Branching out: twenty-first-century developments in the family tree of cultural geography

In the last chapter, the genealogy of cultural geography was outlined up to the last decades of the twentieth century. We saw how the family tree of the discipline developed from a focus on environmental determinism, through ideas of environmental possibilism, and on to the cultural geographies of landscape. This chapter takes us from the twentieth into the twenty-first century and charts the contemporary developments within the discipline. More specifically it takes us from cultural geographies of representation, and the types of understanding this is seen to privilege, and towards a cultural geography that identifies gaps and silences within this study. The chapter then outlines how cultural geographies have moved beyond a focus on representation and towards ‘non-representational’ as well as ‘more-than representational’ geographies. The chapter charts this development, the implications it has, and how these bring us to the approach to cultural geography that this book suggests.