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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography
- Sprache: Englisch
Addresses both social and cultural geography in a single volume, authored and edited by leading authorities in the fields
The Companion to Social and Cultural Geography provides reliable and up-to-date coverage of both foundational topics and emerging themes within two vibrant and increasingly interconnected subdisciplines of geography. Building upon the Companion to Cultural Geography first published in 2013, editors Ishan Ashutosh and Jamie Winders offer an expertly curated collection of original essays with special emphasis on early-career scholars, geographers of color, and geographers from the Global South.
Organized thematically, the Companion opens with a series of "Global Dispatches" from cultural and social geographers working in different disciplines and locations, followed by explorations of key concepts in social and cultural geography such as identity, belonging, solidarity, inequalities, and intersectional geographies. Subsequent chapters examine a wide range of cultural and social geographies, including creativity, technologies, science, nature, memory, tourism, migration, labor, and religion. Throughout the Companion, authors share fresh insights into the racial reckonings of late, ongoing issues related to climate change, the consequences of COVID-19, and more.
Across its 46 chapters, the Companion to Social and Cultural Geography:
- Examines how approaches to human-environment dynamics in social and cultural geography help shed light on current challenges
- Covers critical topics such as justice, protest, borders, public health, urban planning, indigeneity, genders, class, race, and sexualities
- Emphasizes the value of a geographic perspective to understanding social and cultural dynamics
- Discusses how geography has confronted its deep connections to colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy
- Addresses a range of emerging and established themes, including queer and transgender geographies, Black geographies, animal geographies, and cultural geographies of states
- Incorporates a diversity of writing styles, narratives, and analyses, such as interviews, conversations, short essays, autobiography, and autoethnography
Accessible, authoritative, and highly relevant to today's students, the Companion to Social and Cultural Geography is an essential textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses on social or cultural geography, cultural studies, cultural sociology, and ethnic studies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Where Did this Companion Come From?
Why Read this Companion?
How Should You Read This Companion?
REFERENCES
GLOBAL DISPATCHES ON CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 1: Lessons from COVID, If We Will Just Listen
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 2: Duture Neza, Duture Heza
1
: Planning and Building a “Liberal Peace”
Imidugudu
Critical Peace Epistemologies
Conflict Geographies
Whither Peace?
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 3: Social/Cultural Geography in/on the “Middle East”
Problematics of Regional Studies and of “Middle Eastern” Studies
Geographic Scholarship on SWANA
Geography within SWANA
In Summary
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 4: Social and Cultural Geography of Southeast Asia and East Asia: Inter‐Asian Connections and Connectivities
Introduction
Migration and Mobility
Borderland Affinities and Transnational Development Projects
Conclusion
REFERENCES
FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS IN CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 5: Place
Place: An Introduction
Place: An Autoethnography
Place in Geography
The Future of Place
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 6: “Non‐”/“More‐than‐” Representational Theories
Introduction: What Ends, What Begins?
Section 1: An Imperative, a Promise
Section 2: The Concept of Culture
Section 3: Tensions and Trajectories
Concluding Comments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 7: Mappings
Introduction
The Rise of Cartography
Analytics of Critical Cartography
The “Death” of Cartography and the Rise of Counter‐Mapping
Decolonization and Indigenous Mapping
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 8: Inequalities
Producing Inequalities
Carceral Geography
Moving Forward
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 9: Intersectional Geographies
Introduction
Section 1: History of Intersectionality
Section 2: Intersectional Geographies in This Moment
Conclusion: Ways Forward
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 10: Solidarity
Introduction
Solidarity and “Imagined” Connections
Practicing Solidarity
Contested Solidarities
Conclusions
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 11: Virtual Environments, Material Relations: Theorizing Virtual Reality in the Context of Environmental Crisis
Introduction: Digital and Virtual Spaces of Earth
Theoretical Framework
Virtual Assemblages, New Materialist Openings
Sacrificio : An Assemblage of Heterogenous Agents
1
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL BELONGING
CHAPTER 12: Race
Introduction
Contextualizing Race and Racialization in South Asia
Race and India's Eastern Himalayan Frontier
Uninhabitable Landscapes or Zones of Refuge?
Migration and Racialization
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 13: Black Geographies
SUGGESTED READINGS
CHAPTER 14: Genders
SUGGESTED READINGS
CHAPTER 15: Class
Introduction
Geography and Class Theory
Theme 1: The Middle Class and Its Others
Theme 2: Placing Middle‐Class Identity
Theme 3: Geographies of Middle‐Class Austerity
Theme 4: Embodied Class Performances
Theme 5: Working‐Class Identity and Subjectivity
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 16: Queer and Transgender Geographies
Introduction
Geographies of Sexualities
Transgender Geographies
Queer of Color Geographies
Heteroactivism
Conclusion
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 17: Nationalism, Populism
What Is Populism?
