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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Introduction: Situating Social Geographies

Susan J. Smith, Rachel Pain, Sallie A. Marston and John Paul Jones III

The label ‘social geography’ is more than a and Panelli (2004) turns attention, theoreti- century old. As evidenced in correspondence, cally and empirically, to the many facets French geographer Élisée Reclus appears to of difference. Social geographies can be have coined the term around 1895 (Dunbar, specialized – as in Peach’s (1975) version of 1977). He wrote about it in the early drafts and ‘spatial sociology’; but they can also be so final versions of his six-volume work L’Homme wide-ranging as to subsume the whole of et la Terre (Man and the Earth), which was human geography, as evidenced in the several published posthumously in 1905 (see also edited collections that profile the eclecticism Kropotkin, 1902). Concerned with the way of the subject (see, for example, Eyles, 1986; space mediates the production and reproduc- Pacione, 1987; Hamnett, 1996). tion of key social divides – such as class, race, Like every other part of geography, social gender, age, sexuality and disability – social geographies have changed with the times: geography eventually became broadly estab- methodological signatures have shifted, and lished as ‘the study of social relations and intellectual fortunes have waxed and waned, the spatial structures that underpin those as topics that once seemed cutting-edge turn relations’ (Jackson, 2000b: 753). Within that out to be mundane. In recent years, moreover, broad rubric, different authors have the volatility of politics and economy has approached the subject in a variety of ways: unsettled existing intellectual traditions, Jackson and Smith (1984) set out its philo- demanding a radical overhaul of nearly every sophical underpinnings; Cater and Jones way of knowing and being; and social geog- (1989) opt for a focus on social problems; raphies are not exempt. Successive ‘turns’ to Valentine (2001) concentrates on the many culture, politics, environment and economy scales of inclusion, exclusion and identity; have, indeed, frequently eclipsed geographers’ Pain et al. (2001), like Ley (1983) and Knox identification with the social. During the (2000), explore the production of inequality; 1990s, for example, there was a sense that

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human geographers had become so caught up action research in social geography is gaining in the circulation of discourses and the insta- momentum in a bid to develop fully collabora- bility of representations that they were unable tive research, publication and intervention, in to recognize the material practices sustaining partnership with those who have traditionally social exclusion. In response, Smith (1993), been the ‘subjects’ of research. Gregson (1995) and Peach (2002) all – in There is, of course, no singular history or their different ways – expressed concern that unified trajectory for the subject: social geog- social geographers’ radical commitment to raphies, like all forms of knowledge and tackling oppression, inequality and poverty knowing, are diverse. Notably, there is a was weakening. More recently, in a world ‘geography of social geography’. The gener- where culture merges with nature, humanity alizations above, and indeed those which is wired to technology, genetics blur into follow, refer especially to the Anglo-American experience, and the human and non-human geographies about which this handbook has form complex material and affective assem- most to say. But it is important to recognize blages, even the idea of ‘the social’ seems that, beyond the Anglo-American realms and less persuasive than it once was. which seem still to marginalize the geogra- At the start of the twenty-first century, the phies that are produced elsewhere and other ‘social’ has certainly begun to be articulated in ways of approaching the subject are taking new (and renewed) ways. For example, along- centre stage. These are, as might be expected, side a resurgence of concern for social justice, highly diverse (Kitchin, 2007). Particularly ‘the social’ has been reframed to express more exciting are developments in the Antipodes, directly the materiality of social life (Gregson, where attempts to integrate various indige- 2003); social geographies have begun to build nous perspectives into geographical scholar- capacity for more moral, caring and politically ship present a fundamental challenge to ideas aware research (Cloke, 2002); and the subject rooted in the ‘global north’ (Kearns and has been reinvigorated by ideas, drawn from Panelli, 2007; Kindon and Latham, 2002; philosophers such as Deleuze, Guattari and Panelli, 2008). In some parts of Europe, in Latour, which have prompted geographers contrast, social geographies are barely visible: interested in non-representational theory to a poor relation to economic or cultural geog- interpret ‘the social’ in quite different ways. In raphies (see Garcia-Ramón et al., 2007, on short, understandings of the social have, on the Spain); And where they do thrive they often one hand, splintered (creating both tensions lack the critical edge that is so much their and complementarities in the subject), but on hallmark elsewhere (see, for example, Musterd the other hand, they have also become more and de Pater, 2007, on Holland; Timár, 2007, nuanced and (often) increasingly relevant on Hungary). These multiple social geogra- (Del Casino and Marston, 2006). phies reflect both national traditions and the Questions of relevance, in particular, have intellectual and political trajectories of indi- acquired a new urgency as critiques of glo- vidual authors. As Kitchin’s (2007) collection balization and neoliberalism have called for shows, they all contribute in valuable ways to practical action from inside as well as outside the patchwork of social geographies whose the academy. While combining research and whole – we will now argue – adds up to much activism has been a longstanding interest for more than the sum of its parts. Importantly, a minority of social geographers, an editorial while the Handbook that follows is mainly published in Area by Kitchin and Hubbard written by Anglo-American social geogra- (1999) marked a sea-change of interest in phers for an English-reading audience, it also this aspect of the subdiscipline (see also draws from wider traditions which are alter- Fuller and Kitchin, 2004; Pain, 2003; Kindon ing what social geographies are and redefin- et al., 2007). One result is that, across a wide ing who these geographies are for (see, for range of contexts, inclusive, participatory example, in this volume, Kobayashi

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and de Leeuw (Chapter 4), and Kindon and underlying aim will be to provide new inter- others (Section 23)). pretations of, say, residential segregation or the spaces of citizenship. Similarly, social geographers might know a lot about the interweaving of genetic, behavioural and MOTIVATIONS environmental precursors of disease, but in disentangling these factors, their aim is to Scholarship self-consciously labelled ‘social account for the enduring link between place geography’ may be radical or conservative, and health. One of the key achievements of life changing or mundane, engagingly relevant, social geography over the years has, indeed, comprehensively bland or uniquely quirky. It been to speak powerfully to the policies and is above all diverse, covering many topics, practices that have made experiencing different embracing a mix of methods, rooted in a kinds of spaces – at home, at work, in cities, in variety of places and practised in different, rural communities, in schools, hospitals and multiple, ways. Hence the title: a Handbook prisons – so divided and unequal. of Social Geographies. But why collect so The challenge for the 21st century is that many snippets of such a wide-ranging subject these issues – of exclusion, inequality and into a single volume? It is certainly not the welfare – not only persist but have tended to desire to revive, define or narrate a particular become both entrenched and unexceptional. vision or version of social geography that A series of successive human and environmen- inspired this work. The time when defining tal catastrophes has prompted a crisis of jus- what is and is not appropriate for scholars to tice, politics and ethics, demanding a radical research has long passed. So too has the space overhaul of nearly every way of knowing and for positioning the social ‘turn’ as a means of, being. For geography, the disciplinary practi- for example, reconstituting geography as a calities of this are compounded by the extent social science, or placing social problems at to which traditional appeals to space, either the heart of the subject, or creating any sin- in its own right or in its entanglements with gular role for academic geography. Compiling time, have been far too successful. No disci- a historiography of social geography might pline escaped the ‘spatial turn’ into the new have been an interesting option, but more millennium, and since then, time has simi- compelling was a sense of the urgency – and larly repositioned itself at the centre of the timeliness – expressed by colleagues and social stage. Geography’s perpetual identity authors for considering what social geogra- crisis is back on the agenda, callously strip- phy might become. So, this collection is, ping away a once-neat spatio-temporal above all, a commentary on what social geog- container from the ‘selection of different raphers can do for the projects of social sci- things’ whose coherence it formerly secured. ence in general and for the conduct of Human geography in general and social geography in particular. geography in particular have merged into To this end, it is worth remembering that, other subject specialisms; disciplinary space in the past, social geographies often gained is fractured, its role fragmented across a new their momentum by exploring a wide range of intellectual division of labour. specialist subjects, all of which are inspired, The editors and authors in this Handbook first, by a pressing interest in how the social offer some thoughts about what comes next world works, and second by a common by using social geography as a prism, refracting respect for the power of geography – of a subfield whose specialisms were once arrangements in time and space – in accounting linked by a common concern with ‘space and for this (Buttimer, 1968). Social geographers place’ into a spectrum of approaches whose might, then, have specialist knowledge about central theme is that of ‘making connections’. the laws against discrimination, but their This focus on connectivity (across space, place,

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sites, situations and positionings) combines prefaces the chapters concerned. The discus- the varieties of social geographies into an sion here is therefore intended simply to give outward-looking enterprise whose momentum a flavour of what is to come as we – the edi- comes from forging connections, crossing tors, and the 37 other authors who have con- intellectual horizons and being committed to tributed to this work – attempt to capture, making a difference. The remainder of this perhaps create, the shape of the future. To essay amplifies this point. that end, we offer a passing comment on the We begin by offering some reflections on changing landscapes of difference and diver- the rich archive assembled in the name of sity, the intercalation of economy and society, social geography. This archive is not pre- the vexed question of well-being, the urgency sented as a systematic historiography but of revisiting social justice, and the challenge rather as a commentary on a series of founda- of actually doing social geographies. tional propositions – around society and space, social inequality and welfare, ethics, morality and justice, and methodological diversity – that have intruded insistently into REFLECTIONS the lexicon of social geography for at least a hundred years. Sifting through the debris of It is always tempting to cling to the idea that days long gone, we present a selection of disciplines and their constituencies ‘progress’; themes which, far from being locked in the that knowledge is cumulative; that what we past, speak actively to the future. know now (and how we learn about it) must The second section of this introduction turns be somehow better – more refined, ethically attention more squarely onto the connections improved, more fitted to the times – than any- scholars now trace between social geographies, thing that has gone before. And it would be on the one hand, and the subject matter of worrying if there were not some grain of truth geography’s other subfields, indeed of the in the progressive thesis. But the history of varied specialisms of social science as a whole, ideas is a fractured, even murky, affair. As on the other. By profiling four nodes in this writings, reputations, careers and fashions web of connectivity – social–nature, social– come and go, great ideas often do displace economic, social–political and social–cultural mediocrity, and enduring truths can nudge – we suggest that social geographies today are, passing fashions out of the limelight; but, above all, about the possibilities and limitations equally, things of value are lost, trivia have a of relatedness; about the spaces of creativity habit of taking centre stage, average ideas are forged ‘in between’ established approaches and too often stripped from old contexts and made ideas. These, at least, are the kinds of social to look new, and some of the least inspiring geographies that run through this collection, as themes can be surprisingly sticky. Turning to the authors explore the construction, production the past is, therefore, anything but straightfor- and practice of ideas that reach across old ward. Yet the central themes of this book owe boundaries, seek out new alliances and perhaps a considerable debt to earlier generations, and help create a new kind of world. it is worth attending to these sources not just Finally, the third section of this overview as historical documents, but also to consider essay concludes with some projections – a what lessons they hold for today. In this sec- taste of the sections comprising the five parts tion we consider four enduring and important of the handbook, which, far from representing foundations for social geography – themes a stylized account of ‘progress’ in social geog- that have come to define the subfield as a dis- raphy, are very much about the multiple lines tinct enterprise within and beyond geography. of flight that are now poised to materialize. First we address the truism that social geog- Each of these sections has a short editorial raphy has always been committed to – well – introduction of its own, which immediately the idea of the social. Initially, as we see

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below, this meant documenting the structures Society and space together and processes that connect societies with space and thereby infuse the different modes of First, then, social geography has always been engagement and avoidance among people. committed to integrating ‘the social’ with ‘the Increasingly, as the essays that follow show, it is spatial’. This seems like an obvious point, about exploring the social and emotional con- given the combination of terms that identify tent of relations that tie people to the elements ‘social geography’ as a distinct subfield. But of nature and to the object-world of things. connecting society and space is not that Second, there is a longstanding pre-occupa- simple: the materialities and concepts regis- tion among social geographers (much more tered by these terms have seen considerable so, ironically, than among economic geogra- theoretical disruption over the past century. phers) with the hard edge of inequality and Society, for its part, was often the taken-for- the uneven experience of welfare. Whether to granted empirical description of the charac- its credit or not (and it has been criticized for teristics of a population, typically demarcated this), social geography has tended to be asso- by national, linguistic, environmental or other ciated with a multi-dimensional view of ine- boundaries (Vidal de la Blache, 1911; see quality: with a vision of social structure in Buttimer, 1971). As the residual of cultural which income does not map directly onto traits, and particularly when constrained by class, and where class is not the only axis of national and sub-national boundaries in data inclusion; but where, nevertheless, all relations collection, characteristics of ‘the social’ were are power filled, and where inequalities, which often reduced to demographic data on birth may be shifting, are always systematic and are rates, death rates, ‘racial’ composition, sex enacted through the medium of space. ratios, age structure and the like (Hettner, Third, enlarging on this, social geography 1977; Trewartha, 1953). has always been a moral enterprise, charac- Under the theoretical influences of modern terized above all by a drive for the principles sociology, however, the study of society in and practicalities of justice. Some of this work social geography took both an institutional has focused primarily on critique: on ‘simply’ and a relational ‘turn’ in the post-war era. On trying to understand how unequal the world the one hand, society became increasingly might be, and aiming to document the extent distinguished from culture through a focus and experience of injustice. Increasingly, how- on institutions like the family, the school and ever, social geographies are drawn into a nor- the workplace. On the other hand, a concen- mative ‘turn’ in social research, and there is tration on social relations between people, growing interest not only in how things are, rather than simple descriptions of their socio- but also in what they should become. demographic characteristics, led to a more Finally, social geographies have acquired interesting set of questions regarding the a reputation for methodological eclecticism. status of the individual within society In the past, this may have been cast as a (Giddens, 1984), including her or his rela- weakness: a failure to grasp the importance tionship to social structures and to the institu- of theory; a tendency to lapse into unthinking tions that embed and perpetuate them. All of empiricism. But more recently this eclecti- these orientations led sociologists in particu- cism is being positioned as a strength: not lar to amass a large body of theory orientated just because mixed methods are coming into around the concept of ‘stratification’ – the their own, but because of the space this opens study of the differential allocation of and up for a wider range of tactics of encounter, access to resources, including power, among partnership and activism. The methods of different social groups. ‘Society’ was further social geography are increasingly geared to differentiated – destabilized is perhaps a enhancing its practical relevance and exploit- better descriptor – by the social constructivist ing its normative leanings. approaches developed in the 1980s and 1990s

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(see Jackson and Penrose, 1993; S.J. Smith, conceptualize new approaches to linking 1989). society and space: not a space in which social Like the idea of the social, the concept of characteristics are mapped and relations geography also had its unfurlings. Early on, unfold on space, but a geography that is inte- ‘space’ was reduced to topographical or clima- gral to and formed by those characteristics tological regions that underwrote sweeping and relations. An overview of this shift is approximations of cultural and social differ- given in S.J. Smith (1999, 2005). The more ences (see ‘Social/Nature’ below). This view of contemporary view – which drew in large containerized space fits well with the undiffer- measure on interpretations of Henri entiated view of society, as national and sub- Lefebvre’s ‘production of space’ (1991, orig- national boundaries were convenient inally 1974) – holds that social and spatial demarcations for simplifying the collection of relations are co-determinate. Thus, for exam- data on populations and enabling the carto- ple, a social relation such as patriarchy cannot graphic description of spatial variations. Against be described or analyzed outside of the segre- the backdrop of the ‘quantitative revolution’ of gated spaces of the home, which in traditional the 1960s, however, social geographers came to architecture has tended to separate and embrace the mapping and analysis of spatial thereby reinforce the gendered character of variations, using what for many were the new different social and work activities (Hayden, tools of statistics – with factor analysis and 1984). Likewise, a city’s geography – its spatial regression leading the way. Social geographic distributions of homes, day-care facilities research during this period focused on the and workspaces – can produce a triple-day, a geography of poverty (Morrill and Wohlenberg, constrained time-geography that adds com- 1971), social inequality (D. Smith, 1973), resi- muting to a workday already burdened by the dential differentiation (Murdie, 1969), ghetto time spent in production and social reproduc- formation (H.M. Rose, 1971), residential relo- tion (England, 1993; Hanson and Pratt, 1995; cation (Brown and Moore, 1970) and migration Preston and McLafferty, 1993). Not that these (Roseman, 1977), among other topics. Central, relations and spatialities are uncontested: and controversial, questions in these studies indeed, older patriarchies are challenged by were the nature and direction of spatial corre- modern housing designs, and by partners lates: how did racial distributions relate to spa- who do their share of coordinating the tial patterns of poverty, for example? Whether demands of social reproduction. But, under or not the quantitative ‘spatial sociologies’ the dialectical view, any shift in social rela- inspired by such questions could ever yield a tions requires some sort of spatial reorganiza- definitive answer – could measures of the tion, some new form of socio-spatial practice intensity of segregation or the extent of isola- that brings into being new possibilities, includ- tion say anything about the degree of ‘choice’ ing new social spaces. or ‘constraint’ structured into residential pat- This conjoined emphasis on space and terns, for example – geographers made an society finds adherents in other social disci- important empirical contribution as they exper- plines, especially in sociology following imented with different techniques, sought Giddens (1984), with stratification scholars cross-contextual validation of findings, and undertaking what amounts to a spatial ‘turn’ engaged with mainstream theories in sociol- (Gans, 2002; Gieryn, 2000; Lobao, 1993, ogy, economics and political science in formu- 2004; Tickamyer, 2000). As a recent book lating their hypotheses (see Del Casino and aimed at integrating contemporary stratifica- Jones III, 2007). tion theory with theories of space, scale and It was not until the rise of dialectical spati- place proclaims: ‘Increasingly, sociologists ality in the mid-to-late 1970s (Harvey, 1973; view geographic space alongside race, class, Soja, 1980; Massey, 1984; McDowell, 1983; gender, age and sexuality as an important S.J. Smith, 1984) that geographers began to source of differential access to resources and

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opportunities …’ (Lobao et al., 2007: 3). This is pointless to look for political agreement, is, perhaps encouragingly, very similar to because there is little to find (although there is, definitions of social geography written as as we later suggest, scope to build productive much as a decade before, and it is a reminder alliances around morality and ethics across of the extent to which the sub-fields of diverse socialist, feminist and anti-racist human geography can be a catalyst, as well research agendas). What is important here is the as a crucible, for cross-disciplinary and intra- extent to which social geography – whatever disciplinary engagement. its politics – has been concerned with the multi-dimensionality of inequality, whether forged through the spatial relations of pro- Social inequality and welfare duction (income and class), embedded in patterns of distribution (the provision and When social geography emerged at the turn consumption of education, health care, housing, of the twentieth century, it was during a and financial services, as well as the acquisition period of popular political ferment and revolu- of commodities and experiences), or ingrained tionary hope in Europe and the Americas and in the structures of participation (the entitle- in response to a myth about the inevitability ments and obligations of citizenship). of ‘progress’. It was in this context that Élysée Inevitably, handling these many dimensions Reclus, who was pivotal to the emerging of inequality means that, at some times, in field, wrote L’Homme et la Terre. In effect some places, and among some authors, certain this means that the first comprehensive state- themes have been privileged over others. ment about social geography was aimed at There is, for example, a rich archive of opposing all forms of domination of people research focusing on either race, or gender, and nature (Clark and Martin, 2004). Reclus or sexuality, or religion, or age, or health, or attempted to synthesize social theory, social disability. Whether for practical reasons, or and environmental geography and anarchism, for heuristic purposes, or to make an impor- in order to ‘help humanity discover its mean- tant political point, there has been a tendency ing as a historical being and as an aspect of to separate out different axes of oppression; the earth’s larger processes of self-realiza- and these enduring markers of inequality tion’ and to demonstrate that ‘the discovery (race, gender, class, age and disability) con- of these truths about ourselves can also help tinue to be interrogated in this collection. us to act consciously and responsibly as part Amongst other things, this orientation reflects of a developing human community and a and extends a tradition that has always been developing earth community’ (Clark and interested in the intersection of social struc- Martin, 2004: 3). In light of this, it is particu- tures with income or class, but which equally larly interesting to note, as Dunbar (1977) has resisted the temptation to reduce every- has pointed out, that in nineteenth century thing to these financial markers. France ‘socialist’ and ‘social’ were synony- In practice, of course, most scholars also mous terms and that, from its first appear- recognize that even the most entrenched and ance as a distinct concept, social geography enduring markers of difference (which are was, within a larger discipline, the orienta- both symbols of identification and principles tion most committed to understanding and of inclusion of exclusion) are not separate. All addressing social ills. social relations are gendered, and racialized, This mantle has subsequently been worn and about ability/disability, and structured by by a number of key figures who might be age, and mediated by income and class, and thought of as social geographers. While it is so on. The challenge is to ask whether and fair to say that social geography has been when the many categories of social life dominated by scholars arranged from the should be held together, and to establish centre to the Left of the political spectrum, it when, where and why it might be appropriate

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to focus on one of them and not another. It is systems, educational structures and welfare particularly important to grasp the first as transfers: none of these is entirely reducible to well as the second element of this challenge, the other; each demands interrogation. at a time when the systematic, overlapping Recognizing this inspired a generation of and interacting character of different styles of research on welfare geography which, amongst discrimination and exclusion tends – partly other things, pointed to the merits of distribut- through a valid concern to recognize qualities ing goods and services according to need rather of difference and expressions of diversity – to than ability to pay (see Smith and Easterlow be fragmented and dispersed. So the editors (2004) for a critique and reaffirmation of this and authors of this collection seek explicitly tradition). And when welfare states came under to recognize and address the splintering of attack from the political Right this tradition, in social life, not only embracing the extent to turn, informed a new wave of critical research which difference and inequality are multidi- on geographies of welfare restructuring, whose mensional, but grasping the significance of momentum was established well before the their intersectionality and engaging in an label ‘neo-liberalism’ gained the notoriety it has ongoing struggle to recognize and confront today. the complex disequalizing practices embedded Second, this work on welfare geographies in struggles for welfare and wellbeing. helped identify the challenge of promoting One of the things the diverse social structur- well-being as a goal that is separate from (if ings of human life share is, of course, the fact related to) poverty, and which requires its own that they are mediated by geography. Space research agenda. This was part of a rallying and place (as materials and as metaphors) cry for a shift from medical to health geogra- have accordingly been powerful routes into a phies (Kearns and Moon 2002), and it sowed better understanding of just how inequality the seeds of a new interest in geographies of works. David Smith recognized this in the well-being and contentment, which is taken early 1970s when he coined the much-quoted up in this volume. phrase ‘Who gets what, where and how?’ (Smith 1973, 1977). The core of the question is plucked from the heart of moral philosophy, Ethics, morality and justice but Smith’s attempt to operationalize it in geography drew attention to the distributional A third thread that binds the history and inequalities that inspired a generation of geography of socio-geographical research is ‘welfare geographies’. This achieved a the positioning of such scholarship as part of number of important things, two of which an ethical and moral enterprise. The subdis- merit particular attention. cipline has always been characterized by a First, the broad focus on ‘who gets what’ drive for justice, through strands of work that underlined the extent to which societies are carry a strong sense both of morality (what is structured not just by markets, incomes and wrong or right with the world) and of ethics employments, but also by inequalities in (what our responsibilities toward others are). entitlements to, and the materials of, welfare. Such scholarship is concerned above all to That is, while some of the key divides that employ moral and ethical sensibilities to have preoccupied social geography can be question the relevance of geography in the accounted for with reference to the workings pursuit of fairness and equity (see, for exam- of economy, this is only true to the extent that ple, Cloke, 2002; Proctor and Smith, 1999; economies are structured, tempered and D. Smith, 2000). divided by a politics of welfare. Race-making The impulse for this comes from several works, and gender divisions and other inequali- overlapping directions, all of them radical ties are reproduced through the interaction and geographies in the sense of wanting to break interconnection of labour markets, housing with complacency and to use both practice

