The Dictionary of Human Geography

the school they attend, but also the character-
istics of their school and neighbourhood
peers. Strongneighbourhood effectsoper-
ate (Wo ̈llmann, 2001: see alsocontextual
effect; multi-level modelling). Their
existence was the basis for challenges to the
‘separate but equal’ schooling systems once
operated in many US states, whereby
African-Americans and whites were allocated
to separate schools: after the classicBrown v
Board of Education of TopekaSupreme Court
decision in 1954, many school districts were
required to integrate their schools to remove
the unequal treatment suffered by the former
group (Johnston, 1984). A commonly deployed
strategy to achieve this was ‘bussing’, whereby
students were transported from segregated
neighbourhoods to mixed schools: this was
increasingly countered by whites who either
sent their children to private schools or moved
to suburban school districts where housing
was too expensive for most African-
Americans (‘white flight’). Similar patterns
have been observed regarding school choice
in English cities (Johnston, Burgess, Wilson
and Harris, 2006).
With the adoption ofneo-liberalism in
many countries, although education remains
a public good, parental and student choice
is promoted – as against the territorially struc-
tured school catchment areas that character-
ized earlier eras, when the composition of
a school, and thus the contextual effects oper-
ating therein, reflected the neighbourhoods
that it served. To facilitate this choice, infor-
mation on schools – such as the performance
of their students in public examinations and
their truancy rates – are published, leading to
the creation of school ‘league tables’.
Studies ofgeographical educationfocus on
the provision and nature of instruction in the
discipline in schools and universities. Special
interest groups – including geographical
societiessuch as the Geographical Association
in the UK – lobby relevant authorities to ensure,
for example, thatgeographyis in the school
curriculum and that departments offer degrees
in the discipline at universities, with varying
success across countries. Leadinggeographical
societies–suchastheAssociationofAmerican
Geographers and the Royal Geographical
Society/Institute of British Geographers –
include specialty groups whose purpose is
to promote pedagogy, as do journals such as
theJournal of Geography in Higher Education.
Within universities, there is a growing
trend of regularly assessing their performance

• notably at research (as with the UK’s

Research Assessment Exercise, which grades

every university department every five years on

average: Johnston, 1994, 2006) – and then

allocating funds according to the results,

which has the consequence of concentrating

research in selected institutions only. rj

Suggested reading

Bednarz, Downs and Vender (2003); Kong

(2007); Walford (2001).

egalitarianism The view that all people are

of equal fundamental moral or social worth,

and should be treated as such. Egalitarianism

can take a number of forms related to different

types ofequality: equality of opportunity,

equality of outcome, equality of wealth or

power, equality of respect, equality before the

lawor equality before God. Egalitarianism

implicitly informs much research on the geog-

raphies of inequality, including those associ-

ated with differences of gender, class,

ethnicity,sexuality, age, corporeality and

nationality (cf.nationalism). The mitigation

ofspatial inequalityhas been an important

normative concern for geographical scholar-

ship since the early 1970s (Harvey, 1973).jpa

Suggested reading

Lee and Smith (2004).

electoral geography The study of geograph-

ical aspects of the organization, conduct and

results of elections. Pioneering studies were

conducted early in the twentieth century, but

most of the literature – produced by a small

number of specialists – dates from the 1960s on.

Because voting in national and local elec-

tions is almost invariablyplace-bound (i.e.

people have to cast their vote in a specified

area, usually that containing their home) and

the results are published for those places, a

great deal of data that can be subject to geo-

graphical (i.e. spatial) analysis is created.

Merely mapping election outcomes suggests

that geography is ‘epiphenomenal’, however:

that there is nothing inherently geographical

about the processes producing the outcome,

which just happens to be produced and dis-

playable in spatial form. For geographers such

as Agnew (1987a) and Cox (1969), however,

thedecision-makingprocesses underpinning

those mapped patterns are inherently geo-

graphical. The socialization of voters is a con-

textual process (cf.contextual effect) and

much of the social interaction that precedes

a voting decision is locally based, in the

household andneighbourhood– hence the

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ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY