ABSTRACT
The impetus for the current collection arises out of a growing sense of dissatisfaction with two recent and related developments in social theory and the social sciences and humanities more broadly. The first of these, evident from the mid-to-late 1980s and of growing significance across an increasing body of work from the early 1990s onwards, concerns the increasing prominence of space and spatiality. Whether relatively simple assertions of the ‘difference that space makes’ (Sayer, 1985), more grandiose claims as to the inherent spatiality of the postmodern condition (Jameson, 1991), or the growing tendency to draw upon a language of space and place, location and position in writings on subjectivity and identity (Keith and Pile, 1993), as Doreen Massey has remarked, ‘ “space” is very much on the agenda these days’ (Massey, 1994: 249). As geographers we must welcome such developments. But this sudden ‘reassertion of space in social theory’ as Soja (1989) has described it, also makes us a little uneasy. Certainly, we share the kind of concerns expressed by Smith and Katz (1993), for example, that much of this talk about space is just that; that in the work of cultural theorists especially, there is in fact very little to suggest that the ‘spatial turn’ has progressed beyond the level of metaphor (see also Cresswell, 1997). More fundamentally, though, our concern is with the basic formulations of space evident within the spatial turn, formulations that appear to us curiously onedimensional and which, at root, seem premised upon a familiar and unhelpful dualism moving around the foundational categories of Space and Time.