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and critique to create a better world. This key problems, arguments over desirable ends, commitment was, in a sense, institutionalized and debates on the most appropriate or work- though the establishment of Antipode: a able means of achieving them, have made Radical Journal of Geography in 1969 at normative theorizing (imaging, debating and Clark University in the USA. At first, this practising how the world should be) difficult journal reflected the era’s Marxist and socialist and, to an extent, unpopular. What is exciting, geographical critiques of capitalist societies however, is the growing possibility of a con- and their inequitable class relations (e.g. vergence of interest across domains of radical, Harvey, 1973; Peet, 1977). Later feminist moral and ethical geographies in the idea and geographers exposed the inequalities in practice of an ethics of care. S.J. Smith gender relations that also underpin cultures, (2005), for example, points to a possible societies and spaces (e.g. Hanson and Monk alliance of socialist idealism with critical 1982; McDowell 1983); such work also feminism in the drive to place care at the helped strengthen understandings of the centre of social and welfare policies, extend- everyday experiential dimensions of inequal- ing this even into the heart of the marketplace. ity, forcing a shift of attention from power- In the same way, Clark et al. (2007) draw wielders to various forms of resistance to attention to the ethical dimensions of con- power in social life (see Pain et al., 2001; sumption which are changing the way goods Panelli, 2004; Valentine, 2001). More recently, are produced and sold. In ways too numerous anti-racist, postcolonial and indigenous geog- to list here, the centrality of care-giving and raphies have questioned the whiteness and receiving to all of human life – to the constitu- imperialism that remain ingrained within the tion of the social – is now widely recognized discipline, preserving and recreating spaces and is beginning to occupy centre stage in of racist and neo-imperialist oppression accounts of society and social geography. (Blunt and Rose, 1994; Kobayashi and Peake, On the one hand, this has prompted a 2000; Shaw et al., 2006). And now there is a rethink of the quality of social relations in the growing interest among radical geographers spaces of homes, institutions and national in working between the boundaries of feminist, jurisdictions. This quest to construct more postcolonial and anti-racist geographies, care-full spaces has brought together scholars exploring their intersections with sexualities, interested in informal care (highlighting in age and (dis)ability. These various related particular its gendered character through, for leanings – which have, arguably, become example, the idea of ‘caringscapes’ (McKie mainstream in critical/radical social geogra- et al., 2002)), in the institutionalization of an phy scholarship – have common ground in ethic of care, within and beyond social policy, being drawn towards a new ‘normative turn’ and in the challenge of putting the principle in academia, acknowledging and forefronting of caring into practice in every sphere of life. the goals of equality, justice and human On the other hand, this interest in an ethic of rights. This ongoing encounter between radical care has drawn attention to a new kind of geographies and normative theory is, signifi- social geography, prompting scholars to cantly, profiled in a recent volume of Antipode wrestle with the question: what are our (Olson and Sayer, 2009). human responsibilities not just for those This encounter is important because, nearby (with whom our interdependence is whilst much of the history of (radical) social readily recognizable) but also for distant geography has been about diagnozing what is others (those who are geographically removed wrong and establishing what scholarship is from our direct experience) who are the vic- against, arguably we have had less to say tims of exploitation, abuse, repression or about what social geography is for. This is of violence? How far, asks David Smith (1998, course an overstatement, but it is certainly 2000), can and should we care Barnett (2005) the case that disagreements over the roots of offers a helpful philosophical and theoretical

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comment on possible answers, while Gerhardt proved increasingly popular, and, not surpris- (2008) illustrates the urgent practicalities ingly for a lexicon that spans interviews, of this with respect to the genocide in encounter, textual interpretation, historical Darfur, Sudan. This growing body of work is analysis, visual practices, action research and attempting to engage issues in moral philoso- much, much more, these approaches have, phy and social theory, and to develop a con- together, been a hallmark of social geography cept, practice and ethics of care which for the past fifteen years. It is, nevertheless, recognizes the embeddedness of human life possible to think of this methodological diver- within complex webs of geographically vary- sity as embracing perhaps four major ‘shifts’ ing norms and values. over the past half century; it may even be fair It is around issues of justice and fairness to characterize these shifts as ‘progressive’ in that social geography is, perhaps, at its most some way. practically engaged. In seeking to use social The first significant turn was to a positivist geographic research as a way into questions epistemology from the 1960s onwards. During of justice, some use their work to try to this ‘quantitative revolution’ the assumptions inform policy, locally, nationally or even of pure science (such as generalizability and internationally; some provide support for the law-building) were applied to the study of specific redistributive objectives which their social problems, underpinned by a belief that lay collaborators are working towards; others this would allow geographers to make signifi- use the knowledge produced to motivate cant contributions to progressive social through their writing, dissemination and teach- change. This kind of hope had long character- ing. As recent debates about ‘public geogra- ized empirical social science, especially in phies’ have suggested (Hawkins et al., Europe where turn-of-the-twentieth-century forthcoming; Fuller, 2008), geographers as a social reformists such as William Booth whole could be much better at influencing placed great faith in the power of numbers to public debates and shaping what goes on resolve the problem of what to do politically outside the academy. Though this potential is about poverty. By the 1960s, however, the not yet fully realized, there is no question possibility of using new and rapidly develop- that many social geographers continue to be ing survey, statistical and computational engaged with struggles for a better world. methods to add precision, confidence and authority to the process gave new impetus to this quest (Billinge et al., 1984; S.J. Smith, Methodological diversity 1986). At the same time, quantitative methods were seen as a unifying force for geography Finally, as befits such a rich and varied his- as the discipline moved through one of its tory, social geographies are methodologically many identity crises. For a mix of reasons, diverse, and have generally sustained this therefore, the quantitative tradition became, diversity even as technological innovation or and in certain parts of the sub-discipline intellectional fashion favour some elements of remains, extremely popular. Before too long, the methodological toolkit over others. however, these approaches were critiqued: Empirics have always been of fundamental first, because their application too often importance here: a longstanding tradition of proved inconclusive; second, for their failure fieldwork accompanied the early development to identify the deeper causes of social inequal- of the sub-discipline, and all kinds of field- ities; and finally, because of the unreasonable work remain popular today. Quantification claim that quantitative, ‘scientific’ researchers has always been of interest, though the tech- might be thought of as neutral, objective ‘dis- nical skills required to use quantitative meth- interested observers’ whose findings were ods wisely and effectively remain unevenly especially authoritative (see Mercer, 1984; spread. Qualitative research of all kinds has Rose, 1993). It was this ‘value-free’ myth that

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radical approaches, including Marxist and Rose (1993) in her book on the gender of feminist geographies, quickly began to chal- geography. But these qualitative tools were lenge (Blunt and Wills, 2000) as a critical well suited to the conceptual and political aims tradition displaced the claims of inductivism of feminist geographers, who used them to give on social geographers’ imaginations. voice to social groups frequently marginal- However, positivism and its spinoffs have ized in and through academic research, and a long and diverse history (Hoggart et al., to turn attention to questions of ethics and 2002), and dismissing their many epistemo- positionality (McDowell, 1992; Women and logical or methodological manifestations on Geography Study Group, 1997). This feminist these grounds alone is too simple. Recently, critique of who social geographers are – and some have argued for a return to quantitative of the impact of their work on researchers’ methods on the grounds that they may – as own social identities, working methods, theo- their early practitioners had hoped – be useful ries and other outcomes – is one echoed in for challenging inequality simply because anti-racist and postcolonial research (Driver, they are the tools most widely acceptable to 1992; Kobayashi, 1994; Sidaway, 1992). politicians and policy-makers (Mattingly and Through the 1980s and 1990s, qualitative Falconer-Al-Hindi, 1995); others seek to research became the new orthodoxy across increase the validity and purchase of quantita- the discipline (Crang, 2002), though it did tive techniques by using them alongside quali- not always realize the political potential that tative methods (McKendrick 1999); some some feminist geographers had hoped for. distinguish quantitative methods from posi- So, despite the rich seam of qualitative work tivist approaches (see Kwan in Chapter 26) or that continues to infuse social geographies, uncouple quantitative approaches from mas- such approaches have sometimes been criti- culinist versions of science by challenging cized for their lack of rigour and limited the quantitative/qualitative dualism itself validity (Martin and Sunley, 2001), and for (Lawson, 1995). In short, quantitative social being self-referential rather than effecting geography is alive, well, and could do more change for respondents or having wider for us in the future than it has in the past. policy impacts (Pain and Kindon, 2007). The empirical tradition in social geography That qualitative methods were also associ- was preserved by a second ‘turn’, this time ated with an increasingly disparate ‘cultural’ towards qualitative methods, in the early frame also drew them into critiques of a 1980s. This had its origins in the advent of sometimes introverted, esoteric style of humanistic geography (see Ley, 1974; Tuan, knowing (Peach, 2002). The lesson here is 1976) which itself arose in response to posi- that no method inherently has more political tivism, challenging deterministic explanations potential than any other, and all methodologies and eschewing the idea of researchers as inde- demand and deserve rigorous application. pendent or value-free. Qualitative research, in The third shift of interest for the practice of contrast, focuses on direct engagement with social geographies is the ‘non-representa- the meaning and interpretation of complex tional’ turn of the last decade, which has social and spatial relations; it uses inductive steered the methodological emphasis away theory emergently and reflexively, attaching from meaning and interpretation and toward value to logical or substantive, rather than theories of everyday practice (Thrift, 1997, statistical, significance, and using detailed case 2004). In contrast to these earlier reflective studies or extensive interviews to illustrate the approaches, non-representational social geog- breadth and depth of human experience. raphies require methods of investigation that Qualitative methods may initially have been hinge on bodily engagement: on affective and as implicated as the ‘quantitative revolution’ in material relationships and practices which do the inherent masculinism of the discipline – a not mirror or mine the empirical world but masculinism powerfully exposed by Gillian rather experience, enact, perform and create it

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(e.g., Kraftl and Adey, 2008). Like all innova- 2007; Pain, 2003; Elwood, 2006a, 2006b). tions, the practicalities are much debated. These debates around the wider ethics and Geographers such as Bondi (2005), Thien politics of research have in some ways served (2005) and Tolia-Kelly (2006), for example, to put methods into perspective. The argu- have questioned some non-representational ment is that however well-honed are tradi- approaches, suggesting that they can, para- tional methods and forms of analysis, they all doxically, distance emotion and embodiment operate within the same tight epistemologi- from scholarship and the public arena whilst cal frame: knowledge production by academ- begging important questions about authority ics for academics. In an attempt to break free and who is speaking for whom (for a response, of this, social geographers have led the turn to see Woodward and Lea in Chapter 6). participatory methods involving joint knowl- Nevertheless, by revisiting an earlier edge production with ‘the researched’ engagement with pragmatism (S.J. Smith, (Kindon et al., 2007), which is discussed in 1984) and combining it with other philoso- detail in Section 5 of the Handbook. This phies of encounter (as described in Smith, turn is firmly underpinned by feminist theory 2001), non-representational geographies and practice, and while it is a difficult achieve at least two very important methodo- endeavour which is open to criticism (see logical goals. First, by emphasizing the way Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Kesby, 2007), knowledge is acquired and produced through embrace it does the early ideals of feminist whole bodies, these approaches challenge the research and harness some strengths of quali- dominance of the visual in the creation of tative approaches that have not always been geographical knowledge, turning attention to realized in social geographical practice (see what can be known through the domains of Kindon et al., 2007). sound, smell and touch (see Crang, 2003; None of these shifts can be analyzed sepa- Dewsbury et al., 2002; Smith, 1994; Thrift, rately from the shape of the theoretical knowl- 2002). Second, by identifying the perfomativ- edge that their advocates produce and want to ity of the world – recognizing that it has con- see. So this mix of methods and approaches stantly to be made – these methods of continues to develop, sometimes in tension encounter open up the possibility that the and sometimes as productive collisions (Brown future can, through practical acts, be made dif- and Knopp, 2008), but always by way of an ferently (just as it can also deliberately be kept eclecticism, and a mix of methods, that is now the same). being positioned as a strength. We return to The salience of human agency, and the these issues in the final section of the book. prospect of research and writing actually having effects, are themes which can be traced across at least forty years of social geography. If there is a fourth shift currently CONNECTIONS under way, however, it is towards a growing suite of increasingly empowering action epis- The Handbook of Social Geographies is at temologies. Recently, calls encouraging first glance, and by its very title, about the wider participation in human geography multiplicity of approaches to appreciating research have become louder. This is not and conducting social life. By definition, about recruiting research subjects more care- then, it is not intended to cover everything fully or inclusively (though this is impor- that might be construed as social geography: tant); it refers rather to forging research some areas are missing by accident (a ques- partnerships, pursuing joint research with tion of who is able to deliver what, when) activists and engaging in critical policy and others by design. In fact, this collection research that seeks to radically change agendas was originally offered as a ‘compendium’ of (e.g. Fuller and Kitchin, 2004; Kindon et al., social geography; a selection of different

