ABSTRACT
Human geography, like other social science disciplines, is dynamic, characterized by fundamental shifts in theoretical orientations, methodological practices and subjects of enquiry (chapter two). A recent widespread change that has affected disciplines across the social sciences has been the ‘cultural turn’. This has seen an engagement with a variety of cultural issues, an interest in a range of theories that we might broadly term post-modern that have helped to shift the prevailing analytical framework of the social sciences from their Marxist-structuralist orientation, and the increasing employment of qualitative research methods. Human geography has certainly been influenced by this change and we can detect two effects of this cultural turn within the discipline. First is the rise and growing influence of cultural geography from the early 1980s onwards (Jackson 1989; Crang 1998; Anderson 2010). Second is a transformation, to varying degrees, of the other sub-disciplines of human geography whose engagements with cultural issues had, in some cases, been patchy, often marginal previously. This is perhaps best exemplified by the changes witnessed in economic geography since the mid-1990s (Coe et al. 2007).