From the People to the Nation
National Atmospheres
Conclusion: Inventing the People Anew
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 18: Cuerpo‐Territorio and Indigenous Geographies Otherwise: Epistemological Irreverences and Embodying Territorialities in Praxis
Sterile Decolonization in Geography: From Discourse to Praxis
Cuerpo‐Territorio Mapping with Indigenous Women and Girls
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 19: Aging across the Life Course
Introduction
Evolution of the Subdiscipline: Foundations and (De)Compartmentalizations
Conceptual Anchors within Geographies of Age
“Aging” over the Past Decade: Continuities and Developments
Future Directions: Nexus‐Thinking and Lacunae
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 20: Ability
Introduction
Geographies of Disability and Disablism
Geographies of Ability and Ableism
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF…
CHAPTER 21: Creativities/Performance
Introduction: Creativities?
Critical Creativities
Diverse Creativities
Creativities and Their Geographies
Critical Conceptual Thought
Critical Analytics
Where Next? Speculations and Imaginations?
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 22: The Visual
Introduction
The Changing Role of the Visual in Geography
Visuality in Today's Geography: Digital Revolutions, Visual Archives, and the Seeing Body
Envisaging the Future
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 23: Sound and Aural Geographies
Sound, Geography, and Representation
Music, Language, and Accent: Representation and Resistance
Sound as an Intimate, Raw Experience
The Future of Sound
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 24: Futures
The Future and Cultural Geography
More Human Geographies of Futurity
Cultural Geographies of More‐than‐Human Futures
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 25: Memory and Reckoning
Disputed, Deified, and Drowned: School Grounds as/of Reckoning
Social and Cultural Geographies of Memory
The Material Turn
The Affective Turn
The Reparative Turn
Conclusions and Future Directions
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 26: Production/Labor/Work
Introduction
Geographies of Retail Labor and Consumption
Labor Geographies of the Digital Economy
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 27: Cultural Geographies of States
Introduction
The Sociocultural State
Body, Home, City, and Nature: Shifting Spaces of the State
States, Violence, and Difference
Concluding Thoughts
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 28: Geological, Oceanic, Ontological: Reorienting Cultural and Social Geographies of Nature
Introduction
The Geological
The Oceanic
The Ontological
Conclusion: Ruins and Futures
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 29: Science
Introduction
Science as Spatially Situated and Embedded
Science as Collective Social Practice
Science as Value Ridden and Political
Science as Productive of Reality
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 30: Tourism, Leisure, and Consumption: Chinese Tourists in Macau
Decentering Tourism Research: Geopolitics and Biopolitics
From Epistemology to Ontology: Materialist Approaches to Tourist Studies
Ambiances, Atmospheres, and the Assemblage of the Tourist Subject
Nonanthropocentric and Multispecies Approaches to Tourism Research
Mass Tourism in Virulent Times
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 31: Animal Geographies
Introduction
Forms of Animal Geographies
Animal Spaces
Beastly Places
Tensions and Prospects
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 32: Cultural Geographies of Food
A New Geography of Food
Scalar Food Systems
Alternative Food Networks
Critical and Radical Food Geographies
Future Directions in the Geography of Food
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 33: Migration
Introduction
Lineages of Migration Studies
Re‐siting Place
Marginalizing Difference, Centering Ethnoracial Supremacy
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 34: Digital Lives/Spaces
Introduction
Digital Life
Digital Lives and Spaces
Conclusion and Future Areas of Research
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 35: Affect‐Emotions
Affect, Emotions, and Feelings
Trends in Emotional‐Affective Geographical Research Methods and Themes
The Body
Human Loss and Grief
Grief for Other Species and the Environment
Future Directions for Emotional‐Affective Studies in Social and Cultural Geographies
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 36: Rural Geography
A Walk on the TAM
Material Ruralities through Sight, Smell, and Sound
Representations of Rurality from Formal Planning to Folk Music
Rural Spaces of Representation through Diverse Lived Experiences
Another TAM Walk
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 37: Centering Urban Autoethnographies on the Margins
Debating (Urban) Autoethnography
Autoethnographies of Marginalized People and Places
Carceral Conditions
Displaced People and the Unhoused
Graffiti Writers and Subcultural Practices
A Moderate Autoethnography for Modest Disciplinary Change
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 38: Suburban(ism)
Introduction
Etymological and Historical Excavation of “the Suburban”
Suburban “Communities”
Sociocultural Geographies of New Suburbanisms
Eyes on the Suburbs: Cinematic, Artistic, and Literary Representations
Reimagining Suburban Futures
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 39: Home and Domestic Space
Introduction: “Moving Past the Front Stoop”
Rethinking and Expanding the Domestic: Home as a Sociopolitical Space
Queering the Home
The Destruction and Unmaking of Home
The Future of Home in Cultural and Social Geography
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 40: Religion
Introduction
“New” Geographies of Religion
“Changing” Geographies of Religion
“Emerging” Geographies of Religion
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 41: Care Geographies: Work, Home, and Bodies
Geographies of Care
Care Work
Home and Housing
Bodies
Future Directions
REFERENCES
STRUGGLES
CHAPTER 42: Humanizing Climate Change
The Physical Science of Climate Change
Rendering Climate Change Technical
Humanizing Climate Change
Conclusion: Coping with Climate
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 43: Borders
Introduction
Geography: The Discipline of Borders
Pushing the Boundaries of Geography
Inequality, Coloniality, and Activism
Conclusion
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 44: From Postcolonial to Decolonial
Postcolonial Geographies
Colonialism, Geographic Knowledge, and Postcolonial Practices
Charting (Post)colonial Spaces and Identities
Postcolonial Geographies of Encounters and Resistance
Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Geographies
Conclusion: Locating Postcolonial Geographies
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 45: Protest
Fragments of a History of Geographical Research on Protest
Some Contemporary Trends: Of Protest and Culture, Place, and Landscape
Possible Futures
REFERENCES
CHAPTER 46: Justice
Phil Neel
Drew Heiderscheidt
Jennifer Watkins
REFERENCES
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The cover of a 2007 pamphlet with the title, Banyarwanda Duture N...