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things in a single container; a bringing- investigation, empirical detail and teleological together of core elements and new directions design – they held in common an analytic in a diverse but identifiable substantive field approach focused on the scientific explanation of enquiry. Rather than attempting to be com- of human–environment relationships. Yet, prehensive then this compendium-handbook within that general rubric, history has is a work of connectivity. Instead of imagin- recorded numerous approaches to theorizing ing social geography to be a coherent set of the direction and force of the causal arrows. ideas and approaches that – at different times and places – ‘relate to’, overlap with or even The ‘determinist influence’ merge into other subdisciplines (as for exam- We can point famously to one such approach, ple in the celebrated alliance of social and that of environmental determinism, wherein cultural geography), we imagine the subject the characteristics and forces of natural envi- as existing only in and through the connec- ronments were seen to stand in a direct and tions it inhabits. Social geography – like any exogenously causal relationship with those other subdiscipline – is an experience of forg- of their resident populations. In drawing ing links, embracing tensions, and engaging variously on Darwinian, Lamarckian and in the uneasy alliances that the unfolding of Spencerian evolutionary traditions, the deter- knowledge demands. Four of these close minists were to select their causal language encounters – the articulations of social/nature, from different points along a continuum social/economic, social/political and social/ defined by strict deterministic ‘controls’ on cultural – run through the entire volume, and the one hand to weaker ‘influences’ on the we introduce them below. other. What united them was their use of environment to explain a diverse array of perceived social differences among popula- tion groups, including whether they were Social/nature pantheistic or monotheistic, sedentary or The relationship between human life and the nomadic, slovenly or energetic, civilized natural environment is more than a piece of or barbaric, inventive or unimaginative, gay connective tissue that complicates social or melancholic, analytic or sensual, peaceful geography: for many it has been and contin- or unruly, irascible or agreeable (Livingstone, ues to be the defining pillar of geography 1992). In spite of determinism’s scientific itself (Glacken, 1967; Turner, 2002). With pretensions, the number of hypothesized roots in natural histories, travel diaries, and arrows could prove too complicated to verify the founding of the modern university, the empirically, as is demonstrated in this quote modern human–environment tradition came from Ellen Churchill Semple: to flourish in the nineteenth and early twentieth The physical environment of a people consists of all centuries in the UK and continental Europe the natural conditions to which they have been under the sway of geographers like Reclus, subjected, not merely a part. Geography admits no single blanket theory. The slow historical develop- Kroptkin and Vidal, introduced earlier, as ment of the Russian folk has been due to many well as A.J. Herbertson, Alexander von geographic causes – to excess of cold and deficiency Humboldt, Carl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel and of rain, an outskirt location on the Asiatic border of Ferdinand von Richthofen. In the US the tra- Europe exposed to the attacks of nomadic hordes, dition took hold through the work of natural- a meager and, for the most part, ice-bound coast which was slowly acquired, an undiversified surface, ist George Perkins Marsh, historian Frederick a lack of segregated regions where an infant civiliza- Jackson Turner, and geographers Ellen tion might be cradled, and a vast area of unfenced Churchill Semple, William Morris Davis and plains wherein the national energies spread out thin Ellsworth Huntington. The diversity amongst and dissipated themselves (1911: 14). these authors notwithstanding – they varied It was not just that a few of the foundations greatly in terms of their commitment to field of contemporary social geography – notably

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social difference and diversity – were bulldozed affirms his superiority to fate, his moral responsibility by such banalities: determinism as it was often and independence; his escape from slavery to nature into an increasing mastership (Geddes, practised was also methodologically flawed, 1898; as quoted in Livingstone, 1992: 274–5). led by a strategy of empirical affirmation rather than falsification. Thus, even in the Years later, once the reaction against deter- face of the counter-claim that some social minism was in full swing, the president of the characteristics might not be the product of, Association of American Geographers, Harlan say, climate but of yet another social factor, H. Barrows, argued on behalf of a holistic explanations could be found to redouble on the ‘human ecology’ of ‘mutual relations’ that environment, as in this defence of determinism presupposed no directionality between the by Semple: forces of society or environment. Barrows’s programmatic injunction (1923) did not prove Even so astute a geographer as Strabo, though he recognizes the influence of geographic isolation in to be much of a rallying point outside of the differentiating dialects and customs in Greece, Chicago School of Environmental Geography ascribes some national characteristics to the nature from which he wrote, but it was nonetheless of the country, especially to its climate, and the important to Gilbert White, who, along with others to education and institutions. He thinks that his students, carried on Barrows’s torch for the nature of their respective lands had nothing to do with making the Athenians cultured, the many decades (Burton et al., 1978). In addi- Spartans and Thebans ignorant. … But here arise tion to asking questions based on the reversal the questions, how far custom and education in of the causal arrow, they also were notewor- their turn depend upon environment; to what thy for their attention to the policy implica- degree natural conditions, molding economic and tions of their work (White, 1972) and for their political development, may through them funda- mentally affect social customs, education, culture, groundbreaking studies in environmental per- and the dominant intellectual capacity of a people ception (Saarinen, 1969). (Semple, 1911: 22–23). A second environmental tradition in the US was anchored by Carl Sauer, who firmly Breaking the chains of nature rejected determinism in his seminal piece, Not that environment always ruled with the ‘The morphology of landscape’, in 1925. He heavy fist or backdoor logics that Semple and his adherents went on to fashion a cul- identified. Vidal (1899), in establishing the tural geography that documented the ‘destruc- French tradition, put forth the concept of tive exploitation’ of earth at the hands of ‘possibilism’ to describe the limits and poten- ‘man’ (Mikesell, 1978; Thomas, 1956). Sauer tials set by the environment. He argued that disapprovingly witnessed these transforma- how people respond to these depends on their tions throughout his life, as the ‘medium’ in traditional ways of living (genre de vie), a his famous injunction – ‘Culture is the agent, concept he employed not only to point to the natural area is the medium, the cultural culture, institutions, technologies, etc., as landscape is the result’ (1925, 46) – receded operative agents of society, but also to open into yet another urban centre, industrial the door to different interpretations of the development or sprawling suburb. To be sure, environment, presaging later concepts such even when he wrote ‘Morphology’ it might as environmental perception. Similarly, in have been difficult to have found a ‘natural’ the UK, the influential town planner Patrick landscape composed of unmodified climates, Geddes told geographers that: landforms, water bodies and vegetation. … while circumstances modify man [sic], and that Sauerian approaches to the environment have in mind as well as body, man, especially as he rises been accused of having a conservative bias in material civilization, seems to escape from the – of being backward-looking, rural-favouring grasp of environment, and to react, and that more and unscientific. But the research is notewor- and more deeply, upon nature, at length, as he develops his ideas and systematizes his ideals into thy for a number of reasons: for a historical the philosophy of religion of his place and time, he approach centred on both socio-cultural and

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environmental change and adaptation; for critiques of conservation schemes and partici- situating technology in a mediative role patory development practices by considering between society and environment; and for the inevitable exclusions they embed; and detailed field studies that traced the origins discourse analyses of various environmental and diffusions of both material culture and and social narratives (wilderness, Gaia, devel- environmental practices. opment, progress, etc.) at play in making bits A related approach to the environment, cul- of nature the object of environmental man- tural ecology, developed out of expeditions by agement strategies (Williems-Braun, 1997). anthropologists and geographers in the 1950s Tracing a long arc through this historiogra- and 1960s. With time, the term was widely phy, we see the following picture emerge. adopted by those cultural geographers whose First, for the environmental determinists ‘the work focused on the environment. More ana- social’ was the explandum, and not a very lytic than the individualistic and particularistic active or differentiated one at that. For compli- tradition it supplanted, cultural ecology was cated historical reasons, including the fact that noteworthy for merging ecology with systems many early modern geographers were trained analysis, giving ‘ecosystems’ that included in the natural sciences, researchers spent more both the environment and the institutions and of their efforts examining the active and vari- practices of human society. Its adherents egated environmental drivers than the compli- tended to pay rigorous attention to the flows of cations of the social responses. As a result, as energy and materials in these systems. Nature Platt (1948) points out, determinists ignored and society are, in this view, not ‘separate extensive counter-evidence showing that the entities or opposing forces, but rather inter- social characteristics of a people could vary locking components of a system’ (Mikesell, greatly within the same environment. Nor 1978: 7–8). Most cultural ecologists – Karl were determinists capable of explaining why Butzer, Billie Lee Turner II and Peter Vayda people hold on to certain habits long after they among them – retained with their predeces- have changed their environments. sors a critical eye toward development, Second, following the obituaries of deter- including a disdain for rampant consumerism, minism written by Geddes, Vidal, Barrows, unbridled economic growth and unflinching Sauer and others, there developed in social faith in technocratic solutions to environmen- geography a profound suspicion of nature tal problems. But beyond this, explanation altogether. To cross the boundary of nature– tended to wither, for most held an aversion to society in the post-determinism era, one deeper, structural explanations, particularly might risk being reminded of an embarrass- those offered by political economy. This, in ing geographical period, particularly in terms turn, opened doors to another subfield, political of the discipline’s treatment of race in its ecology, where we find a resurgent converza- service to colonialism and imperialism (see tion involving topics of interest to social Peet, 1984; Livingstone, 1992; Dwyer, 1997). geographers. Operating with a more vigorous Most social geographers at this time adopted commitment to theory that situates the use the spatial-chorological view, which stressed and destruction of the environment within integrative areal study and spatial variations larger socio-economic, political and cultural- (Turner, 2002) and which was readily adapt- discursive contexts, political ecologists are able to questions of inequality, social welfare attentive to both social difference and the ways and justice (e.g., D. Smith, 1973) – and, it that capital, the state, and other institutions turned out, largely without the need for envi- socially ‘construct’ and materially ‘produce’ ronmental backup. So, as discussed elsewhere natures (Robbins, 2004). Since the 1990s here, social geographers of the mid-century political ecology has been the subfield to turn and beyond went out exploring other connec- to for: understandings of environmental con- tions, such as those of culture, politics and flict written in terms of race, class and gender; economy. While a general mid-century neglect

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of nature in human geography played out dif- sciences and humanities – geographers included ferently across the subfields, the recoil was – have turned to philosophers such as Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, and Serres (see Whatmore, particularly acute in social geography, where 2002). What these writers offer is an understand- studies of urban social environments predomi- ing of bodies, including ‘human’ bodies, as always nated. It wasn’t until political ecology came already an effect of their composition in and along – with its tools of Marxism, feminism through their relations with the world. In this and postcolonialism – that critical social geog- sense, the human has no essence, and never did, but is rather understood as an ‘in-folding’ of raphers could safely engage the environment the world, an effect of ongoing and ceaseless without fear of being tarnished as determinists. ontological play (Harrison, 2000). The human, then, was ‘post’ from the beginning (Braun, Retheorizing the social with nature 2004: 1354). And, for some, just in time. For, as many have To speak, therefore, of a post-human geog- noted, theorists of the human–environment raphy (Castree and Nash, 2004) is to decon- connection now face some very tricky objects, struct the nature–society binary. This requires as capital and technology combine to produce us to put nature ‘under erasure’ (i.e., ‘dis- a hundred hybrid forms of new social/natures play’, following Derrida, 1976), for nature (Haraway, 1991; Whatmore, 2002). No longer has always been the key resource for prop- separated by a dash (‘–’), these are bits of ping up the social, and yet it is a Nature that social/nature that disrupt attempts at clean can never be – a priori, primordial, beyond classification: the state-managed forest, the construction. Only through this constitutive genetically modified tomato, the beloved other has ‘the social’ been secured. In par- family dog with his microchip implant. Even ticular, for Derrida (2003) the persistent gap the designer baby (Fukuyama, 2002) is trotted between nature and society has everything to out as a millennial example of troubling new do with the nature that is animal. Braun forms of life and technology. (2004), drawing on Derrida’s animal–human But while these hybrid forms might give deconstruction in his discussion of pause, it is not the loss of their ‘essential char- Badmington’s post-human thesis (2004), acter’ that troubles the nature–society divide. It elaborates on this point: is, instead, how they point to the work that has gone into preserving the polarities that Without this distinction, humanism has no founda- now seem in need of negotiation. As Latour tion. Derrida shows this fundamental anthropology writes: at work across the spectrum of Western philosophy – in Descartes, Freud, Heidegger, and Lacan, Critical explanation always began from the poles among others – in order to reveal not only how the and headed toward the middle, which was first space of the ‘human’ is differentially produced, but the separation point and then the conjunction also how the ‘properly human’ comes to be defined point for opposing resources. … In this way, the within, and is dependent upon, this system of differ- middle was simultaneously maintained and abol- ence. Derrida gives us a neologism – animot – that ished, recognized and denied, specified and brilliantly captures his point. The word phonetically silenced. … How? … By conceiving every hybrid as singularizes the plural for animal (animaux) and a mixture of two pure forms (1993; quoted in combines it with the word for ‘word’ (mots), Whatmore, 2002: 2). thereby calling attention to the habit of rolling all As Sarah Whatmore (2002) notes, the chal- animal species into one, producing an undifferenti- ated ‘other’ against which the ‘human’ can be jux- lenge today is to destabilize these seemingly taposed and defined. This animal-word at once pure forms by de-centring what has long been founds and grounds humanism. … Of course, sacrosanct: social agency itself. This move Derrida goes on to explain that this ‘fundamental posits a world beyond – or perhaps before – anthropology’ deconstructs itself. Humanism’s the nature–society dualism. As Braun puts it: founding difference – the differentiation of human from animal – is, ultimately, unstable; a supplement It is precisely to avoid such unintentional returns to is always required to fix the difference ([the com- the ‘human itself’ that many scholars in the social monly invoked ‘specifically’ human skills of]

