ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins by discussing the origins of critical social geographical approaches – the rise of radical and feminist geography from the late 1960s. This is followed by a discussion of contemporary critical social geographic perspectives on individuals places in the world. The author focuses on critical social approaches. The critical social approaches have rocked the explanatory foundations of human geography and contributed to long-term epistemological and ontological changes. Critical social geography is about transgressing borders, metaphorical and real, both intellectually and politically. At the inevitable risk of oversimplifying, there are two principal ways in which postmodernism has influenced geographers’ understanding of individuals’ places in the world. A generation of human geographers began to search for ways of understanding the world that addressed issues of power and oppression, social relevance and social justice.
