Methodology and contemporary research in socio-economic geography 1600-SZD-MWKB-GEO

Description of the substantive content
A. Political geography - history of the sub-discipline and selected research directions
The dual nature of politics and its practical consequences; an outline of the history of political geog-raphy (with particular emphasis on Poland) and main research directions in Polish political geogra-phy, including the main disputes and their consequences for the sub-discipline as well as Polish for-eign policy and geopolitics; differences and similarities between the Polish, German and Anglo-Saxon schools in political geography; research into the structure of the international community and the terminology used to describe it; the importance of toponymics in geographical and historical research.
B. Specificities of research in developing countries
Why is qualitative research so important and what difficulties do European researchers encounter when they want to carry out projects in countries of the global South? Examples of own research in Latin American countries.
C. Sustainable tourism
1) The origins of the concept of sustainable tourism. Philosophical, historical, socio-economic and geographical genesis of it. 2) Evolution of the concept of sustainable tourism from 1980s. 3) The scope of sustainable tourism in present times. 4) How the term of sustainable tourism has abused in the research, mass media, politics, etc. 5) Discussion about "good practices" and "bad practices" in sustainable tourism.
D. Evolution of social geography approaches and methods
The course aims to trace the evolution of approaches and methods in geographic social studies. In the first part changes in research, efforts will be traced, as well as differences in the topics discussed in Poland, Western Europe, and North America. The second part of the lecture will be devoted to present the outcomes research project on housing segregation in Berlin and Warsaw and the chal-lenges of conducting social comparative research.
E. Territorial reforms in European local governments - the challenge of causality in comparative research
The lecture will present some of the methodological problems related to the identification of causal relationships in comparative research on territorial reforms. The scholarly literature on mergers and splits of municipalities is predominantly based on comparative studies. The quantitative comparisons of local jurisdictions in quasi-experimental settings serve to identify precisely the reform outcomes, while the low-N comparisons of countries, more qualitative in its nature, aim at discovering the main drivers of the reforms (or their combinations). We will discuss both types of studies.
F. Modeling the spatial distribution of asbestos products used in Poland
The following issues will be presented: 1) asbestos issues in Poland and in the world, 2) machine learning in process modeling, 3) estimating the quantity on the basis of the developed machine learning model under supervision, 4) presentation of the obtained results using geoinformatics tools.
G. Methodological problems in population studies on the example of the Asian part of Russia.
Presentation of the stages of the research procedure in the implementation of work in the field of population geography. Identifying methodological problems and searching for their solutions at the following stages:
- the legitimacy of undertaking the research, determining the research problem; - the scale of the research, regionalization, problems related to geographical nomenclature;
- formulation of hypotheses and their verification;
- selection of research methods, validity of using quantitative and qualitative methods;
- selection of statistical materials, data reliability; critical assessment of selected indicators
- case study- preparation and implementation of research.
H. Improving map design for maps of small scales using artificial intelligence.
Cartographic generalization is an essential element of map designing. It concerns the selection and simplification of geographic information relative to the map scale and purpose in order to present it at a smaller scale. Optimal and automatic generalization methods can improve and accelerate the map design process. To improve and automate the settlement and roads selection, it is proposed to use the methods based on artificial intelligence (AI). Based on the input data and examples, the ma-chine can explore knowledge (new information) and draw conclusions based on the regularities de-tected in the data. The lecture will cover the elaboration and use of the selected AI-based generaliza-tion models to optimize and automate settlement and roads selection process. It will be shown how the use of AI as a way of the formalization of expert cartographic knowledge taking into account the object features and spatial context can be an effective approach for the multi-aspect and optimal settlement and road network generalization methodology development.