ABSTRACT
There has been a recent blossoming of interest in cross-disciplinary approaches to social research. Ideas, concepts, discourses, and metaphors are clambering over disciplinary boundaries at such a rate that it is hard to know where some of them originally ‘belonged’. This cross-fertilization of ideas is changing the face of some aspects of research in education. In particular, ideas from social and cultural geography are opening up fresh vantage points from which to examine familiar areas such as processes of selection and policy making in education. Soja observes that:
spatiality and the inquisitive spatial imagination have recently entered, as a vital third mode of practical and theoretical understanding, that has hitherto been seen as an essentially two-sided socio-historical project. (Soja 1996: 6)
