Theory and Methods: Critical Essays in Human Geography

by Philo,Chris; Philo,Chris

• ISBN13: 9780754627098
• ISBN10: 0754627098
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This volume tackles the complex terrain of theory and methods, seeking to exemplify the major philosophical, social-theoretic and methodological developments - some with clear political and ethical implications - that have traversed human geography since the era of the 1960s when spatial science came to the fore. Coverage includes Marxist and humanistic geographies, and their many variations over the years, as well as ongoing debates about agency-structure and the concepts of time, space, place and scale. Feminist and other 'positioned' geographies, alongside poststructuralist and posthumanist geographies, are all evidenced, as well as writings that push against the very 'limits' of what human geography has embraced over these fifty plus years. The volume combines readings that are well-known and widely accepted as 'classic', with readings that, while less familiar, are valuable in how they illustrate different possibilities for theory and method within the discipline. The volume also includes a substantial introduction by the editor, contextualising the readings, and in the process providing a new interpretation of the last half-century of change within the thoughts and practices of human geography.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Spatial Science and Its Critics

A geographic methodology

Sensations and spatial science: gratification and anxiety in the production of ordered landscapes

Retheorizing economic geography: from the quantitative revolution to the 'cultural turn'

Marxist Geography and Its Early Reconstructions

Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation

The socio-spatial dialectic

The matter of nature

Humanistic Geography and Its Early Reconstructions

Humanistic geography

Practising humanistic geography

Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea

Agency and Structure

Human agency and human geography

Human agency and human geography revisited: a critique of 'new models' of the self

Space and causality, or whatever happened to the subject?

Time, Space, Place and Space-Time

Social reproduction and the time-geography of everyday life

Geography and the realm of passages

Politics and space/time

Scaling Human Geographies

Is there a place for the rational actor? A geographical critique of the rational choice paradigm

Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality and geographical scale in globalization studies

Human geography without scale

Feminist and Other 'Positioned' Geographies

The geography of women: an historical introduction

Changing ourselves: a geography of position

Postcolonialising geography: tactics and pitfalls

I lost an arm on my last trip back home: black geographies

Poststructuralist Geographies

Geography and power: the work of Michel Foucault

Understanding diversity: the problem of/for 'theory'

My dinner with Derrida, or spatial analysis and poststructuralism do lunch

Poststructuralist geographies: the essential selection

Posthumanist Geographies: Inhuman/nonhuman/human: actor-network theory and the prospects for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective on nature and society

The body as 'place': reflexivity and fieldwork in Kano, Nigeria

Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy

From born to made: technology, biology and space

Limits to Human Geography

Hemming the way

Coming out of geography: towards a queer epistemology

Neo-critical geography, or, the flat pluralist world of business class

Name index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

This volume tackles the complex terrain of theory and methods, seeking to exemplify the major philosophical, social-theoretic and methodological developments - some with clear political and ethical implications - that have traversed human geography since the era of the 1960s when spatial science came to the fore. Coverage includes Marxist and humanistic geographies, and their many variations over the years, as well as ongoing debates about agency-structure and the concepts of time, space, place and scale. Feminist and other 'positioned' geographies, alongside poststructuralist and posthumanist geographies, are all evidenced, as well as writings that push against the very 'limits' of what human geography has embraced over these fifty plus years. The volume combines readings that are well-known and widely accepted as 'classic', with readings that, while less familiar, are valuable in how they illustrate different possibilities for theory and method within the discipline. The volume also includes a substantial introduction by the editor, contextualising the readings, and in the process providing a new interpretation of the last half-century of change within the thoughts and practices of human geography.