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The article comments on the article "The postmodernism challenge: reconstructing human geography" by Michael Dear that was published in the 1988 issue of journal "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers." The author expresses that the work allows the inclusion of social theory into the writings of geographers that gives more open claims to knowledge. It states that the paper is instrumental in promoting language awareness in human sciences within geography among geographers. It is argued that human geographic research is an implicit or explicit context of the article.

In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society. It also challenges the modern science-politics settlement, where natural science speaks for a stable, objective Nature. This paper reviews recent efforts to develop ‘multinatural’ alternatives that provide an environmentalism that need not make recourse to Nature. Focusing on biodiversity conservation, the paper draws together work in the social and natural sciences to present an interdisciplinary biogeography for conservation in the Anthropocene. This approach is developed through an engagement with the critiques of neoliberal natures offered by political ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. In seeking to explain change within contemporary society, financialization has circulated less widely than similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that research has been insufficiently attentive to space and place, both in terms of processes and effects. Financialization is a profoundly spatial phenomenon, representing as it does the search for a spatial-temporal fix, or quasi-resolution of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization, focusing in particular on the idea of financial ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the beginnings of a renaissance in the field of comparative urban studies. The paper discusses this body of work's history, drawing on contributions from across the social sciences. Following this it highlights some of the work's limits, namely its weak theorization of place, scale and causality. The paper then offers a relational comparative approach to the study of cities as a means of attending to these limits. This acknowledges both the territorial and relational geographies behind the production of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with understanding the geography of intellectual creativity and change using as a case study the quantitative revolution in geography. First, I review briefly the sea change occurring over the last 40 years in understanding intellectual production, and made most forcefully in the literature in the sociology of scientific knowledge. I highlight three elements: the nature and persistence of intellectual breaks and ruptures; the embodiedness and material embeddedness of the intellectual process; and the centrality of networks and alliances. Secondly, I take each of these three components of intellectual production, and work them through different theories of place to illuminate the role of the geographical within each. In particular, I argue that the geography of intellectual rupture is clarified by using Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, that the place of intellectual embodiment and embeddedness is elucidated by Kevin Hetherington and John Law's work on materiality, and that spaces of network and alliance are enhanced by the recent writings on place by Nigel Thrift. Finally, using these three features I present an interpretive analysis of the place of geography's quantitative revolution drawing upon 36 oral histories I conducted with first- and second-generation pioneers of that movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expedition's complicity in the imperial project of conquest, extraction and settlement has placed it as an object of critique, but largely discredited its significance as a valid research method in the critical social sciences. Yet dismissing the expedition merely as an imperial remnant risks ignoring more nuanced histories that bear no resemblance to myths of conquest and masculine heroics. Instead, this paper considers the expedition as a malleable practice that can be critically appropriated and manipulated in ways that retain and further the critique of violence and knowledge production, while also experimenting with creative alternatives to some of its conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the modalities and whereabouts of power – and specifically the spatiotemporal contingencies and reach of power relations – be more effectively studied? This paper shows how issues of validity and reflexivity restrict existing empirical work’s ability to advance understandings of power, and demonstrates how such issues can be overcome through the refined use of methods and analytical techniques that tease out the double contingencies of the social relations that underlie power. Refinements are shown to be possible by learning, in particular, from approaches to analysing power elsewhere in the social sciences, and particularly from management studies and linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human geography is in a unique position to understand how local structural factors shape social, political, and ultimately economic outcomes. Indeed, the discipline has had much to say about the interaction between local institutions and the economy in general, and about how the broader institutions of society influence local economic development. Yet, to date, geographers have for the most part avoided debates on more generalized theories of economic growth and development. With the increasing recognition — among sociologists, political scientists and even economists — that explaining economic growth robustly requires taking into account the role of both formal society-wide institutions and local and sometimes informal institutions, geographers are in a position to make an important contribution. In order to do so, however, they will need to take greater account of the theories and developments that are taking place outside the discipline. Using the framework of community and society as complementary structural forces shaping development trajectories, this paper presents a broad overview of the principal theoretical and empirical developments in the institutionalist approaches to economic development and identifies areas in which geographical research could contribute to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Our aim in this paper is to prompt debate about the purpose and practice of such an anticipatory ethical review. We begin by describing the rich and varied ethical and political debates ongoing in human geography. We argue that these are, at best, ignored and, at worst, threatened by this system of ethical review by committee. We describe the emergence of these formal mechanisms of research governance and important differences between the ethical contexts, history, and demands of research in the medical and social sciences. The paper draws on empirical research investigating National Health Service (NHS) research ethics committees to propose three salutary lessons geographers would do well to consider from experience elsewhere with ethical review. We argue that in review by committee deliberations extend beyond the ethical to include the methodological, that the system is a self-perpetuating and increasingly rule-bound mechanism, and that despite a rhetoric of accountability it is a system as obscure to outsiders as professional ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reopens debates of geographic theorizations and conceptualizations of social capital. I argue that human geographers have tended to underplay the analytic value of social capital, by equating the concept with dominant policy interpretations. It is contended that geographers could more explicitly contribute to pervasive critical social science accounts. With this in mind, an embodied perspective of social capital is constructed. This synthesizes Bourdieu's capitals and performative theorizations of identity, to progress the concept of social capital in four key ways. First, this theorization more fully reconnects embodied differences to broader socioeconomic processes. Second, an exploration of how embodied social differences can emerge directly from the political-economy and/or via broader operations of power is facilitated. Third, a path is charted through the endurance of embodied inequalities and the potential for social transformation. Finally, embodied social capital can advance social science conceptualizations of the spatiality of social capital, by illuminating the importance of broader sociospatial contexts and relations to the embodiment of social capital within individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent attempts to develop geographies of science both within, and beyond, the discipline of geography. Such efforts have been most successful in work by historical geographers and historians of geography. Investigating the 'geographical turn' evident across science studies more widely, this paper considers a broad range of engagements with spatiality by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and posthumanist practice theorists. In doing so, the paper thus argues that different geographies of science are emerging. Indeed, bringing together variegated conceptions of the spatiality of scientific activity will allow for wider audiences for geographies of science, inspire further investigation of the geographical sciences, and provide resources for debates regarding disciplinary histories and futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography grew rapidly within the British university system during the 1950s and 1960s. In the middle of the latter decade, however, the discipline was initially excluded from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This essay looks at why such an ostensibly successful discipline was not incorporated in the initial plans and how a successful challenge led to its later acceptance in the SSRC. It shows that the acceptance was a consequence of individual initiative rather than representations from the discipline's learned societies, throwing further light (as discussed in the first paper in this pair) on their failure to promote the discipline during that key period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report juxtaposes recent statements on geographical knowledge by Robert Kaplan and David Harvey to review current concerns in the history and philosophy of geography. Three general trends are identified. First, there have been attempts to address the geographical contributions evident in the corpus of key thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant. Second, a broader concern with articulating histories of disciplinary subfields, such as cultural, economic and physical geography, has been evident, often connected to personal biographies and reminiscences. Third, a body of work has attempted to put geography’s story into dialogue with that of the wider social sciences, especially for the Cold War period. The paper concludes by noting the continuing difficulties of engaging with the histories and philosophies of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economic geography the notion of the network has come to play a critical role in a range of debates. Yet networks are rarely construed in an explicit fashion. They are, rather, assumed as some sort of more enduring social relations. This paper seeks to foreground these implicit assumptions – and their limitations – by tracing the selective engagement of economic geography with network approaches in economic sociology. The perception of networks in economic geography is mainly informed by the network governance approach that is founded on Mark Granovetter's notion of embeddedness. By embracing the network governance approach, economic geography bypassed the older tradition of the social network approach. Economic geography thus discarded not only the concerns for network position and structure but also more calculative and strategic perceptions of networks prevailing in Ron Burt's work. Beyond these two dominant traditions, economic geography has, more recently, started to tinker with the poststructuralist metaphor of the rhizome of actor-network theory while it took no notice of Harrison White's notions of publics and polymorphous network domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the emergence of what might be called a 're-scaling' literature. This paper tries to combine this literature with insights from regulation theory in order to identify some of the ways in which antagonistic relationships are regulated in the after-Fordist period. It is argued that re-scaling not only affects (anti-)regulatory forces by manipulating the power distribution among different agents but also manipulates the ways in which agents perceive their own positionality. The propositions are illustrated with evidence from The Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geography has become increasingly fragmented into a series of intellectual solitudes that has created isolation, producing monologues rather than conversation, and raising the question of how knowledge production should proceed. Inspired by science studies and feminism, we argue for an engaged pluralist approach to economic geography based on dialogue, translation, and the creation of 'trading zones'. We envision a determinedly anti-monist and anti-reductionist discipline that recognizes and connects a diverse range of circulating local epistemologies: a politics of difference rather than of consensus or popularity. Our model is GIS that underwent significant shifts during the last decade by practicing engaged pluralism, and creating new forms of knowledge. Similar possibilities we suggest exist for economic geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Forum makes four points. First, it expands our knowledge on the writing and publishing of research monographs in different countries and so it moves beyond accounts which generalize from the UK experience. Second, the Forum considers international differences in the ways in which the assessment of academic performances affects the writing and publishing of geography research monographs. Third, it considers the ways in which structural changes in the global publishing industry affect different national contexts unevenly. Finally, the Forum's different contributions reflect on how publishing books matters (or) not to geography as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space could make further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historical and cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scholarship into outer space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together the geographic literature on nuclear topics, and draws out the geographical dimensions of broader scholarship on ‘nuclearity’, to consider the premise of a nuclear landscape, and to offer a partial history of such landscapes. Places such as New Mexico’s Trinity Site have become iconic, at least in the United States, and a study of nuclear landscapes must consider the cultural force of spectacular weapons tests and related origin stories. But critical scholars have also looked beyond and below the distractions of mushroom clouds, to additional and alternative landscapes that are obscured by secrecy and relative banality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crutzen and Stoermer’s (2000) naming of the ‘Anthropocene’ has provoked lively debate across the physical and social sciences, but, while the term is gradually gaining acceptance as the signifier of the current geological epoch, it remains little more than a roughly defined place-holder for an era characterized by environmental and social uncertainty. The term invites deeper considerations of its meaning, significance, and consequences for thought and politics. For this Forum, we invited five scholars to reflect on how the Anthropocene poses challenges to the structures and habits of geography, politics, and their guiding concepts. The resulting essays piece together an agenda for geographic thought – and political engagement – in this emerging epoch. Collectively, they suggest that geography, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to address the conceptual challenges presented by the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this report, I use the organizing device of the A–Z to present a critical review of recent work under the banner of global production networks (GPN). The report positions GPN analysis in its broader intellectual context, profiles its distinctive contributions, and details a range of challenges that remain to effective economic-geographical theorizations of globalization dynamics and their impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discussions of ethics in recent human geography have been strongly inflected by readings of so-called ‘Continental Philosophy’. The ascendancy of this style of theorizing is marked by a tendency to stake ethical claims on ontological assertions, which effectively close down serious consideration of the problem of normativity in social science. Recent work on practical reason emerging from so-called ‘Analytical’ philosophy presents a series of challenges to how geographers approach the relationships between space, ethics, and power. This work revolves around attempts to displace long-standing dualisms between naturalism and normativity, by blurring boundaries between forms of action and knowledge which belong to a ‘space of causality’ and those that are placed in a ‘space of reasons’. The relevance of this blurring to geography is illustrated by reference to recent debates about the relationships between rationality and habit in unreflective action. Ongoing developments in this tradition of philosophy provide resources for strengthening a nascent strand of work on the geographies of practical reason that is evident in work on ethnomethodology, behaviour change, and geographies of action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this report, I review the intersection between cultural economy and economic geography research on money and finance. To date, economic geographers have engaged most extensively with cultural economy work on the calculative practices that (re)produce the international financial system. However, I argue that there is scope for economic geography to broaden its engagement with this literature by developing understandings of the co-constitutive relationship between variegated geographical contexts and calculative practices. Such an approach is valuable because it responds to calls for cultural economy research to consider the political and normative dimensions of money and finance more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents reports which identify a selection of significant developments and aim to acknowledge work conducted in and beyond the Anglo-American areas of the subdiscipline. It tackles several trends challenging the centers and hegemonies of White, Anglophone, western geography. It emphasizes how social geography can be reorientated and energized by the contrasting perspectives presented. The distinctive features toward indigenous, more-than-White/Anglo-American geographies are examined.

