The contemporary challenge of postmodernity draws our attention to the nature of reality and the ways in which experience is constructed. Sensuous Geographies explores our immediate sensuous experience of the world. Touch, smell, hearing and sight - the four senses chiefly relevant to geographical experience - both receive and structure information. The process is mediated by historical, cultural and technological factors. Issues of definition are illustrated through a variety of sensuous geographies. Focusing on postmodern concerns with representation, the book brings insights from individual perceptions and cultural observations to an analysis of the senses, challenging us to reconsider the role of the sensuous as not merely the physical basis of understanding but as an integral part of the cultural definition of geographical knowledge.

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, this study explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions in literature such as smell, sound, etc. that often challenge the rationalizing logic of modernity. Through close readings of writers such as Conrad and Coetzee, Moslund invites scholars to shift focus from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context

"With clarity and confidence, this vibrant volume summons up ′the social′ in geography in ways that will excite students and scholars alike. Here the social is populated not only by society, but by culture, nature, economy and politics." - Kay Anderson, University of Western Sydney "This is a remarkable collection, full of intellectual gems. It not only summarises the field of social geography, and restates its importance, but also produces a manifesto for how the field should look in the future." - Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick "The book aims to be accessible to students and specialists alike. Its success lies in emphasizing the crossovers between geography and social studies. The good editorial work is evident and the participating contributors are well-established scholars in their respective fields." - Miron M. Denan, Geography Research Forum "An excellent handbook that will attract a diversity of readers. It will inspire undergraduate/postgraduate students and stimulate lecturers/researchers interested in the complexity and diversity of the social realm.... As the first of its kind in the sub-discipline, it is a book that is enjoyable to read and will definitely add value to a personal or library collection." - Michele Lobo, New Zealand Geographer The social relations of difference - from race and class to gender and inequality - are at the heart of the concept of social geography. This handbook reconsiders and redirects research in the discipline while examining the changing ideas of individuals and their relationship with structures of power. Organised into five sections, the SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies maps out the ′connections′ anchored in social geography. Difference and Diversity builds on enduring ideas of the structuring of social relations and examines the ruptures and rifts, and continuities and connections around social divisions. Geographies and Social Economies rethinks the sociality, subjectivity and placement of money, markets, price and value. Geographies of Wellbeing builds from a foundation of work on the spaces of fear, anxiety and disease towards newer concerns with geographies of health, resilience and contentment. Geographies of Social Justice connects ideas through an examination of the possibilities and practicalities of normative theory and frames the central notion of Social geography, that things always could and should be different. Doing Social Geography is not exploring the ′how to′ of research, but rather the entanglement of it with practicalities, moralities, and politics. This will be an essential resource for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduates across human geography.

Health geographers are increasingly turning to a diverse range of interpretative methodologies to explore the complexities of health, illness, space and place to gain more comprehensive understandings of well-being and broader social models of health and health care. Drawing upon postmodernism, many health geographers are concerned with issues of representation, the body and health care policy. Also related to an emphasis on the body is the growing literature in feminist health geography that investigates the metaphorical, physical and emotional challenges of the body and disease. Reflecting these interests, the chapters in this book set out the host of creative qualitative methods being used to explore the psychosocial experiences of individuals more directly, using such traditional methods as in-depth interviews and group discussions, participant observation, diaries and discourse analysis, but also more novel techniques such as 'go-along interviews’, reflexive writing, illustrations, and photographic techniques. There are several areas of qualitative research unique to geographers which figure prominently in this volume including: health and place, comparative case study analysis, and qualitative approaches to the use of geographic information systems (GIS). This collection brings together a wide range of empirical concerns related to questions of health and shines a light on the diversity of qualitative methods in practice. Illustrating how qualitative methodologies are used in diverse health contexts this book fills an important niche for health geographers but will have wide appeal to health and geographic researchers.

Geocriticism provides a theoretical foundation and a critical exploration of geocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding literature in relation to space and place. Drawing on diverse thinkers, Westphal argues that a geocritical approach enables novel ways of seeing literary texts and of conducting literary studies.

Given that touch and touching is so central to everyday embodied existence, why has it been largely ignored by social scientists for so long? What is the place of touch in our mixed spaces of sociality, work, domesticity, recreation, creativity or care? What conceptual resources and academic languages can we reach towards when approaching tactile activities and somatic experiences through the body? How is this tactile landscape gendered? How is touch becoming revisited and revalidated in late capitalism through animal encounters, tourism, massage, beauty treatments, professional medicine, everyday spiritualities or the aseptic touch-free spaces of automated toilets? How is touch placed and valued within scholarly fieldwork and research itself, integral as it is to the production of embodied epistemologies? How is touch involved in such aesthetic experiences as shaping objects in sand, or encountering fleshly bodies within a painting? The goal of this edited collection, Touching Space, Placing Touch is twofold: 1. To further advance theoretical and empirical understanding of touch in social science scholarship by focussing on the differential social and cultural meanings of touching and the places of touch. 2. To develop a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary explanations of touch in terms of individual and social life, personal experiences and tasks, and their related cultural contexts. The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation. Each chapter takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The contributors are a mixture of established and emerging researchers within a growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship, yet the volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.

This book brings together, explores and expands socio-spatial affect, emotion and psychoanalytic drives in tourism for the first time. Affect is to be found in visceral intensities and resonances that circulate around and shape encounters between and amongst tourists, local tourism representatives and places. When affect manifests, it can ‘take shapes’ in the form of emotions such as fun, joy, fear, anger and the like. When it remains a visceral force of latent bodily responses, affect overlaps with drives as expounded in psychoanalysis. The aim of the title, therefore, is to explore how and in what ways affects, emotions and drives are felt and performed in tourism encounters in places of socio-political turmoil such as Jordan, Palestine/Israel, with a detour to Iraq. Affective Tourism is highly innovative as it offers a new way of theorising tourism encounters bringing together, critically examining and expanding three areas of scholarship: affective and emotional geographies, psychoanalytic geographies and dark tourism. It has relevance for tourism industries in places in the proximity of ongoing conflicts as it provides in-depth analyses of the interconnections between tourism, danger and conflict. Such understandings can lead to more socio-culturally and politically-sustainable approaches to planning, development and management of tourism. This ground breaking book will be of valuable reading for students and researchers from a number of fields such as tourism studies, geography, anthropology, sociology and Middle Eastern studies.

A Companion to Cultural Geography brings together original contributions from 35 distinguished international scholars to provide a critical overview of this dynamic and influential field of study. Provides accessible overviews of key themes, debates and controversies from a variety of historical and theoretical vantage points Charts significant changes in cultural geography in the twentieth century as well as the principal approaches that currently animate work in the field A valuable resource not just for geographers but also those working in allied fields who wish to get a clear understanding of the contribution geography is making to cross-disciplinary debates

"Practical, accessible, careful and interesting, this...revised volume brings the subject up-to-date and explains, in bite sized chunks, the ′how′s′ and ′why′s′ of modern day geographical study...[It] brings together physical and human approaches again in a new synthesis." —Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford Key Methods in Geography is the perfect introductory companion, providing an overview of qualitative and quantitative methods for human and physical geography. This Third Edition Features: 12 new chapters representing emerging themes including online, virtual and digital geographical methods Real-life case study examples Summaries and exercises for each chapter Free online access to full text of Progress in Human Geography and Progress in Physical Geography Progress Reports The teaching of research methods is integral to all geography courses: Key Methods in Geography, Third Edition explains all of the key methods with which geography undergraduates must be conversant.