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language, reason, tool-making), yet each and every that ‘economics has failed by neglecting to supplement is inadequate to the task (Braun, 2004: develop a theory of real markets and their 1352–3, brackets added). multiple modes of functioning’ (Callon, Yet, in concluding, it should be empha- 1998). Second, and equally, that ‘the econ- sized that, however much one might welcome omy is ordinary; it is an integral part of eve- a post-human social geography, this does not ryday life. … Not only are economies mean that we can dispense with a political inescapably social, societies are inescapably analysis attentive to invocations of ‘the economic’ (Lee, 2006). Together, these obser- human’ or ‘the social’ (Castree and Nash, vations encapsulate a sea-change in the study 2006). Just as Don Mitchell (1995) warned of both economy and society, recognizing us to be wary when the term ‘culture’ was that the projects are linked and their scope being wielded, so too must we be suspicious interdisciplinary. Critically for this hand- of daily encounters with a nature-reinforced book, it is now clear that progress in account- ‘society’ (see also Joseph, 2002, on ‘commu- ing for economies and economics can no nity’). Even if Margaret Thatcher did turn out longer be dominated by economists; it is a to be serendipitously prescient in her claim challenge for us all. that ‘there is no such thing as society’, this Nevertheless, it is surprising how long it has does not mean that ‘the social’ has not been taken a range of disciplines (other than eco- nor will not remain a contested discourse, an nomics) fully to embrace the challenge of object of politics. If anything, Thatcher her- understanding what economies consist of and self only substantiates the point. how ‘the economy’ works. It is, for example, striking how few references to economic geog- Social/economy raphy appear in the Journal of Social and Cultural Geography – a publication whose Social geographies are often rooted in every- mission since the turn of the millennium has day life, focusing attention on the relation- been ‘to report on the role of space, place and ships and behaviours that elaborate the culture in relation to social issues, cultural ordinary world. Not surprisingly, this point of politics, aspects of daily life, cultural com- departure rarely sits easily with the atomistic, modities, consumption, identity and commu- individuated, ostensibly rational ‘economic nity, and historical legacies’. Economy is, to be men’ whose stylized behaviours still drive sure, an aspect of daily life and an element of empirical economics; nor has it resonated consumption studies, but that is at best implicit with the ostensibly separate spheres of econ- in the mix of papers published in this journal. omy and society that are ingrained in an A similar picture emerges from the limited intellectual division of labour and material- reference made to social geography in the ized in the institutional arrangements of gov- Journal of Economic Geography, a publication ernance. But the latter is easier to live with established in 2001 as an attempt to ‘redefine than the former, and social geography has de and reinvigorate the intersection between eco- facto tended to be about social, not economic, nomics and geography’. Notably there is no life. Yet the isolation of ‘the economic’ is statement about connecting economic geogra- rarely maintained in practice, and to the phy with the rest of the discipline, and although extent that it is, this begs the question of how some contributors clearly are engaged in this economic essentials have been made to pre- task, the majority of works testify to a still- vail in certain kinds of settings or encounters. entrenched division of roles between economic So it is not surprising that a shift of scholarly geography on the one hand and social and interest from high theory to situated prac- cultural geographies on the other. tices, spanning nearly two decades, has come Arguably, a more obvious place to look for to recognize two key truths. First, that there rapprochement across this specific subdisci- is more to economy than economics: indeed, plinary divide is Tijdschrift voor Economishe

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en Sociale Geografie. Dating from 1967, this tells how, as Talcott Parsons put his grand is the one English language journal in geog- design for sociology into practice, there raphy to contain the words ‘economic’ and was only one discipline he was not prepared ‘social’ in its title. Its mission statement how- to take on, and that was economics. Basically, ever makes more of the connection between says Stark, ‘Parsons made a pact: in my Anglo-American and Continental human gloss – you, economists, study value; we, geographies than of integrating social and sociologists, will study values. You will have economic affairs: searches on key words claim on the economy. We will study the bring up very little overlap in this latter social relations in which economies are respect. On the other hand, perhaps signal- embedded’ (p. 1). ling changes that are already in train, the More structural explanations for the online journal Social Geography (first pub- divorce of society from economy are for- lished in 2005) includes amongst its ‘topical warded by Anderson (2003), who argues that fields’ the words ‘labour’, ‘production’ and the exclusion of democratic and civil society ‘consumption’. In fact, the very first article in from the realm of economy is a requirement the series is effectively an assessment of of the capitalist condition; and by S.J. Smith social geography’s take on economy (Van (2005), who recognizes the essentialization Wezemael, 2005). of markets to be both a condition of, and an It would be a mistake, particularly in light explanation for, the weakly developed ethic of recent trends, to overstate the extent of the of care in modern political democracies. social–economic divide in geography. There Such authors imply that, while the separation have always been individuals and institutions of economy and society may have been a committed to bridge-building: that, after all, is condition through which disciplines (and part of the geographical imagination. And a subdisciplines) developed in one way rather concern with political economy (a critique of than another, more critically still, the split has how whole economies are managed) is of been necessary for economics, economies course at the heart of many areas of human and welfare states to function as they do. geography. It is, nevertheless, worth pausing Both these explanations – for a division of to consider why, and with what consequences, intellectual labour and a separation of real- the analytical line between economy and soci- world activity – help to account for the ety has, so often, been so sharply drawn. More divorce of social from economic geogra- importantly, it seems timely to attend to a host phies; for the creation of subdisciplines of recent attempts, within and beyond geogra- whose subject matter and approaches have, phy, to recognize the economy in society and until recently, been almost completely dis- to work with the sociality of economy. tinct. In this longstanding separation of roles, social geography tends to occupy one of four Economy and society positions. All these positions are caricatures, In an engaging essay entitled ‘Capturing mar- of course; and all accommodate some quite kets from the economists’, Don Slater (2002) excellent ideas and contributions. But they observes that ‘The division between eco- do add up to a tendency not just to privilege nomic and socio-cultural analysis constitutes the social (a move that might be ethically a kind of deep structure of modern Western appealing), but also to represent social life as thought’ (p. 59). This division of intellectual if it were not an economic affair (a position labour is sometimes attributed to the that is ontologically unsustainable). so-called ‘Parsons’ pact’ – a deal that enabled First, there are social geographies that take the expansion of sociology, and cemented particular economic conditions as given: either the isolationism of economics, during the as a benign backdrop against which social early twentieth century. Commenting on this life works; or as machine that structures the division of territory, David Stark (2000) social world. On the one hand this underpins

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social geography’s much-criticized tendency Easterlow (2004) for an overview and critique of to assign too much agency to individuals, as if this position). The result is that much more is residential patterns, flows of migration and so known about ‘states’ than about the economies on are a product only of similarity and dis- they manage; more is known about social exclu- similarity in the characteristics of who people sion from the economy than about the entangle- choose to live, work and socialize with. On ment of social and economic affairs that is a the other hand it produces a kind of determin- condition of human life. And even though the ism in which economic processes map onto challenge of matching welfare resources to indi- social outcomes, producing systems of strati- vidual and collective needs, funding and deliver- fication which are expressed as social geogra- ing formal and informal care, and promoting phies, through processes of (essentially well-being demands sensitivity to economic economic) categorization which its incum- themes, work in this vein has rarely been central bents are powerless to control. to mainstream social geographies. Second, there are many rich empirical stud- Finally, social geographies – multiple ies in social geography which attend to all kinds though they are – have been strangely silent of social and cultural processes yet choose not on themes that might reasonably be located to document, or comment on, their economic at the heart of the enterprise. In recent years, content. Think, for example, of a large body of the sociology of work, for example, has been work on consumption which profiles all kinds tackled mainly (though magnificently) by a of tastes, qualities, identities and behaviours, handful of (generally feminist) geographers. yet scarcely mentions how much it costs to The economics of domestic labour – the cost produce, buy and sell the goods concerned. and content of housework – have an even Consider equally a fascinating body of work on lower profile. And the consumption of finan- domestic interiors that, for its many fine cial services – mortgages, insurances, bank- achievements, glosses over the financial costs ing, personal loans and so on – is woefully of key objects and materials and pays only under-researched for a subdiscipline con- passing attention to how such expenditures are cerned with the consumption (though rarely funded. Even work on that staple of social the cost) of virtually every other imaginable geography – residential segregation – has until product or object. Again, there are excep- recently had surprisingly little to say about (for tions: in the UK, Elaine Kempson and col- example) the fundamentals of housing market leagues at Bristol University, together with dynamics (of course there are important excep- Andrew Leyshon and colleagues at tions; see, for example, the work of Steve Nottingham University, have made important Holloway and Elvin Wyly and the papers col- contributions in the area of personal financial lected in Smith and Searle, (in press)). services, financial capability and an under- Third, social geography embraces a strong standing of ‘financial ecologies’. The mes- welfare tradition, which – although intimately sage nevertheless is that, as an interdisciplinary concerned with the financial edge of inequality effort to unpack the sociality (the materiality, – is generally more interested in how best to the relationality and the emotional content) suspend the price mechanism (with, for exam- of key economic ideas (markets, prices, ple, needs-based systems of allocation) than in information, calculation) gathers speed, the the finer detail of how markets, price determina- social geographies inherent in this cry out for tion, valuation, credit scoring, and so on, work. greater attention. Welfare geography has, as a consequence, gen- The division of geographical labour into erally contributed (albeit in some very important which social geographies have hitherto been ways) to a line of thinking which divides states so neatly cast may be enduring, but the indica- from markets and assigns the former a role in tion already is that old boundaries are being ‘mending’ the latter by compensating in cash or transgressed, indeed erased, by a rethink of kind for widening inequalities (see Smith and what constitutes economy, as well as by a shift

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this demands in the understanding of society. economic agents operate may itself have Whatever it was that split social geographies changed in recent years, recognizing – and apart from their inherent economies, there is an exploiting – the extent to which cultural impulse now for their reconnection, and evi- themes underpin the organization of work, dence that this process is seriously under way. the contents of products, styles of consump- This is the product of a concerted effort across tion and modes of circulation. a range of disciplines – sociology, anthropol- The idea of cultural economy has been an ogy, politics, psychology and geography – to exciting one for geography. On the one hand, open up the ‘black boxes’ of economy, recog- it has attracted the attention of a very large nizing the ontological impossibility, and cultural geography constituency to the sali- epistemological undesirability, of an oddly ence of the economic themes which in prac- enduring (if practically unsustainable) tice infuse every nook and cranny of life’s intellectual rift. meanings and materials. On the other hand, it has appealed to a cross-section of economic A cultural turn geographers, particularly those whose work Perhaps the most general case made in recent is concerned with beliefs, behaviours and years for expanding the sociological signifi- outcomes, which simply defy conventional cance of economics (as a practice), and of economic understanding. But it has not been economies and their constituent elements (as an entirely comfortable ride, for at least three socio-technical asemablages), has been reasons. First, the turn to cultural economy in dubbed ‘cultural economy’. This label is geography has been troubled by a charge of broad, but it marks the extension of an inter- ‘vague theory and thin empirics’ which – to disciplinary ‘cultural turn’ into the area that be fair – is not without foundation. But at the has resisted it most: economics. Geographers same time it is also a charge that overlooks have played a role here, not least by gather- the many opportunities which have been ing key works into influential interdiscipli- seized to bring the ‘close dialogue’ of quali- nary those edited by DuGay and Pryke, tative encounter into dialogue with the styl- (2002), Amin and Thrift (2004), and Pryke ized facts of economics (see Clark, 1998). and DuGay (eds) (2007). These collections Second, cultural economy perspectives have capture the idea ‘that something called “cul- tended to alight most readily on the cultural ture” is both somehow critical to understand- content of economic entities, and on the ing what is happening to, as well as to imprint or exercise of these cultural econo- practically intervening in, contemporary mies on wider societies. That is, they have organizational and economic life’ (DuGay sometimes acquired a deterministic flavour, and Pryke, 2002: 1). Such approaches are focusing on the way economic ambitions are thus concerned with ‘the social and cultural culturally imposed; how products are repre- relations that go to make up what we conven- sented; or how consumers are ‘captured’. For tionally term the economic’ (Amin and Thrift, example, the four essays comprising a sec- 2004: xviii). In a series of fine-grained tion on ‘the economy of passions’ in the empirical examples, the authors in collec- Cultural Economy reader (Amin and Thrift, tions like these show what is to be gained by 2004) mainly tackle the way emotions can be recognizing that ‘economy’ is constituted cynically manipulated for economic gain. through a myriad of social, emotional, politi- Finally, it is arguable that a preoccupation cal, material and symbolic activities and with the meanings, representations and dis- arrangements – events and relationships that courses of economy means that the project of are not ‘additional to’ economic affairs, but cultural economy has not yet gone far enough inherent within them (see Woodward and to advance understandings of the sociality or Lea, Chapter 6). This moreover has been true materiality of economic life. As Al James throughout history, even though the way (2006, 2007) has shown in his discussions of