The article discusses the perceptions and understandings of the public concerning public geographies. Responses indicate that public geographies are multi-faceted, multiple and unbounded. Many are claimed to argue that public geographies are part of geographical furniture. Others relate public geographies to developments happening across social sciences and to the future. The article examines the enthusiasm for public engagement and public intellectualism which are manifested in many social science disciplines.

In the past two decades human geographers have intensely theorized scale, and extended claims that it is a foundational element of geographic theory. Yet attendant with this move has been a growing concern that scale has become an unwieldy concept laden with multiple, contradictory and problematic meanings. I share that concern, and argue that a similar debate about the usefulness of 'identity' as a conceptual category in social science offers instructive insights. Paralleling recent critiques of identity categories such as nation and race, I view the conceptual confusion surrounding scale - and scale politics - as, in part, the consequence of failing to make a clear distinction between scale as a category of practice and category of analysis. In adopting scale as a category of analysis geographers tend to reify it as a fundamental ontological entity, thereby treating a social category employed in the practice of sociospatial politics as a central theoretical tool. I argue that this analytical manoeuvre is neither helpful nor necessary, and outline its consequences in analyses of the politics of scale. Finally, I sketch the altered contours of a research programme for the politics of scale if we take this injunction seriously - both in terms of how we theorize scale as a category of practice and what becomes the focus of scale politics research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a debate about the need to restructure the basic foundations and core ideas of economic geography. The debate is initiated by Paul Krugman and his fellow economists who have proposed a new economic geography. The corresponding approaches have been classified as geographical economics. But they do not provide a basis for research in economic geography because the focus is directed toward the field of economics, the complex social realities of economics is neglected. This in turn, has stimulated debate about the research goals and methodology in economic geography.

