Cultural Geography

Cultural Geography [] Read Now

The Handbook of Cultural Geography is one of a series of handbooks published by Sage. For Sage these books represent the ‘state of the art’ in their specific fields, and they are pitched at an audience who have a degree of familiarity with the subject, but would like to know more about a specific topic or extend their understanding of the breadth of work in the area. For us – as editors – this has set some very interesting puzzles.

Cultural Geography [] Read Now

It is quite a challenge to think about the state of the art in any one field, but for us the deeper problem was that we found it very hard to delineate ‘our’ field. Indeed, if there is one thing about cultural geography that we know for sure, it is that it is not a field! As we debated this ‘border’ problem, it became clear to us that the field of cultural geography was better marked both by its disruption of the usual academic boundaries and by its insatiable enthusiasm for engaging new issues and ideas – what- ever their source. As we began to sketch out possible contents and structures for the book, we decided that we should try to make this particular Handbook reflect this interdisciplinarity and this passion for thinking more broadly about what counts as geography.

Cultural Geography [] Read Now

To this end, we contacted a number of people and asked them to edit sections that reflected both the breadth of cultural geography’s thematic interests, and also some of the most interesting areas of debate and research within these (let’s call them) ‘fields of engagement’. Of course, the result is far from comprehensive in either content or debate.

However, our purpose was to reflect the varieties of cultural geo- graphies being undertaken and suggest that there is far more to be done.