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the methods and substance of research on tempting to set this social economy alongside cultural economy, there is considerable scope the many varieties of capitalism that currently both to mend and to build the interdiscipli- co-exist, and define it into social geography. nary bridges that cultural economy appeals Certainly this provides an appealing analytical to, and to develop this approach in innovative starting point and an obvious inroad into the and important ways. We point equally the economy for social geographers. But the additional possibility that some elements of concern is that the institutions and practices this project might fruitfully be ‘wired in’ to of social economy may not be one of many; the more connected social geographies that instead, they may be distinctive in one impor- inspire the form and contents of this tant way, as the socially inflected Other to a Handbook. ‘real’ economy, which is the dominant econ- omy, inherently riddled with inequality and The special case of ‘social economy’ geared only to profit. Curiously, the most obvious label for this In a helpful overview of the field, Hudson new connectivity – social economy – has (2008) implies, that social economy is indeed acquired a rather specialized, albeit entirely Other to the mainstream in at least two ways: apt, meaning, in which the prefix ‘social’ as a safety net, supporting those who are not signals a welfare role. That is, the social adequately served by markets; and as an economy sensu stricto works to an unconven- ‘alternative’ economic space, which may be tional bottom line – one that may not even be detached from the wider economy but is per- drawn up with reference to measures of credit haps preferred on ethical grounds and might or cash. Local currency systems, for example, be more enjoyable. Only Hudson’s third vision are an element of the social economy. These of social economy – as a space of transforma- include local exchange trading schemes or tion which could be at the leading edge of a systems (LETS), time-dollars and other real shift in the way economies (and econom- initiatives which are based on the (usually ics) function – engages with a vision of social localized) informal exchange of goods and economy as a more mainstream affair. This services whose values are determined in a last version, connects up with the ideas of variety of ways and exchanged using local Gibson-Graham whose website on alternative currencies (see Lee et al., 2004). LETS, for economies (www.communityeconomies.org) example, create ‘alternative’ economies, usu- shows how this transformative role is not a ally among participants who are wholly or minority exercise but a part of a wider interna- partly financially excluded (unemployed, tionally based, feminist-inspired reworking of retired, unable to work regular hours, and so what economies are and whom they are for. on). They have also been shown to have a Most commentators on the social economy social dimension which, in some cases, – whether this label is used narrowly, or more exceeds their subsistence role, for example generally – are at pains to stress that society where participants accumulate credits but fail and economy are inextricably entwined: that to spend them – as if this ‘capital’ were an the institutions and individuals of one are indicator of their value to the community. at the same time the agents of the other. But More recently, social economy has come there is nevertheless a divide in the literature to refer to a broader sweep of benevolent between approaches designed specifically to economic activities: strategies ‘that privilege explore the institutions of social economy meeting social (and environmental) needs (which are in a sense part of the welfare before profit maximization, through the state) and those that recognize that societies involvement of disadvantaged communities – even with their existing structures of in- in the production or consumption of socially equality, changing hierarchies of need, useful goods and services’ (Amin, 2008: 1). entrenched welfare ideals and variable ethics Diverse in form and variable in content, it is of care – are always and inherently economic

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(e.g. Boyer, 2003). By profiling social econ- this light, alternative economies are a contra- omy in this second sense, this Handbook diction in terms’ (Lee, 2006: 422). Economics, contributes to the efforts of those who now like societies, like politics, exist everywhere seek to bridge a gap in the geographical litera- and in everything. ture between those distinctive sets of practices Second, there is the question of what to do and institutions that constitute the social econ- with this ubiquitous co-existence of social/ omy, on the one hand, and the multiple economy. To an extent, ‘simply’ demonstrating meanings and materials that constitute a it and taking it seriously is itself an exercise passionate, if slippery, but very broadly based in critical activism. This is at the heart of the cultural economy, on the other. In doing so it Gibson–Graham collaboration which set out engages mainly with the third of the social- to reclaim the economy from its singular, economy projects listed above – it is about capitalist space, recovering the heterogeneity excavating the content and shaping the poten- that the capitalist economy subdues or denies, tial of highly diverse ‘economic societies’. and constituting through this an arena of myriad economic practices and activism: Economic society ‘a whirlwind of inventions and interventions’. The province of ‘the economy’ has expanded Their project is not to create an ‘alternative in recent years as states have retreated and economy’ but to show that what is generally families have changed their form: neither labelled ‘the economy’ is a small part of a informal provision nor state support now much more diverse, interlocking means of offer the first port of call for providers, or for producing, exchanging and distributing those in need, of goods, services, resources values. It is the sectors of activity which are or care. It is alongside this expansion of a currently ‘submerged’ beneath the tip of the particular (some might call it neo-liberal) conventional economic iceberg that Gibson- style of economic geography that the role of Graham look to, as a route to establishing a economy in society and the sociality of ‘radically heterogeneous economy’ which economy come under scrutiny. The term signals a transition to post-capitalism (Gibson- ‘social economy’ may usefully describe Graham 1996, 2006). Smith (2005) makes a either ‘alternative economies’ or state inter- related point, arguing that even the ‘conven- ventions to stimulate markets in underserved tional’ elements of what has been constituted areas, but social geographers also need a as a singular capitalist space are in practice vocabulary for their work on how ‘the econ- far more diverse than they seem. The iceberg omy’ is itself an intrinsically social affair. has no singular ‘tip’. Drawing from the work Two aspects of life in economic societies are of Elizabeth Grosz, Smith’s point is that even particularly important. at the zenith of a capitalist order, economic First, there is the truism that ‘the economy’ life is constituted through ‘a thousand tiny mar- is embedded in the routine of everyday life: it kets’ whose ethic is not given but made and is ordinary. This point is forcefully made by whose geography might be different. From this Roger Lee (2006), who examines ‘the busi- perspective ‘the diversity of actually existing ness’ of making a living. His point is that the markets and the multitude of normative ideas constitution of social life is itself an economic and practices that are, or could be, built into enterprise, just as the economy is a social them, is not just a new economic geography, or affair. There is no separate sphere; living a social curiosity: it is a far-reaching political economy is about all the myriad entanglements resource’ (Smith, 2005: 17). of value, sentiment, meanings, materials, By these varied routes, social geography is exchange and interchange that constitute the one of many disciplines now contributing to a sociality of human life. To be sure, the ordi- paradigm shift at the interface of economy and nary economy is diverse, multiple and hetero- society, emphasizing the social and power- geneous; but above all it is ubiquitous: ‘and, in filled character of economic mechanisms and

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ideas: valorising their diversity and complex- already, been relationally conceptualized and ity, their sensitivity to context, their passions those connections have been severed and as well as their ‘rationality’, and their part in sutured many times over the course of the the social construction and performance of development of the discipline and across dif- everyday life. There is, in short, an ordinari- ferent national traditions. Indeed, the con- ness and a heterogeneity in economy, whose temporary critical/radical origins of social social geographies have still to be fully exca- geography can be traced not to the political vated. Such ideas may be illustrated in studies unrest of the 1960s – where it is often located of labour markets, financial markets, small in short-sighted historiographies – but back businesses or multinational firms; however, further still to the anarchist traditions of nine- more accessible points of departure for those teenth century geographers Pyotr Kropotkin engaged with themes central to social geogra- and Élisée Reclus. phy may be found in recent research on hous- ing markets, consumption and everyday life. Early social and political geographies By whatever tactics and examples, this all Predictably, social geography, social science means that the division between social and and sociology share overlaps in their economic geography, like the division between development. Sociology as a disciplining economics and sociology, which has been one frame for producing knowledge emerged in of the most enduring in modern thought, the mid-late nineteenth century, first in Europe simply cannot last. Politics, if nothing else, and later in the US and the UK. Early on, will see to that. sociology and the classical theorists of sociol- ogy understood the purview of their discipline as a response to modernity and modernization Social/political and the challenges of social disintegration and exploitation that accompanied them. If we take social geography to be the study of While not always considering themselves to social practices in space, then – as we have be sociologists, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, already seen in discussions of social/nature Tonnies, Pareto and Simmel, among others, and social/economy – it is impossible to formulated classical social theories that were divorce the social from the political in any foundational to the development of social attempt to interrogate it. As Henri Lefebvre science and sociology. Dunbar (1977) has (1991) remarked, any action in space is argued that there is ample documentary always already politically fraught and all evidence to indicate that the appearance politics is an effort to remake space. As such, of the concept of social geography was part of the social and the political (and the context a larger intellectual movement that produced within which they occur) constitute a nexus both social science as a multifaceted approach upon which all of human life proceeds and to human life and sociology as a more narrow must, accordingly, be considered in tandem. disciplinary formulation. He places the origin The co-constitution of social and political of this movement – one that entrained social geography is hardly surprising as, within the geography in its wake – in the early 1880s larger realm of the social sciences, formerly with the Le Play school of French sociology. un-breachable disciplinary boundaries are The Le Playists, students of Frédéric Le Play, also themselves being sundered. Within were interested in the relevance of environ- geography itself, the connections between ment and industrialization to poverty and the social and the political are becoming destitution. They saw these problems as increasingly recognized, appreciated, theo- tractable and rejected the readily available rised and investigated. What is perhaps sur- Marxist critique of capitalism and dialectical prising is the fact that social and political materialism because it was considered too geography have actually, for a very long time abstract to actually solve them. Instead, they

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championed the social survey as a way of the state apparatus: a tool of colonialism and understanding place, work and family, and imperialism with maps as its most powerful thereby offering reforms to address the dislo- object (see Clark and Martin, 2004: 61). But cating effects of urbanization and industriali- with the anarchist geographers’ more political zation upon them. and situated formulation of social geography, Early social science’s and sociology’s con- the discipline and its practitioners became a cern for understanding the particularities of force that could be turned against the state and place helped to produce conceptual frames capital. Disappointingly, the influence of anar- such as Frédéric Ratzel’s ‘anthropogeogra- chist and socialist thought on social geogra- phy’ and Paul Vidal de la Blache’s ‘human phy in particular and the discipline more geography’, along with the Le Playists’ ‘social widely did not persist with any vigour into the geography’. Yet, while Reclus was also early twentieth century. While the renowned employing the term social geography around activist town planner Patrick Geddes pro- this time, his application of it questioned these moted some of Reclus’s and Kropotkin’s ideas prevailing framings that tended to be descrip- about social geography in the UK, and though tions or catalogues of the people and places some British geographers subscribed to them threatened by the gathering forces of mod- for a while (Meller, 1993), by the 1920s the ernization and instead employed the concept lure of natural-science approaches to geo- to reflect upon a more relevant and politicized graphic questions had begun to be felt. There social geography that was attentive to ‘class and elsewhere the sharp political orientation struggle, the search for equilibrium, and the of social geography became blunted in favour sovereign decision of the individual’ (Dunbar, of a more ‘objective’ social geography 1977: 17). It was thus with Reclus that the (Livingstone, 1992). circulating approaches to people and places The exclusion of radical thinkers from the were deferred from objectivity’s conventional academy produced a similar trajectory in the standards of the time, and toward social geo- post-World War I social science community graphic study as a deeply political act. in the US. In a fascinating assessment of the Interestingly, while a different area of geog- period, David Sibley (1995) shows how the raphy – political geography – was at the time political orientation of social geography and focused on geopolitics and empire, social sociology was crowded out by the scientific geography, in contrast, emerged with a focus orientation of sociology, which, when under- on much more localized political questions stood as a science, was distinctly different that revolved around environments – broadly from social service or social work. He com- understood – and the people, plants, animals pares the writings and practices of the Chicago and landscapes that constituted them. As such, School of Sociology, especially founder the internationally focused ‘geopolitics’ of Robert Park (1864–1944) and Ernest Burgess Friedrich Ratzel (and later Halford Mackinder) (1886–1966), to those of the early twentieth was rejected by Reclus and Kropotkin, who century African-American urban theorist and very deliberately aligned themselves with a activist W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963) and Jane socialist/anarchist commitment to political Addams (1860–1935), a Chicago social theo- change that focused on people in places and rist, organizer and founder of the Settlement not on the more abstract concepts of territo- Movement and co-founder of Hull House. ries, populations, frontiers and states. French Through a close reading of a wide set of geographer Yves Lacoste argues that the emer- texts, Sibley shows how Park and Burgess gence of social geography as a concept – as an largely ignored the engaged, socially relevant organic, rooted political orientation – was an work of Dubois and Addams. While the latter ‘epistemological turning point’ in the history two produced some of the most detailed and of the discipline. Before its appearance, geog- perceptive ethnographic and social survey raphy had been a foundational component of studies on the emerging capitalist city in the

