their study sites using a suite of methods for relational data and which are already familiar to many biophysical and social scientists.…”

Seeing beyond the frames we inherit: A challenge to tenacious conservation narratives

“…As a result, it offers a unique, macroscopic perspective on how frames come into being through the interaction of ideas, actors and the professional and policy institutions in which these circulate. By combining the quantitative techniques of science mapping with the qualitative analyses usually done in frame analysis, we aim to reveal both the specific terms and documents and the broader social and intellectual networks that help produce and maintain a particularly framing (Chignell, 2023).…”