Human Geography Today

Book excerpt: This book offers a unique assessment of the current state and future directions of human geography, exploring the developments and themes that have put the discipline at the heart of a number of important debates. Human Geography - with its concern for space, place and nature - has over recent years moved to the center of much theoretical debate in the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, the exchange has been two-way - human geography has itself increasingly welcomed the importation of work from other areas of academe. This book takes up the promise and challenge of this new-found prominence and openness and explores the future for the discipline. Human Geography Today brings together a range of internationally recognized authors, all of whom have explored this new interface, and each of whom here proposes future directions for their part of the discipline. The book considers the increasingly challenged dichotomy between the social and the natural, the meaning and significance of the geographical imagination, the increasing prominence of debates over difference and identity and their relationship to spatiality, the imperative of recognizing the thoroughly mutual constitution of spatiality and power, and - after all - how we might in these changing times most productively re-imagine space and place themselves. This book will be invaluable for students and academics in human geography, social theory, cultural studies, and politics.