Figure 2.2 Pre‐1994 typical habitat pattern, with homes loosely oriented to ...
Figure 2.3 Post‐1994 village settlements, with houses uniformly spaced in gr...
Figure 2.4 Young boys push potatoes, beans, and other harvests on bicycles t...
Figure 2.5 Map of the 36 rural village sites where interviews with 614 resid...
Figure 2.6 Anonymized photograph of Alphonse in his home, 2018.
Figure 2.7 Houses under construction in “Ingurunguru Village” in a landscape...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Definitions of place.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Screenshot of OpenStreetMap website.
Figure 7.2 Artist Cian Dayrit's “Cartography for Colonialism.”
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1 Cuerpo‐territorio collective mapping. Santa Ana de Muserun...
Figure 18.2 Body‐map drawn collectively by a group of five Indigenous girls....
Figure 18.3 “Niñas de la Amazonia exponen ‘Intimidades.’” La Razón news...
Figure 18.4 Installation at exhibition opening: attendees observing the draw...
Figure 18.5 Exhibition opening: questionnaire on the wall, June 12, 2019, La...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography
Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography is a blue‐chip, comprehensive series covering each major subdiscipline of human geography in detail. Edited and contributed by the disciplines’ leading authorities each book provides the most up to date and authoritative syntheses available in its field. The overviews provided in each Companion will be an indispensable introduction to the field for students of all levels, while the cutting‐edge, critical direction will engage students, teachers, and practitioners alike.
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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to TourismEdited by C. Michael Hall
A Companion to Feminist GeographyEdited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager
A Companion to Environmental GeographyEdited by Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman, and Bruce Rhoads
A Companion to Health and Medical GeographyEdited by Tim Brown, Sara McLafferty, and Graham Moon
A Companion to Social GeographyEdited by Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., Mary Thomas, Ruth Panelli, and Paul Cloke
The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Human GeographyEdited by John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan
The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Economic GeographyEdited by Eric Sheppard, Trevor J. Barnes, and Jamie Peck
The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Cultural GeographyEdited by Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to TourismEdited by Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall, and Allan M. Williams
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political GeographyEdited by John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna J. Secor, and Joanne Sharp
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural and Social GeographyEdited by Ishan Ashutosh and Jamie Winders
Also available:
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The Blackwell Companion to GlobalizationEdited by George Ritzer
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THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
Edited by
ISHAN ASHUTOSHAND JAMIE WINDERS
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Notes on Contributors
Derek H. Alderman is a cultural geographer of memory, race, heritage tourism, and critical approaches to place name study and mapping – often in the African American Freedom Struggle context. He is a Chancellor's Professor at the University of Tennessee and a former president of the American Association of Geographers. He is a (co)author of over 170 articles, book chapters, and essays, a recipient of National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities funding, and an advocate for publicly engaged scholarship.
Ben Anderson is a cultural‐political geographer whose research conceptualizes ordinary affective life and examines the politics of affect in relation to emergency governance, contemporary post‐2018 political turbulence, including the rise of right‐wing populisms, climate change, and other contemporary conditions. He is author of Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (2017, Routledge) and the forthcoming (with Professor Anna Secor) The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (2025, Goldsmiths University Press/MIT).
James Ash is a professor in technology and society at Newcastle University. His work investigates the cultures, economies, and politics of digital interfaces and the role that digital technologies play in transforming everyday life. He is the author of Phase Media (Bloomsbury 2017) and The Interface Envelope (Bloomsbury 2015) and coauthor, with Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski, of Researching Digital Life (Sage 2024).
Ishan Ashutosh is associate professor of geography at Indiana University‐Bloomington. His work encompasses the study of migration, the politics of race and ethnicity from an international and comparative perspective, and urban studies. He has published in cultural geographies, Progress in Human Geography, Geography Compass, Environment and Planning C: Space and Politics, Journal of Historical Geography, South Asian Diaspora, Diaspora, and Geopolitics.
Alison L. Bain is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Canada. As an urban social geographer, she studies the inequalities of contemporary urban and suburban place‐making through the lens of artistic practice and spatialized identity politics. Her books include Creative Margins, the coedited The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities and Urbanization in a Global Context, and forthcoming Queer Geographies and Co‐Authoring Feminist and Queer Geographies.
Stefano Bloch is associate professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona in Tucson and on Tohono O'odham and Pasqua Yaqui territory. He researches, writes about, and teaches courses focused on law and criminalization in the context of neighborhood change, gang territoriality, identity, and cultural place‐making.