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US – particularly with respect to the impacts Castro’s newly socialist Cuba; international of exclusion, exploitation and deprivation circulation of Mao Zedong’s The Little Red around race, income, gender and ethnicity – Book; and scores of anti-colonial independ- their work was devalued by the intellectually ence struggles across the globe – most promi- ascendant Chicago School practitioners nently the one led by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam because it was regarded as descriptive (not – were all components of new political engage- analytically consistent with natural science ments that sparked a renewal in social geogra- models) and politically motivated, and there- phy. This period produced a re-radicalization fore scientifically suspect. Addams was of the subfield that was felt across a range of explicitly radical in her politics and used the national fronts. Within human geography, research she and her colleagues conducted liberal responses to state power, inequality through Hull House and the Chicago School and racism eventually came to be superseded, of Social Service Administration to challenge initially by a rediscovery of the anarchist roots the state and capital with respect to issues of of social geography, and then by a growing immigration, women’s rights, child labour, adherence to Marxism as the intellectual and war and housing. Dubois’s social surveys political touchstone. David Harvey’s Social unambiguously identified racism as the force Justice and the City (1973) exquisitely exem- behind housing deprivation and economic plifies this transformation and stands as the disparity. Moreover, both Dubois and Addams most significant marker of the revolution that recognized the inextricability of theory and occurred in social geography, as the discipline practice, whereas Park was adamant that became thoroughly politicized following an theory should remain aloof from political extensive commitment to scientific objectivity practice. Sibley argues that because the that had characterized most research during Chicago School of Sociology was able to the previous two decades. maintain control over the urban canon for five The history of this complex period in human decades, the work of neither of these more geography has yet to be satisfactorily written. politically motivated researchers was able to It is important, nonetheless, to provide some challenge its intellectual hegemony in an sense of the key influences on the progressive increasingly conservative and nationalist political identity which came to characterize period. In the absence of a foothold for either social geography during this period and which critical sociology or the socio-political geog- continues to greatly influence it today. The raphy of Reclus, it wasn’t until the late 1960s 1968 revolutionary events were very much and early 1970s that the work of the anarchist founded on complex theorizations of the rela- geographers was rediscovered and yoked to a tionship between state, society and space, and newly radical social geography; Addams and social geography participated in a similar Dubois had to wait a few more decades for re-visioning. Reflecting on the student strikes their work to attract similar attention among in Paris in 1968, philosophers and social theo- social geographers. rists such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas attempted to make sense of those The 1960s and the return to the political events by developing theories of the state There is no way to overstate the significance that could account for its complex structure of the political events of 1968 on the disci- and function, as well as its relationship to pline of geography generally and social geog- capitalist domination. Althusser (1971), raphy in particular. That year was the peak of through careful and extensive reading of an international protest movement that Marx’s works, moved beyond the classical stretched across the 1960s through to the end accounts of the violence of the Repressive of the Vietnam War in 1975. Student protests State Apparatus (RSA) and its manifestation in in Europe, the UK, the US; the popular sup- the police, the military, the courts, the prisons, port for Che Guevara in Latin America; Fidel the government, etc., to more subtle aspects of

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state power that operate ideologically to For example, Joe Painter’s concept of ‘prosaic deploy and reproduce the ‘rules of the estab- states’ (2006) contends that everyday life is lished order’. Building on Gramsci’s (1971) ‘permeated with stateness’ such that the only concept of hegemony, Althusser theorized way we can understand or approach the state that the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) is through the effects that it has on social prac- operates and is institutionalized in the more tice. Painter maintains that the state – a politi- private sphere of social life: the school, the cal concept par excellence – can be approached family, the arts, television, radio, etc. His only through the influence it exerts on our structuralism quite clearly delineates the role daily lives: eating, sleeping, shopping, work- of the state in shaping state subjects through ing, dying, marrying, having sex, and the list the spatial contexts of both (public) repres- goes on. Moreover, the impact of the state, sive forces and (private) ideological ones. when understood in these terms, is seen to be Poulantzas’s contribution to state theory geographically explicit; that is, it varies from during this period was to argue against the one space to another and from place to place instrumentalist interpretation – that the state so that its reach is uneven and irregular. was an ‘instrument of the bourgeoisie’ – by Another example is Anna Secor’s work on insisting that although the state is relatively biopolitics in Turkey (2006, 2007), in which autonomous from the capitalist class, it func- she exposes the state as a social relation that tions to ensure the smooth operation of capi- unfolds in myriad ways. She looks in particu- talist society and therefore benefits the lar at how subjectivity is founded in state capitalist class. Following in this tradition, sovereignty – showing how the ‘idea of the later state theorists such as Bob Jessop state’ circulates in the daily lives of Turkish (1990) explored the porous border between citizens, disrupting any fixed boundary the state and capital, posing the former as an between state and society and pointing, ensemble of social relations that is dialecti- instead, to ‘the everyday state’. Though frag- cally related to the latter. His state–society mented and multiple, the state coheres in theory proved attractive to many political everyday life through ‘the resonance (between geographers, but it was the more poststruc- sites, agents, rationalities, and techniques) that turalist, subject-oriented theory of power put is discursively produced through the circula- forth by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe tion and arrest of people, documents, informa- (1985) that gained wider purchase among tion, money, and influence’ (2007: 49). social and cultural geographers, some of Secor and Painter’s work, as well as that of whom used the theory to explore the spatial a growing number of other political-cum-so- dimensions of subject formation (e.g., Natter cial geographers, underscores the impossibil- and Jones, 1997). ity of understanding the state without taking ‘the social’ into account. If we wish to under- Contemporary inter-connections stand the workings of nationalism, for The contemporary landscape of social and instance, we must approach it through the political geography continues to make central social practices that constitute it; if we wish the nexus of people, power and place. It also to understand geopolitics, we must recognize offers opportunities for change. The trans- that it is embodied in mundane as well as formations that have occurred in political contentious social relationships. As Sara geographers’ embrace of the social in the last Smith argues, the tense geopolitical standoff several years, particularly the focus on the between India and Pakistan is manifested in materiality of state practice (Kuus, 2007a, b; intimate bodily practices about marriage and Koefoed and Simonsen, 2007; Marston, 2004; procreation among and between different Mountz, 2004), have been enabled by explicit ethnic groups in India (2009). attention to the production of political subjects While the deliberate juxtaposing of political through a social process that is always spatial. and social geographic framings is intellectually

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interesting, these innovative approaches do of all those contained in the handbook. As much more than stimulate new ways of seeing a result, while the three intersections we connections. Particularly in the more activist- have discussed so far seem fresh and lively, oriented work of geographers and others, they profiling the relationships between social enable us to imagine and enact alternative and cultural geography might feel a little ways of challenging power, domination and jaded. Furthermore, while social/cultural exploitation by revealing that the state is not may be the most obvious zone of integration something ‘out there’, institutionally inacces- to look to – though it is in fact no more sible, but is rather an ‘effect’ (Mitchell, 1999) ‘natural’ than any of the other connections – that is materially negotiable and resistible pre- the nexus of social and cultural geography cisely through its inherence in daily practices. has provoked heated debate, especially in Notably, it is in recent discussions of the value Anglo-American geography where it has of community as a response to state power that formed a catalyst for the discipline’s recur- a return to the work of the early anarchist geog- ring self-analysis. In continental Europe, by raphers, particularly Kropotkin, can be traced contrast, there are places where the social (Day, 2005). Organized around the logic of and cultural never parted ways, remaining affinity, drawn in part from Kropotkin’s con- indistinguishable parts of the same endeavour cept of mutual aid, the possibility of rejecting (see Simonsen, 2007, on Denmark; Paasi, hegemonic state relations is facilitated by 2007, on Finland) and jurisdictions where organizing alternative social spaces that reject they form oppositional poles (see Chivallon, racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ageist, 2007, on France). able-ist, capitalist and other forms of exclu- This is not the place to review the many sionary politics and embrace instead spaces of histories of social and cultural geography – becoming where forms of association exist that their discontinuities and entanglements – are neither dependent on capital nor authoritar- which now pepper the literature. What is of ian. It means, in short, rejecting the state as the interest here is that these histories have starting point of radical social change and turn- become ‘stylized’ in ways which might con- ing instead to non-revolutionary and non-re- structively be challenged. This stylization formist forms of social organization that are generally talks, first, of a time when the two non-hierarchical, non-universalizing and non- approaches were separated and unevenly coercive, and are based on shared ethico-polit- examined (with the social dominating the ical commitments to progressive practices. cultural), then of a period in which they came Richard Day calls these alternatives ‘affinity- briefly together, before, finally, a period in based practices’. Undertaken by those ‘who which roles were reversed, so that the cultural are striving to recover, establish or enhance now dominates the social. There is also a their ability to determine the conditions of their geographical account in which social geogra- own existence, while allowing and encourag- phy’s European roots were spliced onto quan- ing others to do the same’ (2005: 13), they are titative US social science to form a style of effecting an explicitly social as opposed to ‘spatial sociology’ that was set apart from merely political revolution, in the tradition of North American cultural geography, rooted Kropotkin and Reclus as well as other early as it was in the material landscapes of anarchists such as William Godwin and Gustav American anthropology. Meanwhile, UK Landauer. social geography was transformed by the humanistic traditions of British anthropology and British cultural studies, whose vocabu- Social/cultural lary rarely included the word ‘social’ but whose engagement with shared meanings and The intersection of social with cultural geogra- powerful representations opened a whole new phy is perhaps the most well worn connection world for social geographers to explore.

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However the story is told, the result is a a work of urban social geography, but was certain disgruntlement: worries that social very different to those on offer at the time, geography has lost its identity; concerns that tackling issues of uncertainty, violence and cultural geography has no real commitment to fear among residents through ethnography. recognizing or challenging inequality and Ley adopted some conventional spatial injustice (see Gregson, 1995); calls for rap- mapping approaches, but he also dealt with prochement around renewed sensitivity to representations of the neighbourhood, fore- materialism in cultural studies and social shadowing one of cultural geography’s staple research (Jackson, 2000a); and so on. The fact concerns. Indeed, the book’s pluralistic but of this handbook suggests that predictions of predominantly humanistic approach to the social geography’s dissolution are premature social world, along with its underlying concern (see also Pain, 2003); but our larger point is to document the inequalities and injustices its that there have always been multiple and subjects faced, nicely positions it between overlapping accounts of the ‘social’ and the ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ geographies (in refresh- ‘cultural’ in geography, and it is among these ing contrast to the positivist spatial studies of folds that the most productive ideas emerge. both segregation and crime that predominated at the time). It might in fact be seen as The social and cultural – a re-assemblage? the epitome of social–cultural geography, Despite speculation and counter-claims, not- illustrating the indivisibility of these human withstanding disciplinary tensions, and conditions. acknowledging their uneven profiles, the fact is Yi Fu Tuan’s (1979) work on landscapes that in geography (and more generally) the of fear was more centrally concerned with social and cultural have always been intrinsi- understanding the experience of emotion cally linked. Rather than telling this story ‘in itself, and has always been regarded as a the round’ – a tale that can be recovered rela- work of cultural geography. Tuan chronicled tively easily from a burgeoning literature – we the nature of human fear and its placement in have opted to conclude this overview of social landscapes, including the immaterial and geography’s connectivity by illustrating the intangible; he explored fear of ethereal as intimate entanglement of social and cultural well as more concrete threats, and drew affairs through an example from just one area attention to what would now be labelled dis- of research, the social geographies of fear. courses of fear, charting their origins and This is just one of many possible narratives, effects. Tuan was less concerned with fear as and it sketches rather than details the contours a societal issue and has been criticized for of research. Fear is an apt example, however, failing to identify that Western populations not just because it is an emotive topic which is have in fact little materially to fear in com- perhaps impossible to pin down, but also parison with those in poorer parts of the because it is at once individual and collective, world (Sonnenfeld, 1981). Yet there are key discursive and experiential, material and imag- ways in which this was also a work of social inary, embodied and emplaced; the ‘feared’ geography, with its emphasis on shared and the ‘fearful’ have complex and overlap- meanings and the sociality of fear. ping subject positions and spatial lives (Day, Pain (1997), Smith (1986) and Valentine 1999). That fear is open to vastly different (1989, 1992), in their work on the racialization definitions, interpretations, ontological and and gendering of fear, spoke powerfully to a epistemological positions has, indeed, made growing sociological interest in the emotional for a rich vein of research on its spatialities. structuring of inequality, noting the impact this The earliest work on fear among geogra- has on the material conditions of everyday life phers is best encapsulated in David Ley’s for women and people of colour. These (1974) exploration of ethnic segregation in approaches sit quite centrally in the sphere of ‘the black inner city’. This was embraced as social geographies. But in comparison to the

