ABSTRACT
Human geography over the last two decades has undergone a profound conceptual and methodological renaissance that has transformed it into one of the most dynamic, innovative and influential of the social sciences. The discipline, which long suffered from a negative popular reputation as a trivial, purely empirical field with little analytical substance, has moved decisively from being an importer of ideas from other fields to an exporter, and geographers are increasingly being read by scholars in the humanities and other social sciences. As a result of the rebirth in scholarship in geography, other disciplines have increasingly come to regard space as an important dimension to their own areas of inquiry. Cosgrove (1999: 7), for example, argues that “A widely acknowledged ‘spatial turn’ across arts and sciences corresponds to post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanations and about single-voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge.” Recent works in the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and art history have become increasingly spatial in their orientation. From various perspectives, they assert that space is a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena. In some ways, this transformation is expressed in simple semantic terms, i.e., the literal and metaphorical use and assumptions of “space,” “place,” and “mapping” to denote a geographic dimension as an essential aspect of the production of culture. In other ways, however, the spatial turn is much more substantive, involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction. Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen.