Jordan Brasher is a broadly trained critical human geographer with research specializations in cultural‐historical geography, heritage tourism, and the politics of commemorating slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas. His work earned the Best Paper Award in the Journal of Heritage Tourism for 2021 and has been featured in The Conversation, the Washington Post, Folha de São Paulo, and other outlets.
Eve Z. Bratman is a political ecologist and associate professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Earth & Environment at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She is author of an award‐winning book, Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development in the Brazilian Amazon (Oxford University Press 2019), and has published over twenty articles about the politics of pollinator protection, energy infrastructures, environmental education, and urban sustainability in venues including Antipode, Earth Stewardship, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, and Orion Magazine.
Tianna Bruno is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present‐day environmental injustice.
Tim Bunnell is professor in the Department of Geography and director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He works mainly on the politics of urban development in Southeast Asia (particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia) and that region's global connections. Tim's latest book is Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (Jovis 2018; coedited with Daniel P.S. Goh).
Daniel Cockayne is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. He is a feminist economic geographer and cultural geographer who explores workplace culture and changing attitudes toward work among entrepreneurs and office workers. His current research explores the shift toward working from home as a result of COVID‐19 lockdowns in Ontario, Canada.
Susan Craddock is professor emerita from the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focused on the social and political determinations of risk to ill health and in particular to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, COVID‐19, HIV, and influenza and the convergence of financial, political, and scientific factors in determining the availability or not of life‐saving medications for these diseases, particularly in low‐income countries. Her publications include Compound Solutions: Pharmaceutical Alternatives for Global Health (2017), City of Plagues: Disease Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (2000), HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology (coedited, 2004), and Influenza and Public Health: Learning from Past Pandemics (coedited, 2012).
Nicholas Jon Crane is an associate professor of geography and international studies at the University of Wyoming. Crane teaches cultural geography, political geography, and interdisciplinary themes in cultural politics and political economy across multiple world regions. Crane's current research examines relationships between configurations of place and the production of unequal social vulnerabilities in the context of urban economic development in central Mexico (including Mexico City) and the Aegean region of Türkiye (centered on İzmir).
Karen Culcasi is associate professor of geography at West Virginia University. Her book, Displacing Territory, Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, won the 2023 Meridian Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. She is currently working on a project on anti‐Muslim discrimination in West Virginia. She teaches courses on political geography, geographies of the “Middle East” (though she prefers to use “Southwest Asia and North Africa”), digital cartography, geopolitical theories, and geographic thought.
Declan Cullen is an assistant professor in geography at The George Washington University. His interests are in geographies of colonialism, economic transitions, and the effects of digital technologies on people and places.
Anindita Datta is professor of geography at the University of Delhi. She is vice president of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and past chair, IGU Commission on Gender and Geography. Her work focuses on gendered and epistemic violence, feminist dissidence, spaces of resistance, and geographies of care. Datta is associate editor of Dialogues in Human Geography and author of Gender Space and Agency in India: Exploring Regional Genderscapes.
Menusha De Silva is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the intersections of aging, transnational migration, and citizenship. Her recent work on geographical education focuses feminist pedagogy and blended forms of learning. She has published in peer‐reviewed journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Population, Space and Place, and Professional Geographer. In 2020, she received the Area journal prize for New Research in Geography.
Christabel Devadoss is a political and cultural geographer. She is an associate professor of global studies and human geography in the Department of Political and Global Affairs at Middle Tennessee State University. She received her PhD in geography from West Virginia University in 2018 and her master's in geography and bachelor of science in visual journalism from Kent State University (2014, 2009). She has been a lecturer at MTSU, an instructor for Kent State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a professional photographer.
Kim England (she/her) is professor of geography and emerita Harry Bridges Endowed Chair of Labor Studies, University of Washington. Her research investigates various aspects of the globalization of care work and the experience of care workers and the ways these knit together the restructuring of care provision, international migration, and the home as a workplace. Her current research explores workplace rights and domestic workers' activism in the United States.
Cristina Faiver‐Serna is assistant professor of Geography and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Faiver‐Serna's areas of expertise include critical human geography, Chicanx and Latinx studies, women of color feminisms, environmental justice, and public health.
Claire Fitch is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research concerns the spatial imaginaries of techno‐centric capitalism and phenomenologies of immersive digital media. Her dissertation investigates the composing relations of subjecthood in a timespace marked by the rapid increase of both environmental degradation and the ubiquity of digital technologies.
Mabel Denzin Gergan is assistant professor in Asian studies at Vanderbilt University. Trained as a human geographer, her research is grounded in the Indian Himalayan region, specifically Sikkim and Ladakh. She is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race. She is the founding member of an editorial and writing collective, Desirable Futures, that brings together scholars theorizing colonial constructions of time and futurity at the intersection of Black, Indigenous, and decolonial geographies.
Ilaria Giglioli is assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco. A human geographer by training, she studies the creation, legitimization, and contestation of borders, with a comparative focus in the Mediterranean and US southern border. Her most recent book (2025), Unbounding Europe: Bordering and the Politics of Mediterranean Solidarity in Sicily and Tunisia, has been published by Cornell University Press.
Mary Gilmartin works at Maynooth University, Ireland, where she is professor of geography. Her recent research focuses on migration and mobilities, and she has published widely in this area. A former managing editor of Social & Cultural Geography, she recently coauthored Social Geographies: The Basics (Routledge 2024). She also coedited the third edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place (Sage 2024), which now includes a more diverse range of scholars.
