Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? Social Geography in Social & Cultural Geography more

This article was downloaded by: [phil hubbard] On: 24 August 2011, At: 14:58 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Social & Cultural Geography Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20 Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? Social Geography in Social & Cultural Geography Phil Hubbard a a School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, Room G3-06, Gillingham Building, University of Kent, Chatham Maritime, ME4 4AG, UK Available online: 24 Aug 2011 To cite this article: Phil Hubbard (2011): Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Forum: Reinvigorating social geographies? 529 Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? Social Geography in Social & Cultural Geography Phil Hubbard School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, Room G3-06, Gillingham Building, University of Kent, Chatham Maritime ME4 4AG, UK, p.hubbard@kent.ac.uk In their Editorial review of Social & Cultural Geography’s first decade, Michael Brown and Matthew Wilson (2009) heralded the first ten years of the journal as something of an unqualified success. Rightly noting the impressive range of work published in the journal—both in terms of its international provenance, theoretical ambition and methodological nuance—they note that the journal no longer fills a narrow sub-disciplinary niche positioned between social and cultural geography but represents an outlet for work that covers the gamut of social and cultural geography, with the boundaries of these appearing irrelevant in the wake of the 1990s ‘cultural turn’ which, in many senses, provoked the establishment of the journal. Noting special issues covering diverse themes—religion, food, consumption, migration, psychoanalysis, mobility, sexuality, care, language, and (dis)ability, they stress the journal has been an outlet for many of the most ‘exciting’ research areas in human geography (Brown and Wilson 2009: 3). Rewinding ten years, and revisiting the initial Editorial that launched the journal, it is thus possible to conclude that the journal has fulfilled its initial aim to provide an outlet for ‘relevant theoretically informed research’ in areas that ‘might relate to social issues, cultural politics, aspects of daily life, cultural commodities, consumption, identity and community, historical legacies, and the production of landscape’ (Gleeson et al. 2000: 6). Yet some caveats might need to be applied to such a positive assessment, particularly if we stop to consider the ways that the journal has sustained and developed work in social geography (as opposed to those topics and themes which fit more comfortably astride social and cultural geography, or which draw on the traditions of cultural geography which threatened to become hegemonic when the journal was founded in 1999). The key question here concerns the extent to which the social and geography represented in the pages of the journal—and social and cultural geography more generally—engages with pressing social issues. This raises a number of related questions concerning the continued vibrancy, vitality and relevance of social geography. Fundamentally, it is hard to argue against the fact that the journal has published many theoretically elegant and sometimes cutting-edge papers, many of these exploring the application of non-representational theories to aspects of contemporary social and cultural life. However, even allowing for the fact that there cannot—and should not—be a singular interpretation of ‘relevance’ in geography, with all geography capable of talking to debates Downloaded by [phil hubbard] at 14:58 24 August 2011 530 Forum: Reinvigorating social geographies? action-research methodologies (Pain and Kindon 2007). Given the enthusiasm with which social and cultural geographers have sought to engage with different audiences, including state agents at various levels, to suggest that their work is not speaking to social problems appears a somewhat contrary claim. Yet here I am not criticising social and cultural geography’s explanans (its theoretical stance and chosen mode of explanation) but rather its explanandum: its subjects and objects of study. An examination of the 198 papers published in the journal in its first nine volumes suggests that roughly one in five were concerned with questions of race or ethnicity; one in six with mobility, migration or trans-nationalism; another one in six with travel and tourism; one in ten with sexuality; one in fifteen with nature or the environment; one in twenty with consumption or retailing; one in twenty with age, care and lifecourse change. Yet only two explored homelessness (Johnson, Cloke and May 2005; Radley, Hodgetts and Cullen 2006); one focused on class (Wilson and Keil 2008) and just one was explicitly on work (McDowell et al. 2005). Admittedly, the emphasis on intersectionality in many other papers means such a characterisation reduces the nuance of many papers and the ways in which they acknowledge ‘socially significant differences of gender, class, race, sexuality or disability’ (Jackson 2000: 11): for all this, research on class, work and poverty is clearly eclipsed by work highlighting the importance of (for example) ethnicity, migration and memory. The lack of attention devoted to the aforementioned social problems in the pages of the journal remains surprising given these have traditionally been among the mainstays of a social geography that, in the UK at least, was closely associated with the empirical occurring outside the academy in one way or another (see Ward 2005, 2007), I retain a nagging concern that many of these have not talked to some of the most urgent and pressing social problems of our times: questions of homelessness, joblessness, poverty, indebtedness, violence, loneliness, insecurity and fear. In short, and to repeat some oft-cited words that still resonate nearly four decades on, ‘there is an ecological problem, an