Socio-Economic Geography and Interdisciplinary Synthesis in the Study of the Russian North and Arctic

Abstract

The North and the Arctic are legitimate objects of interdisciplinary research, the methodology of which involves the content subjects of sciences themselves. To solve complex problems the author proposes informal convergence of sciences by mating the key concepts of each scientific discipline, included in the research project, and targeted using a variety of analytical methods. The most important aspects of interdisciplinarity are internal characteristics of the research object, not its external (multi-dimensional) attributes of description. Socio-economic geography plays the most important role in studying the North and the Arctic, if it is included in an interdisciplinary synthesis (along with physical geography, statistics, regional economy, sociology, etc.) by its «final part» - the scientific discipline that studies territorial natural-economic complexes. The latter are represented as a social geosystems, having approximately equal to the dimension of natural geosystems. With such approach to the interdisciplinarity, the North and the Arctic, taken as a whole, are not socio- economic systems, and therefore their main issues turn on the local and regional levels

Keywords

• the North
• the Arctic
• geography
• interdisciplinary synthesis
• geosystems
• naturaleconomic complex