Kathryne Gravestock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. She is a labor activist, labor geographer, and feminist geographer. Her research explores the relationship between fashion retail workers, clothing consumption practices, and urban change.
Paul Griffin is an assistant professor in human geography at Northumbria University. His research considers the spatial politics of labor organizing and more recently the histories of community responses to unemployment. This research has utilized both archival and oral history research methods. His work can be found in journals such as Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Political Geography, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, and Progress in Human Geography.
Edward Hall is reader in human geography at the University of Dundee. His research is focused on disability and learning disability, including projects on social exclusion and inclusion, personalization in social care and support, vulnerability and resilience to environmental hazards, the role of creative arts in sense of belonging, and experiences of and responses to hate crime.
Harriet Hawkins is professor of GeoHumanities and the founding codirector of the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersections of geography, art, creativity, aesthetics, and the imagination and explores how creative practices can contribute to critical contemporary issues such as the current and future use of underground spaces and engagements with climate change.
Drew Heiderscheidt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington. Drew is a historical geographer and critical GIScientist whose work synthesizes archival research and GIS. Using a case study of the Western Federation of Miners, his dissertation focuses on the geographies of criminalization and collective action in Colorado's Front Range during the early‐twentieth century.
Brian Hennigan earned his PhD in 2022 from the Department of Geography & the Environment in the Maxwell School for Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University. After having worked for two years as a union organizer, Hennigan returned to Syracuse University, where he teaches full‐time as an adjunct professor. Hennigan's research explores how the US working class navigates the neoliberalized housing and labor markets.
Matthew Himley is professor of geography at Illinois State University, USA. He is a nature–society geographer with research interests in the political ecology and political economy of resource industries, especially in the Andean region of South America. He is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography (Routledge 2021) and Mining, Mobility, and Social Change in the Global South: Regional Perspectives (Routledge 2024).
Elaine Lynn‐Ee Ho is Provost's Chair Professor at the Department of Geography and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research examines the geographies of citizenship through studying transnational migrants, as well as the aging and the well‐being of older migrants and nonmigrants. She is editor of the journal Social & Cultural Geography and serves on the editorial boards of geography, citizenship, migration, and area studies journals.
Benjamin Kidder Hodges is an artist and anthropologist originally from Richmond, Virginia, whose research‐based art practice and writing often draw on folklore, mythology, and media archaeology to call attention to overlooked histories. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Macau teaching filmmaking, media studies, and cultural studies within the Department of Communication, where he helped establish the Creative Media Lab.
Ellen Kohl is an assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her primary research and teaching interests are at the intersections of environmental governance and systemic oppression with an emphasis on environmental justice activism and policy. Her current projects look at the role of science as both a tool of oppression and a potential tool of liberation for scientists, policymakers, and activists.
Sunčana Laketa (MA in psychology, University of Zagreb; PhD in geography, University of Arizona) is an urban and cultural geographer. Her interests include different forms of urban and geopolitical conflict, as well as questions of social difference and their corresponding geographies of exclusion, focusing on how these become entangled with everyday places, lives, and experiences. Her forthcoming book is titled Cities of Banal Warfare: Affective Geographies in Violent Times (Bristol University Press).
Jamie Lorimer is professor of environmental geography at the University of Oxford. His research explores public understandings of nature and how these come to shape environmental governance. Past projects have explored the histories, politics, and cultures of wildlife conservation ranging across scales from elephants to the microbiome. Jamie is the author of The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (Minnesota 2020) and More‐than‐Human (Routledge 2024).
Casey R. Lynch is Ramón y Cajal Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Girona in Catalonia, Spain. He completed a PhD in geography at the University of Arizona and has worked at the University of Nevada Reno, University of Twente, and the Open University of Catalonia. His research examines the urban politics of technocapitalism with specific interest in questions of (post)human agency and labor in relation to artificial intelligence and robotics.
Avril Maddrell is professor of social and cultural geography at the University of Reading. She is a feminist geographer, researching spaces, landscapes, and practices of death, mourning, and remembrance; sacred mobilities; diversity issues, and historiography. She is and author/coauthor/coeditor of numerous books, including Mobilities in Life and Death (2023); Deathscapes (2010); Consolationscapes … (2019); Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage (2015); Sacred Mobilities (2015); Complex Locations (2009); and Contemporary Encounters in Gender and Religion (2017).
Andrea Marston is assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Her work explores the political economics and cultural politics of resource extraction, primarily in Latin America, and she is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press 2024).
Judith Miggelbrink is the director of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography and professor of regional geography at the University of Leipzig. Her research projects have focused on rural populism and the relationship between the borders of the European Union and globalization.
Emily Mitchell‐Eaton is an assistant professor of geography at Colgate University and the author of New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States. Her research uses feminist approaches to examine how empires shape migration and mobilities, citizenship, racialization, and struggles for decolonization, particularly across Oceania and in Pacific diasporas. Her work has been published in Political Geography, Gender, Place & Culture, EPC: Politics & Space, and Radical History Review.
