ABSTRACT
Since the spatial turn in many neighbouring disciplines such as sociology, literary theory, political science, anthropology, economics, etc., human geography seems to have shifted closer to the core of social theoretic thinking. Current topical debates within and around human geography for a large part are concerned with positionings in relation to different social theoretic schools of thought. Especially in the context of a more 'post-modern' attitude towards these debates, these positionings increasingly take place in the awareness of the political economy and power-play of inclusion and exclusion, of the disciplining effects of 'positions' (in a double sense of the word) within disciplines. Strains of thought are thus all too easily sealed off against the 'other'. In this chapter I will, however, try to formulate a little 'resistance' from the margin, or to use another Foucauldian term: a 'capillary' attempt to bring together what might seem so separate, to transgress the border between approaches which often seem so different. To make sense of the richness of these different approaches one is also forced to make rough generalizations and categorizations, neglecting many nuances and more detailed perspectives. Conscious of the danger of caricaturising and doing injustice to many of these very sophisticated and subtle approaches, I will - in the interest of the clarity of my argument - try to ideal-typically describe some general traits of three of these approaches as they can be traced in the current literature. Specifically I will deal with behaviour(al)ism, action theory (or subjectivist interpretative approaches), and post-structuralism within geography, since these represent three important currents of thought in human geography since the 1960s.
