Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns

by Simon Naylor

Introduces undergraduates to the key debates regarding space and culture and the key theoretical arguments which guide cultural geographical work. This book addresses the impact, significance, and characteristics of the 'cultural turn' in contemporary geography. It focuses on the development of the cultural geography subdiscipline and on what has made it a peculiar and unique realm of study. It demonstrates the importance of culture in the development of debates in other subdisciplines within geography and beyond. In line with these previous themes, the significance of space in the production of cultural values and expressions is also developed. Along with its timely examination of the health of the cultural geographical subdiscipline, this book is to be valued for its analysis of the impact of cultural theory on studies elsewhere in geography and of ideas of space and spatiality elsewhere in the social sciences.

List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: Dead or Alive?
PART I - CULTURAL TURNS, GEOGRAPHICAL TURNS
Introduction; The Twistings and Turnings of Geography and Anthropology in winds of Millennium Transition; More Words, More Worlds: Reflections on the 'Cultural Turn' and Human Geography: Taking a Cultural Turn? Struggles Over the Social in Social Policy.
PART II - POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL TEXTS
Introduction; The Popular and Geography: Music and Racialized Identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand; Between Academy and Popular Geographies: Cartographic Imaginations and the Cultural Landscape of Sweden: Regions to be Cheerful: Culinary, Authenticity and its Geographies: English Pastoral: Music, Landscape, History and Politics
PART III - CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Introduction; Critical and Uncritical Cultural Turns; Economy, Culture, Difference and Justice; Virtualism: The Culture of Political Economy; Cultivating Ambivalence: The Unhinging of Culture and Economy; Imagined Regional Communities: Undecidable Geographies
PART IV - NATURE AND SOCIETY
Introduction; Heterogenous Geographies: Reimagining the Spaces of N/nature; Situating Knowledges, Sharing Values and Reaching Collective Decisions: The Cultural Turn in Environmental Decision Making; Socialized Nature: England's Royal and Plantation Forests; Natural Communities: 'The Pauper Question' in the Atlantic Monthly 1880-1884.
PART V - SPACES AND SUBJECTIVITIES
Introduction; Five Objects, Geographical Subjects; Placing Anxieties; Landscape Mapping and Symbolic Form: Drawing as a Creative Medium in Cultural Geography.
Index