Nohely Guzmán is a ch'ixi feminist and anticolonial PhD candidate in the Geography Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. With nearly a decade of activism and community‐driven research in the Bolivian Amazon, her work explores Indigenous understandings of embodiment, intimacy, territoriality, and everyday practices of self‐determination.
Phil Neel is a communist geographer based in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018) published by Reaktion (London), now out in paperback. His second book, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory, is scheduled for release in 2025 as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series published by Brill (Leiden) and Haymarket (Chicago). He has no academic affiliation.
Peter B. Nelson a professor of geography at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he joined the faculty in 1999. He holds a PhD and master's in geography from the University of Washington and a BA in geography from Dartmouth College. He teaches courses on population issues, research methods, and the rural United States. His research examines urban to rural migration and has engaged topics related to gentrification and the impact of COVID‐19 on migration patterns.
Mel Nowicki is a reader in urban geography at Oxford Brookes University. Her research focuses on people's lived experience of housing crisis in a range of contexts, including family homelessness and the rise of tiny housing as a purported solution. Her first book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London, was published in 2023 by Bristol Policy Press.
Kerri Jean Ormerod is associate professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno in the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering. Her research examines how science, law, and technology interact and adapt to changing social values regarding water governance.
Arnisson Andre C. Ortega is an assistant professor of geography at Syracuse University in the Department of Geography and the Environment. He is a community geographer who specializes in counter‐mapping, urban cultural politics, population geography, critical quantitative methods, and transnational urbanism. Born and raised in the Philippines, he advocates praxis and social justice and works closely with various community‐based organizations in the Philippines.
Catarina Passidomo is associate professor of environmental studies at Washington and Lee University. Her research focuses on food systems and the relationships among food, place, nature, society, and power.
Lydia Pelot‐Hobbs is an assistant professor of geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching focus on carceral and abolition geographies; racial capitalism; feminist and queer politics; and grassroots social movements. She is the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press 2023) and coeditor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books 2024).
Julie A. Podmore is a professor in geosciences at John Abbott College and affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is an urban sociocultural geographer who adopts a feminist, queer historical approach to the study of urban/suburban processes. She is coeditor of Lesbian Feminism: Essays Opposing Global Heteropatriarchies, The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities and the forthcoming Queer Geographies: Key Debates and Contending Perspectives.
Mark Rhodes is a cultural and historical geographer focused upon memory, heritage, and landscape. They advise MS and PhD students in Michigan Technological University's interdisciplinary Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program. His research explores the political economies and ecologies of human and more‐than‐human heritage. This currently includes eponyms found in fruit and vegetables, industrial World Heritage Sites, and the National Museum Wales system.
Juleon Robinson is an organizer, community educator, and geography PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include housing geographies, Third World Marxisms, and regional political economy. His current projects include a critical analysis of the role of public housing policy in the fragmentation of Black Geographies in California's East Bay and a documentary on the radical housing justice politics of Moms 4 Housing, a Black feminist collective in Oakland, California.
James Ryan is head of the School of Humanities and professor of cultural history at the University of Southampton. He has a background in historical and cultural geography and wide‐ranging research interests in the history and geography of modernity, empire, and photography. He is the author of Photography and Exploration (2018) and Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (1997) and coeditor of Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (2001).
Antje Schlottmann has been doing research and teaching at the Department of Human Geography, Goethe‐University Frankfurt since 2008. Her work comprises analysis of communicative interfaces in a development project (MA), studies on the relation of space and language in media discourse focusing the German reunification (PhD), and, recently, enhancing the field of visual geographies and visual encounter value production in socio‐nature/more‐than‐human settings in nature and wildlife conservation.
Tim Simpson is associate professor in the Department of Communication, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the author of Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution (University of Minnesota Press 2023) and editor of Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries (Amsterdam University Press 2017).
Véronique Sioufi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Her research explores the reproduction of colonial imbalances of power and precarity in global digital labor markets. She is the Racial and Socioeconomic Equity Researcher and Policy Analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC.
Angharad Closs Stephens is head of geography at Prifysgol Abertawe – Swansea University and author of National Affects: The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political (Bloomsbury 2022). Her research is at the intersections between cultural geographies, international relations, security, and performance studies.
Kendra Strauss is the director of the Labour Studies Program and a professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, where she is also an associate member in the Department of Geography. She is a labor geographer and feminist political economist with research and teaching interests in the areas of precarious work, social reproduction, migration, and care labor. She is the codirector of the Understanding Precarity in BC (UP‐BC) SSHRC Partnership.
Brandi T. Summers is associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post‐Chocolate City. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Summers' second book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City, highlights resistance and reclamation in response to urban gentrification and related economic policies.
Samantha Thompson (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct assistant professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada. She is a feminist urban geographer with interests in the intersections of care geographies, urban politics, and low‐income housing. Her current work analyzes the impacts of care on renters' experiences of housing crises.
Jennifer Watkins is a PhD candidate in geography at Indiana University, Bloomington and the current program director for The LEE Initiative of Louisville, Kentucky. Her research engages food as community relations, the political economy of the restaurant industry, and US labor structures.
Delia DuongBa Wendel (she/ her) is associate professor in urban studies and international development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her interdisciplinary work explores peacebuilding after protracted violence. She is the author of Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty, a book on memory justice and politics (Duke University Press 2025); the coeditor of Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place (Harvard University Press 2016); and director of the Planning for Peace research collaborative.
