ABSTRACT

This book presents human geography as a dynamic domain. It does so in a double sense. There is human geography as a field of inquiry, an academic discipline with its traditions, objectives and approaches, a changing and highly contested terrain. And there is human geography as the world at large, the places where people make their livelihood, a world subject to a continual process of struggle and transformation. The writings in this volume address the intersection of these two domains. They view the discipline of human geography as more than an intellectual endeavour, as part of a wider social world with a variable distribution of power and resources. They view the places they study as more than material and social territories waiting to be discovered and known, as complex cultural worlds with their own fields of knowledge and imagination.