urban problem, an international trade problem, and yet we seem incapable of saying anything of depth or profundity about any of them’ (Harvey 1973: 129). Whether or not this can be related to the current theoretical concerns of human geography is debatable. Some have accused the nonrepresentational turn of pushing geography away from popular geographies (Ward 2005), even though it appears to have been important in informing a wider ‘spatial turn’ which fires the imagination of those in other disciplines (see Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine 2008). But to claim that geography’s interest in the more-than-representational elements of life has made it less relevant to questions of public and policy concern relies upon a claim that ‘non-representational geographies’ cannot be communicated to audiences beyond geography. This is a difficult claim to substantiate given the conceptual language of non-representational geography, concerned as it is with affect, emotion, embodiment and the event, is no more abstract or difficult than that which quantitative modelling of the 1960s or the radical Marxism in vogue in the 1970s. The idea that policy-makers only appreciate the language of statistics and quantification has long since been debunked (Kitchin and Hubbard 1999), with recent ‘participatory geographies’ effectively bridging the gap between non-representational theories and social policy through community arts and Downloaded by [phil hubbard] at 14:58 24 August 2011 Forum: Reinvigorating social geographies? emphases of a welfare-oriented human geography concerned with who gets what, where and how (Martin 2001). It poses the vexing question as to why the rapprochement of social and cultural geography has reinvigorated the study of certain phenomena and themes but not others. The geography of crime, for example, was an important part of social geography in both the 1970s and 1980s, with attention given to differential exposure to crime as well as the representation of criminalised neighbourhoods (e.g. Evans and Herbert 1989; Smith 1986). Yet since that time, crime has hardly figured in social geography, with only fleeting attention devoted to crime per se in geographical accounts of the policing and social control of anti-socialities and disorder in ‘scary cities’ (e.g. England and Simon 2010) and little said about the social geographies of theft, burglary, malicious damage or ‘white-collar’ crime. Enculturating crime geography has thus encouraged a focus on the social and spatial production of fear, informed by ideas adopted from cultural criminology, but has seemingly not encouraged examination of the social geography of crime itself. Judging from the pages of Social & Cultural Geography, poverty and unemployment has also slipped off the social geographer’s radar. Pioneering in the mapping of deprivation, and in the theorising of the social and environmental causes of poverty in ways that did not simply postulate the perpetuation of ‘cultures of poverty’ (for a summary see Philo 1995), post-millennial social geography seems strangely muted about ‘poor places’. It also seems to have had little to say about the geographies of financial exclusion, neighbourhood activism, regeneration initiatives, housing distribution, unemployment or illness. In relation to the latter, for example, the social geographies of health explored in the journal have 531 principally been about the public health initiatives designed to impart a biopolitics of healthism (Thompson, Pearce and Barnett 2009), spaces of caring (Parr and Philo 2003) and the consumption of therapeutic landscapes (Conradson 2003). There have been no papers on spatial variations in disease, morbidity and mortality. Notably, there have also been no papers in Social & Cultural Geography asking fundamental questions about the spatiality of contemporary social relationships (bonds of association, intimacy and love) and the ways these are spun out across real and virtual spaces (including the cornerstone of many urban sociological investigations, the neighbourhood). Given the ‘mobilities’ turn, this lack of focus on the ‘stretching’ or ‘contracting’ of communities at different spatial scales is more than a little surprising: it demonstrates a complete indifference to some of the fundamental concepts at the heart of social geography (i.e. the idea that the relationship between society and practice is spatially inflected and shaped by relations of proximity/distance). Of course, none of these lacunae matter much if we suppose that pertinent work is being carried out in other sub-disciplinary niches, being published in other journals or is being examined in other disciplinary contexts. Indeed, one can find germane discussions in journals including Population, Space and Place, Health and Place, Social Science and Medicine and Crime Mapping and Analysis (e.g. Clark 2009; Exeter, Boyle, Feng and Boyle 2009; Shaw et al. 2000; Townsley 2008). But, in these apparently post-disciplinary times, Social & Cultural Geography has always been radically open to different scholarship drawn from multiple disciplines, meaning that there is no reason why those writing on crime, poverty or illness should not see it as an appropriate outlet. The absence of Downloaded by [phil hubbard] at 14:58 24 August 2011 532 Forum: Reinvigorating social geographies? thinking of relevance as multifaceted, as being defined by shifting combinations of pertinence, applicability, commitment, centrality, and teaching and by understanding that assessments of relevance always entail normative stances, we can see that there should be disagreement over appropriate practices among those who intend their work to be relevant. (Staeheli and Mitchell 2005: 365) Downloaded by [phil hubbard] at 14:58 24 August 2011 such papers surely matters. Whilst not wishing to be in any way imperialist, Social & Cultural Geography was established not simply to provide an outlet for those studies which fell awkwardly between social and cultural geography, but was intended to cover