Robert Wilton is a professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University. His research focuses on the social geographies of disabled people and the barriers they face to social inclusion. Recent projects have focused on employment in market and social economies, finding accessible and affordable housing, and negotiating state welfare systems. Rob has served as an editor for Social & Cultural Geography and is currently associate editor for Health & Place.
Jamie Winders is professor of geography at Syracuse University. Her research addresses themes including international migration, racial politics, social reproduction, and artificial intelligence. She is the coauthor of A Critical Introduction to Cultural Geography and a coeditor for The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Winders is an associate editor at cultural geographies and was the founding director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute.
Orlando Woods is professor of geography at the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University, where he is also director of the SMU Urban Institute. His research interests span sociocultural and urban geography, critical infrastructure studies, and new media and communication. He holds BA and PhD degrees in geography from University College London and National University of Singapore, respectively.
Si Jie Ivin Yeo is a doctoral student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, and senior tutor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His current research explores how various kinds of digital technologies mediate the experience of everyday well‐being for different urban inhabitants.
Acknowledgments
Ishan: My thanks to my coeditor, Jamie Winders, whose focus on this project, particularly when it seemed to repeatedly come undone, got all of us to the finish line. I would also, and especially, like to thank the authors of this volume, who reminded me time and again about the impact social and cultural geography makes in our lives and in our world.
Jamie: My thanks go to my coeditor, Ishan Ashutosh, whose passion and anger about inequities in the world, paired with a deep intellectual curiosity and a wandering theoretical eye, kept the work on this Companion from becoming tedious. I also thank Brian Hennigan, who dug through journals to help us create a wish list of topics to address. Finally, and in addition to our authors, I thank the students who, over many years, have helped me blur the lines between teaching and research, theory and practice, studying and doing, and reminded me about why a curious and critical take on the world around us is so important.
Introduction
Ishan Ashutosh and Jamie Winders
If you talk with enough geographers, you'll hear a similar story about how they stumbled into the field of geography because it helped them ask those questions they'd been wrangling with all their lives. Why do places look the way they do? Where do boundaries between neighborhoods, communities, villages, or nation‐states come from? Who gets to decide what goes on a map and what is left off? What's it like to live in (fill in the blank)? What does it mean to be from (fill in the blank)? What make places different or the same? Following that tradition, we introduce this Companion to Cultural and Social Geography through a series of questions about it. Our hope is that by the time you finish this chapter, you have your own questions about these two subfields of geography and a desire to explore them through the chapters that follow.
Where Did this Companion Come From?
This Companion is a product of its times and places. The idea to update the 2013 Companion to Cultural Geography (Johnson et al. 2013), which itself updated a 2004 version (Duncan et al. 2004), began in Spring 2019. We drafted our vision for what a companion that addresses both cultural and social geography should include in Summer 2019, with research assistance from Brian Hennigan. In Fall 2019, we debated which topics deserved stand‐alone chapters and which one of us would shepherd each chapter, adding, removing, combining, and refining topics, grouping and regrouping chapters, and seeking the chapter sequence that made the most sense. In early 2020, we created our wish list of authors and began inviting them to contribute chapters. At this point, we anticipated giving authors nine months to a year to complete chapters, with six months or so to revise, and a final submission deadline in late 2021. All signs pointed to as smooth a process as we could expect for a companion with nearly 50 chapters.
The COVID‐19 pandemic, of course, disrupted every aspect of this project. Within weeks of our first round of author invitations, COVID had shut down universities, borders, and travel in many parts of the world, disrupting work and home lives (and everything in between), as well as the temporalities and spatialities of both spheres. Asking authors to submit a finalized chapter within a year suddenly seemed impossible, if not outright ludicrous, in the face of a pandemic whose death toll seemed to rise astronomically each day in those early months. In selecting Companion authors, we had prioritized early‐career scholars, geographers of color, and geographers from the Global South – three groups that have been disproportionately affected by COVID. Within the first six months of the pandemic, 20% of the authors who had agreed to contribute chapters had withdrawn from the Companion. Their reasons for doing so stretched from devastating family losses to new, and unexpected, work responsibilities to the sheer anxiety and psychological stress of living in a global pandemic.
As those intense early days of the COVID pandemic morphed into the long tail of coming to grips with a virus that killed, that closed schools and daycares, that moved our scholarly lives onto platforms like Zoom, and that further frayed the social fabric and social contract in many places, the arc of this Companion followed along. Some authors submitted their chapters on time and rightly wondered why there seemed to be endless delays in finalizing this project. Other authors encountered ongoing challenges to completing their chapters, working in starts and stops, asking for extensions, and struggling to focus on the labor of drafting a chapter in the “new normal” that COVID was creating. Still other authors brought on and dropped coauthors, in an effort to figure out how to complete scholarly tasks while juggling new responsibilities at work and at home. Some authors encountered unexpected inabilities to focus on tasks like writing a review chapter, as we did, on multiple occasions, as editors. An unusual number of authors disappeared altogether, no longer responding to our emails, going silent after assuring us that the chapters were almost finished, and coping with COVID in a way that will feel familiar to many of us – triaging their work, assuring themselves (and others) that they could work the way they did pre‐COVID, repeatedly realizing that they couldn't, and walking away from tasks that required a sustained attention that COVID consistently disrupted. In multiple cases, we commissioned up to three different sets of authors for a particular chapter, before a final version was submitted.