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work on these themes employing spatial sci- once again opposite ‘the rest’ is countered by ence/GIS in the 1980s and 1990s, these were a new generation of place-based researchers much more qualitative cultural takes, focus- (see also Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, ing on discourses, images and ideas about 2003; Pain, 2009), as well as by a return to fear as well as first-hand experiences of vio- classic oppositions to the growing militariza- lence. And while some spatial science is tion of public space, such as that elegantly rightly criticized for turning subjective expe- revealed in Davis’s (1992) social history of riences into objectivized patterns, others have segregation, fear and the distribution of found ways to use technologies such as geo- wealth and power in Los Angeles. visualization productively to augment inten- So, while it is tempting to see an explosion sive research into highly personal issues of of interest in emotional geographies (see, for emotion (see Kwan, 2008, on Muslim wom- example, Anderson and Smith, 2001; en’s fears in the US). The social in social/ Davidson et al., 2005) as the new domain of cultural is again contextual and relational: cultural rather than social geography, this is the one constituting the other. really just one element of a wider engagement There are many other examples of the with hope, fear, anxiety and contentment that interleaving, and relationality, of ideas about has permeated the co-development of social the social and the cultural, the meanings and and cultural research over at least four decades. the materials of fear. Equally there is a litera- There is no linear history of social ‘versus’ ture invoking these ideas in reaction to sim- cultural geography, or of one perspective plistic or essentialized accounts of what fears extinguishing the other. Without denying ten- are and how they are produced. Scholars of sions which are worth exploring, the bigger planning and architecture such as Oscar picture is that these approaches are each part Newman (1972) and Alice Coleman (1985), of a kaleidoscope of understanding of social for example, promoted the idea (especially and cultural emotional geographies. Social- popular with policy makers) that built envi- cultural geographies are together part of the ronments directly affect crime and fear, and wider project of excavating the materials and that they can therefore be remedied by chang- meanings of life. Rather than debating where ing those environments, making them more the cultural ends and the social begins, time protective. In response to ideas like this, may be better spent pondering other schisms: Gilling (1997: 186) showed how such inter- for example, around our purposes and ventions simply reinforced ‘mutual suspicion involvement in knowledge production; and and a profoundly anti-communitarian for- our engagements in ethics, politics, relevance tress mentality’, while others – for example, and epistemology. Koskela (1997) – drew attention to the ena- bling possibilities of behavioural and emo- tional qualities like boldness, and still others concentrate on the emancipatory potential of PROJECTIONS hope (Wright, 2008). Once again, then, it is the intersectionality of the social and cultural Having entered a space where relationships rather than their separate effects that is most with, and even among, things may be as apparent. interesting as relationships among people, This continues to be so in more recent no one has a monopoly on defining or engag- times as fear, and studies of it, have experi- ing with the complexity of the social world. enced a renaissance in light of the war on Likewise, in a setting where the workings terror and other pressing geopolitical issues of ‘economy’ are no longer taken for (Gregory and Pred, 2007; Pain and Smith, granted, where ‘markets’ are as much about 2008). In this new literature, the resurrection subjective encounters as financial affairs, of a masculinist geopolitics setting the ‘West’ social geography is forced to recognize that

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what was once of marginal interest – supply, health and disability, bodies and affectual demand, cost and value, for example – now relations; and it uses the postsocial ‘turn’ to occupies a central place. And at a time when reconsider the way some key geographies of researchers engaged with policy are no inequality are made and sustained. longer thought to be sullying their hands by This section examines the social relations reproducing power structures that are of difference, a keystone of social geography. unchanging and unchallengeable, nothing The opening chapters consider the role of short of a paradigm shift of relevance is in geography in placing and reproducing ‘tradi- train. The Handbook of Social Geographies tional’ social divisions around race/gender/ is designed to reflect all this: to reconsider age/disability/nation. All of these markers and redirect the cutting edge of a long-estab- make some reference to the ‘naturalness’ of lished, frequently revised and currently difference – often under the banner of ‘diver- revived subfield; to engage with the way a sity’ – and contrast those appeals to the map of established territory has burst into claims of social constructivism, anti-essen- new ‘lines of flight’. tialism, and geographies of relation. The So what, to this end, does the Handbook injustices these essentialized axes produce contain? As noted earlier, it does not contain a help explain why, during the late twentieth little of everything; it is not a dictionary, an century, social geography was part of a criti- encyclopaedia, a systematic text or an exhaus- cal, and remarkably successful, attempt to tive review. It is a selective excursion into the undermine appeals to nature in accounts of depths and across the breadth of a changeable, social difference. Authors of these early vibrant field of study. Consistent with an chapters explore what is at stake theoretically emphasis on connections rather than legacies, and politically now that these appeals to on trajectories rather then origins, we have essential differences are no longer possible. invited contributions which show how different The section’s chapters also explore the turn debates – whose influence may have waxed to other ‘post-social’ axes of difference that and waned in the past – are moving on. Neither have recently unsettled old ideas about cate- we, the editors, nor the authors have tried to be gories and identities. They therefore consider definitive. Rather the collection is eclectic and newer divides – around genetic geographies, exploratory, tracking the past to an extent, but non-human animals, technologies and pre- with a preference for debating what the subject, conscious affectivities – that not only question and the world it is getting to know, might the theoretical demarcation of ‘the social’ become. To that end, the volume is organized from its Others, but also point to the role of around five thematic hubs that are anchored in such an analytic in reproducing inequalities social geography; these are inspired by, but not formed through the traditional axes of gender, neatly contained in, the subdisciplinary con- race, etc. In marking these new directions, these nectivities outlined above. Each section has its chapters clarify the encounter between social own editor, and each has its own editorial over- constructionism and new materialisms in view, providing a summary of, and commen- shaping the social geography of social tary on, the individual chapters. Broadly, inequality. They tell the story of how social however, the shape of the social geographies geography has responded to calls to embrace that follow looks something like this. ‘nature’, to recognize the salience of the The first section is concerned with a long- object world, and to take the post-human standing core interest among social geogra- realm seriously. phers with questions of difference and The second section of the Handbook is diversity. This builds upon enduring ideas about the inseparability of economy and about the structuring of social relations. It society, and about the contribution of social examines the ruptures and rifts, continuities geography – alongside other areas of social and connections around race, gender, age, research – to the development of concepts

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and ideas that have previously been the which not only work directly to keep people domain of economy and economists. As we well and safe but also build up resilience to have already seen, the division between social harmful circumstances and events. This sec- and economic geography, like the division tion considers both sides of the coin. It docu- between economics and sociology, is one of ments geographies of risk, fear and the most enduring in modern thought. No victimization, as well as geographies of per- social commentator denies that there is a sonal and community safety. It is concerned material, and therefore economic, edge to the with the patterning of health inequalities and inequalities that divide the world, but the eco- with geographies of disability, but it also taps nomic mechanisms which underpin these – into the emotional, and affective, geogra- money, markets, prices, costs, calculation – have phies of resilience, contentment and hope as too often been taken for granted rather than it considers the impact of inequalities in subjected to debate. Confronting this chal- wealth and power on material and psycho- lenge, the essays in this section draw attention social wellbeing. to the sociality, subjectivity, emotional quali- The fourth section focuses on geographies ties and placement of money, markets, price of social justice. The question of who gets and value, recognizing the importance of what, where and why has, for years, formed a examples drawn from home, work and serv- core concern for social geography. The neo- ices, from production, consumption and liberal environment, however, encasing both exchange. These authors recognize that global and local concerns over the last 25 because ‘the economy’ now dominates so years, has set the competitive individualism many areas of life – attending to needs as well of markets against a co-operative or relational as wants, delivering basics as well as distrib- ethics of care, such that the latter has been uting surplus – much more work is required to confined to the voluntarism of families or the excavate its social and cultural content and to residual sphere of social policy. Social geog- draw out its political relevance. This task raphy, nevertheless, has always held onto the could be addressed through discussions about argument that things could and should be dif- labour markets, financial markets, small busi- ferent, and this concern with the possibilities nesses or multinational firms; however, the and practicalities of normative theory is what section also works with ideas that are tradi- connects the ideas in this section. tionally more central to social geography, Where a subdiscipline is so engaged with such as consumption and everyday life. inequality as something which is made rather Section three hinges around geographies than pre-given, we might expect a concern of wellbeing. The aim here is to draw together, with how things should and could be differ- and find links between, the many aspects of ent. This section is about the idea and practice material and emotional wellbeing and dis- of a more inclusive, just, ethical, caring soci- tress, which are documented in the literature. ety; and about the role which social geogra- This section builds from a foundation of phers could have in forging it. Concern with work on the spaces of fear, anxiety and dis- social justice in geography intersects with ease towards newer concerns with geogra- various other disciplines but most especially phies of health, resilience and contentment. with moral and political philosophy. Since Perhaps the two key dimensions of wellbeing David Harvey’s pathbreaking 1973 book, hinge around safekeeping and health. Each is Social Justice and the City, geographers have impaired by the patterning of risks and attempted to grapple with the spatial implica- vulnerabilities, and these in turn underpin tions of moral and political questions and geographies of emotional and material harm. especially with how value is determined and On the other hand, safety and positive health, the just distribution of value in society. But or wellbeing, are both promoted by key sets such a construction, based as it is upon dis- of (material and psycho-social) resources, tributive questions, fails to appreciate that

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social injustice is the result of differential its relationship with policy and other forms of access to power and resources and not merely intervention. about the distributional outcomes of valua- This section covers different ways of tion. For instance, access to justice and the engaging with the world outside social geog- rights that inhere within the social and politi- raphy. It encourages readers to link practical cal category of citizenship are more compli- research strategies with wider theories of cated than the distribution of access to research and its political, ethical and institu- citizenship itself. tional contexts. The contributors offer per- This fourth section traverses the history sonal accounts which reflect how they have and contemporary terrain of social justice in negotiated these issues in their own research geography, recognizing the many different practice. The editorial commentary draws ways in which the term has been problema- these themes together and provides some tized. We address the ideal of morality and thought-provoking observations on the con- ethics with respect to justice as well as the duct of social geographical research in the tension that exists between liberal notions of twenty-first century. social justice and feminist reconceptualization of it around an ‘ethic of care’. We also address the intersections of social justice and environ- THE SHAPE OF SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY mental justice and more recent attempts to develop a meta-ethics of justice for the To restate: it is obvious, even in a volume of discipline. Finally, we explore various jus- this scale and size, that we cannot hope to tice- and rights- based struggles for both the present a comprehensive picture of a subject capacity to become and act and to have equal as longstanding or as wide ranging as social access to the political, social and cultural geography. Nor can we claim to have done resources that constitute worlds. justice to the many vibrant social geographies Reflecting this interest in practice and prac- that are currently in play. We are conscious of tical engagement, the handbook ends with a some glaring gaps, just as we are inspired by fifth section containing a set of commentaries so much of what has been written. What we on methods and ethics: on what is implied in have tried to convey above all in this collec- doing social geography. This is not a system- tion is a sense of the energy, diversity, rele- atic overview of the ‘how to’ of research: there vance and curiosity that drives the work of are plenty of volumes now devoted to method- social geographers today. The essays contain a ology. It is rather about the entanglement of flavour of what matters, a glimpse of where research with practicalities, moralities and the cutting edge lies, a brush with the most politics. It is about the possibilities for, and dangerous territory, and a signal of what is limits to, activism. Doing social geography still to come. This is not a geography of eve- has always been about practice and practical rything for anyone; but hopefully it contains engagement – it is one area of geography something of value for geographers generally, where the ‘doing’ has always been bound into for social scientists in the wider community, the ‘knowing’. It is, indeed, social geogra- and for social geographers in particular. phers who have begun to respond to calls for more grounded research and theory across the discipline, and who have tied the achieve- REFERENCES ments of a sometimes too detached ‘cultural turn’ into pressing concerns about welfare and Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological inequality. This makes social geography well state apparatuses (notes toward an investi- placed to address key questions, which are gation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other currently resurfacing across social science, Essays, translated by B. Brewster. New York: about the relevance of academic research and Monthly Review Press. pp. 127–86.

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