the gamut of topics and subjects which might be subject to the gaze of social and cultural geography. Questions of migration, sexuality, consumption and tourism rightly excite contributors to, and readers of, Social & Cultural Geography, so why not crime, poverty, and illness, especially in these recessionary times? To implore a renewed focus on these issues— and others besides—in the pages of this journal is not to argue for a geography that is any way atheoretical or simply tailored to the needs of public policy-makers or business communities. This, as Staeheli and Mitchell, suggest, would be an incredibly narrow way of conceiving relevance in geography and to downplay the variety of ways that research can bring to light social issues and encourage new ways of thinking about these: Recent debates over relevance in geography have generally adopted a too narrow view of where relevance is located or enacted. There is a strong focus on policy and business and with the promotion of either an instrumental relevance as application or a kind of relevance as centrality that may be little more than disciplinary advertisement. Thinking seriously about relevance for business and government is of course important; these agents have enhanced power to effect change, to redistribute resources, to shape behavior and rules, to launch wars and remake geopolitical maps, to push toward either environmental sustainability or environmental destruction, and to produce the spaces within which we must all live. If one can change the way that actors in government and business think and act, the relevance of geography to society will be obvious. However, by If ‘committed’ social geography is about fostering dialogue, between publics and policy-makers, between academics and activists or teachers and students, by whatever means necessary, then it is surely not too naıve ¨ to suppose that journals—and particularly Social & Cultural Geography—might have an important role to play in reinvigorating the ‘social’ in social and cultural geography and making it more relevant to the recessionary times in which we all live. References Brown, M. and Wilson, M. (2009) Ten years on(ward)!, Social & Cultural Geography 10: 1– 8. Clark, A. (2009) Moving through deprived neighbourhoods, Population, Space and Place 15: 523– 533. Conradson, D. (2003) Geographies of care: spaces, practices, experiences, Social & Cultural Geography 4: 451–454. England, M. and Simon, S. (2010) Scary cities: urban geographies of fear, difference and belonging, Social & Cultural Geography 11: 201–207. Evans, D. and Herbert, D. (1989) The Geography of Crime. London: Routledge. Exeter, D., Boyle, P., Feng, Z. and Boyle, M. (2009) Shrinking areas and mortality: an artefact of deprivation effects in the West of Scotland?, Health and Place 15: 399–401. Gleeson, B., Katz, C., Johnson, N., Kitchin, R., Peake, L., Sibley, D. and Valentine, G. (2000) Editorial, Social & Cultural Geography 1: 5 –7. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (2008) Key Texts in Human Geography. London: Sage. Forum: Reinvigorating social geographies? Jackson, P. (2000) Rematerializing social and cultural geography, Social & Cultural Geography 1: 9 –14. Johnson, S., Cloke, P. and May, J. (2005) Day centres for homeless people: places of fear, Social & Cultural Geography 6: 787– 811. Kitchin, R. and Hubbard, P. (1999) Research, action and ‘critical’ geographies, Area 31: 195–198. McDowell, L., Ray, K., Perrons, D., Fagan, C. and Ward, K. (2005) Women’s paid work and moral economies of care, Social & Cultural Geography 6: 219 –235. Martin, R. (2001) Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda, Progress in Human Geography 25: 189 –210. Pain, R. and Kindon, S. (2007) Participatory geographies, Environment and Planning A 39: 2807–2812. Parr, H. and Philo, C. (2003) Rural mental health and social geographies of caring, Social & Cultural Geography 4: 471– 488. Philo, C. (1995) Off the Map. The Social Geography of Poverty in the UK. London: Child Poverty Action Group. Radley, A., Hodgetts, D. and Cullen, A. (2006) Fear, romance and transience in the lives of homeless women, Social & Cultural Geography 7: 437–461. Shaw, M., Gordon, D., Dorling, D., Mitchell, R. and Davey-Smith, G. (2000) Increasing mortality 533 Downloaded by [phil hubbard] at 14:58 24 August 2011 differentials by residential area level of poverty: Britain 1981– 1997, Social Science and Medicine 51: 151– 153. Smith, S. (1986) Crime, Space and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staeheli, L. and Mitchell, D. (2005) The complex politics of relevance in geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 357 –372. Thompson, L., Pearce, J. and Barnett, R. (2009) Nomadic identities and socio-spatial competence: making sense of post-smoking selves, Social & Cultural Geography 10: 565–581. Townsley, M. (2008) Visualising space time patterns in crime: the hotspot plot, Crime Patterns and Analysis 1: 61–74. Ward, K. (2005) Geography and public policy: a recent history of ‘policy relevance’, Progress in Human Geography 29: 310 –319. Ward, K. (2007) Geography and public policy: activist, participatory, and policy geographies, Progress in Human Geography 31: 587–591. Wilson, D. and Keil, R. (2008) The real creative class, Social & Cultural Geography 9: 841–847. q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2011.599717 Multiple, marginalised, passe or politically engaged? ´ Some reflections on the current place of social geographies Peter Hopkins School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK, peter.hopkins@newcastle.ac.uk Introduction Charting the historical, methodological basis of has been a regular feature the discipline for more philosophical and social geographies of the landscape of than forty years. For example, consider Emrys Jones’ edited collection Readings in Social Geography published in 1975, David Ley’s classic A Social Geography of the City published in 1983, or Peter Jackson and Susan Smith’s sophisticated engagement with the philosophical basis of