Even as COVID seemed to profoundly change so much of our work as scholars over the last four years, much also stayed the same. Authors in this Companion completed degrees, changed jobs and institutions, left academia, got promoted, and retired. By the time this project was completed, we, as editors, were both in different jobs than when this project began. Ishan had been tenured and moved into a leadership role in his home university's diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Jamie had stepped down from directing a research institute and moved into an administrative position working with faculty affairs at her home institution. Like many authors, our work lives looked very different in 2024 than they did in 2019, when this work began.
Of course, COVID isn't the only force that shaped this Companion's content and production. The racial reckonings that accompanied 2020 and 2021, for example, surface frequently across chapters. In similar fashion, ongoing grappling with the climate crisis is woven throughout many, if not most, chapters, as are observations about our complicated relationships with technology and digital worlds. Concerns about precarity pepper many chapters, along with growing unease about what is happening with democracy on a global scale. While we wrapped up work on this Companion (or at least thought we were wrapping it up), the war in Gaza shaped our final push toward completion. As destruction, death, and devastation in Gaza increased day by day in Fall 2023, our work on our own campuses with faculty and students became more intense, and more time consuming, and we struggled to find time and space for those nagging final tasks on this Companion. The same is true for many of our authors, both those whose chapters are included in this Companion and those who withdrew from this project. Their presences and absences, and the circuitous route that this Companion took from planning in 2019 to finalizing in 2025, chart the complex lived realities, structural forces, and multiscalar politics that sit at the center of cultural and social geography as fields. This Companion is, thus, both a compendium of cultural and social geography and a reflection of the complicated dynamics that sit at the center of both subfields.
Why Read this Companion?
We open this Companion with a discussion of how it was shaped by and reflects the wider world in which it was created, not only (or mainly) to explain why a project that should have been completed in two years stretched into a five‐year saga but also to drive home the obvious, yet important, point that our scholarship – and the labor that goes into producing it – is never separate from the world that we study. Our labor process as scholars is bound up with and constituted by the cultural, social, economic, ecological, and political processes that we study. This Companion reflects that work in both what is present and what is not across its chapters.
Beyond reflecting the temporalities and geographies that shaped its production, however, what does this Companion reflect more broadly about cultural and social geography – two subfields that are linked in journals like Social & Cultural Geography but also sometimes contrasted and placed in opposition to each other? On a basic level, addressing both cultural and social geography in one Companion reflects our sense that the resonance between these two subfields is greater than the differences between them and that there is significant value in thinking and talking about both fields together. If cultural geography brings an attentive, sometimes‐unruly, focus on the ways that various social theories frame our scholarship and analysis, social geography brings a committed focus to justice, equity, and difference – themes not absent from cultural geography, but not centered there to the same extent that they are in social geography. Of course, some readers could, and should, question the binary that we just set up between a theoretically oriented cultural geography focused on imagining new possibilities and a politically driven social geography focused on the gritty realities of an inequitable world. Nonetheless, our contention is that pairing scholarship in these two subdisciplines, and purposefully blurring and questioning the line between them, offers a particularly resonant perspective in this moment on the cultural and social aspects of the world around us.
Equally important, this Companion reflects the ongoing vitality of both subdisciplines. The questions and queries posed across chapters wrestle with foundational questions in geography. How do long‐standing themes and topics in cultural and social geography help us write about and act on the multiple crises that shape our everyday lives? What are our responsibilities and ethical commitments in moving the margins to the center? What role does the autobiographical play in helping cultural and social geography depart from their initial assumptions firmly rooted in Euro‐America? A critical geographic perspective on the cultural and social aspects of these questions, on how social and cultural spatialities, geographies, and dynamics matter, continues to be of incredible value, not only in our scholarly, creative, and political work, but also, and especially, in our work in the classroom and with students.
How Should You Read This Companion?
Chapters in this Companion cover both long‐standing topics with deep histories in cultural and social geography and newer themes. They are meant to accompany, not replace, excellent histories and reviews of each subdiscipline (e.g. Anderson 2017, 2019, 2020; Hawkins 2021, 2023; Ho 2021, 2022, 2024; Hopkins 2019, 2020, 2021; Jackson 1989; Mitchell 2000). No Companion to Cultural and Social Geography would be complete without chapters on place, mappings, genders, class, sexualities, race, memory, and performance – all of which are covered in chapters here. This Companion also, however, addresses topics that were less visible (if present at all) in its 2013 version. We added a new section, Global Dispatches, to speak to the different disciplinary and geographic places in which cultural and social geography is both housed and produced – cultural geography in urban planning, social and cultural geography and public health, and cultural geography in and about the Middle East and South/East Asia. Other topics that we intended to be part of these global dispatches – cultural geography and international relations and cultural geography in Central Asia and southern Africa – became failed chapters, and we mark their absence here. Along the way, we also lost chapters on the tactile, contagion, and infrastructure.