This article examines the reconnections of "food and nature" and "farmers and agency" in rural geography. Both are vibrant areas with considerable possibilities for further work and for contributing not just to agro-food geographies but also to wider social science themes. The author notes that the reconnection of food and nature leads to current debates on hybridity and materialities and agro-food specialists should not lose sight of the wider theoretical debates around the said issues.

This article focuses on the use of terms exchange and circulation in social science. Broadly, the terms exchange and circulation have been adopted in a wide variety of ways in the social sciences to understand all kinds of movements of goods, ideas, people and money, particularly in the context of a globalizing world. More specifically, political economic notions of capital circulation and commodity exchange have been revisited and reworked in order to gain critical insight into the changing geographies of trade, finance, retail, distribution and consumption. While much of the literature on forms of exchange and circulation has focused on the stretching out of economic and social networks in a global and neo-liberal context, and the power of corporate capital wielded through these networks, there has been a turn more recently to consider forms of exchange and circulation that present alternatives to these global capitalist networks. Understanding alternative organizational economies as spaces of hope, geographies of alternative exchange and circulation would appear to be influenced as much by a renewed political turn in economic geography as the oft-cited cultural turn.

Focuses on the different constructions of neoliberalism that are in existence in the world. Coexistence of neoliberal impulses in a hybrid relationship with various forms of social democracy and residual welfare-statism in Europe; Mapping of transnational neoliberalisms; Origins of neoliberalism.

The meaning and understanding of the concept of region has been changing along with the ways in which human geographers understand and describe the world. The social turn in science has focused research on the intensity of interpersonal relations of a region’s inhabitants, on the dialectical process of the regional constraints to social relations and the influence of the social relations on creation of the region. When observing and experiencing the process of transition in central Europe, one is ‘impressed’ how historically related social blueprints of regions deeply influence contemporary events.

After making a substantial impact across the social sciences and humanities for more than a decade, interest in postmodernism is waning, creating an opportunity to reassess this theoretical programme free of the hyperbole that frequently surrounded discussion in the past. In its contextualism and critique of metanarratives, I approach postmodernism as a form of local knowledge, characterized as knowledge inevitably framed through the here of our collective presence and the now of our collective interests. Knowledge in short is group-centred, and chronocentric in its privileging of the current. This argument is extended to the idea and practice of modernism in the built environment, and contrasted with a postmodernism that reflexively works from an epistemology and ontology of the local. I suggest that lessons drawn from a critical postmodernism, emanating from the social movements of the 1965-75 period, have had constructive results in the built environment. As such, the legacy of postmodernism should not be forgotten as its life cycle seemingly draws to a close. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The concept of society is of fundamental importance in social science research. Yet there is little explicit theorization among the mainstream social sciences of how society should be conceived of geographically. The dominant tendency is to take a state-territorial definition of society for granted. While an increasing reflexivity has recently emerged regarding the relationship between social science discourses and the states’ agency and projects, the role of state territorial boundaries in structuring the production of knowledge of society has not received equal attention. This article seeks to make a contribution to ongoing work which focuses explicitly on the interrelationships between governmental practice, bodies of knowledge, and territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the French regulation approach has heavily infiltrated the research agendas of the social sciences. This has been particularly conspicuous in economic geography, urban and regional analysis and political economy. Within these subdisciplines, some new research inquiries have departed from the original `first generation' concern with economic crisis to analyse a range of issues such as the state form, and local and regional governance. This article reviews several of the more promising analyses which have consciously sought to fill some `missing links' in the ongoing regulationist research project, and which have considerably enhanced our undertaking of the contemporary regulatory milieu. These post-Parisian themes have focused on the process of regulation and its discursive and political constitution; the geography of regulation and spatial scale; and the role of the state in and through the regulatory process. The article concludes with some implications for applying this emergent regulationist agenda to empirically informed research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the life and works of Allan R. Pred, a geographer and social scientist in the U.S. Pred was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1936. Pred's father was a high school French language teacher and his mother is a housewife and musician. He started his career as a theorist of the American city and has fourteen books and monographs on geography and social science translated into seven languages. The author added that Pred was one of the most-cited scholars in the geography and conducted research on modernity.

Focuses on the meaning of progress in geography and the social sciences in the light of the debates in the philosophy and sociology of science. Notion of progress from a realistic-constructivist perspective; Concept of the term derived from different philosophies of science; Relationships between disciplinary progress and social and institutional contexts.