Introduction: The Social in Question

• In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared there was “no such thing as society”.
• Thatcher’s comments hit a nerve with social scientists who were anxious about what constitutes “the social”.
• Thatcher saw society as a dubious abstraction, used to support socialist policies.
• She preferred to focus on individual men, women, and nuclear, heterosexual families.
• Thatcher’s rhetoric promoted economically driven solutions to social problems, with “market forces” replacing “society”.
• Definitions of “the social” are politically charged, not just semantic issues.
• Geographers and social scientists have long debated what constitutes “the social”.
• Some define it in terms of hierarchical structures and permanent institutions.
• Others see it as impermanent interpersonal relations and fleeting affinities.
• Raymond Williams traced the etymological roots of “society” and “the social”.
• In the sixteenth century, society was seen as companionship or association.
• By the eighteenth century, it was understood as an abstract, impersonal structure related to the state.
• By the nineteenth century, society was objectified, leading to debates about the relationship between the individual and society.
• Debates continue today despite attempts to transcend dualisms with sophisticated accounts of the relationship between structure and agency.
• John Urry doubts the usefulness of the term “society” and sketches a “post-societal” agenda for sociology.
• Sociological categories like class, gender, and ethnicity cannot be mapped unproblematically onto geographical spaces.
• Flows of people, information, goods, and capital exceed national boundaries.
• Urry suggests metaphors of networks, mobilities, and flows are more appropriate than static notions of society.
• Actor network theory and non-representational theory provide evidence that “society” is no longer a valid sociological object.
• Bruno Latour argues the social should be seen as what circulates within the world of things.
• Patrick Joyce challenges the tendency to think of society in reified terms.
• Joyce seeks a more fluid understanding of the social, constituted through practices, materialities, and embodied beings.
• Social sciences have played a part in the constitution and transformation of the social.
• Geographers have contributed to rethinking the social.
• Rethinking the social involves rethinking space.
• Space is increasingly understood in relational terms, not static or bounded.
• Doreen Massey emphasizes linkages between places at various scales.
• Geography involves exercising and interrogating geographical imaginations.
• Human geographers and social scientists should understand the spatiality of social life.
• Social theory has traditionally emphasized temporality over spatiality.
• The 1980s saw a reassertion of space in critical social theory.
• Interest in the relationship between society and space has grown across the social sciences.
• Geographers now engage more with social theory.
• The cultural turn brought cultural questions of meaning, identity, and representation to center stage.
• Some feared political and economic issues were being displaced by cultural concerns.
• Social inequalities of race, class, and gender were not disappearing.
• Cultural differences and politics of representation gained prominence.
• Some felt studies grounded in the material world were being neglected.
• The chapters in this section address concerns about the perceived evacuation of the social.
• Nicky Gregson argues the social has not been replaced by the cultural but refracted through it.
• Multiple social and cultural geographies coexist.
• Katharyne Mitchell emphasizes grounding hybrid cultures in materialities of specific times and places.
• The chapters seek to transcend dualisms between social and cultural, material and symbolic, discourse and practice.
• Symbolic meanings are embedded in specific material contexts, defined by power relations and social differences.
• Social and cultural questions should be seen through the lens of the spatial.
• Seeing the social through the cultural demonstrates the need to transcend dualistic thinking.

SEEING THE SOCIAL THROUGH THE LENS OF THE SPATIAL

• Social geography in the 1980s was optimistic and engaged in dialogue with other social sciences about society and space.
• Geographers were no longer subordinate to other disciplines and began contributing actively to understanding social inequalities.
• Social relations were recognized as spatially constituted, marked by interdisciplinary collections like Gregory and Urry’s.
• The cultural turn empowered geographers to contribute confidently to cultural studies.
• Feminism broadened the political scope to include visual and textual representation, cultural politics of sexuality, and citizenship.
• Critiques from non-white feminist perspectives challenged academic privileges and unexamined whiteness.
• Gregson’s chapter discusses recent disability studies in geography, highlighting issues of race and racism.
• Traditional views saw social dimensions of race, class, and gender as independent and additive.
• New theorizations emphasized the mutual constitution of race, class, and gender, challenging standard cartographies.
• Gender identities were shown to be racialized simultaneously.
• Research on geographies of race and racism acknowledges racialized lives across scales.
• Avtar Brah discusses ‘diaspora space’ inhabited by diasporic and indigenous subjects alike.
• Studies like Anderson’s on Vancouver’s Chinatown explore dominant discourses in racialized space construction.
• Jane Jacobs’ work on London’s postcolonial geographies shows space as relational, from financial centers to racialized neighborhoods.
• Studies of transnationality focus on connections between people, places, and cultures.
• They integrate political-economic understanding with hybrid cultural identities resulting from capital investment and labor migration.
• Roger Rouse’s research on Mexico and southern California reveals transnational geographies affecting broader societal sections.
• Transnational spaces challenge traditional nation-state imagery and emphasize a new social space.
• Research on transnationality rejects simplistic global models, emphasizing local contexts and global-local relations.

SEEING THE SOCIAL THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CULTURAL

• Each chapter in this section demonstrates the value of combining spatial and cultural lenses in understanding the social.
• Social and cultural geographies are not mutually antagonistic but complementary.
• Recent research on disability shows how disability is socially constructed both materially and discursively.
• Disability is not just about access but about how space is actively constituted through planning and design decisions.
• Environments vary in enabling abilities, similar to how conditions like HIV/AIDS vary in social stigma.
• Geographies of self and identity have shifted towards an embodied approach.
• Judith Butler’s work on gender argues that gender difference is culturally encoded through social practices.
• Gender performativity blurs boundaries between discursive and material aspects.
• Geographical research on sex-gender differences emphasizes space’s role in interpreting cultural significance.
• Moss and Dyck highlight qualitative methods’ evolution in human geography, emphasizing researcher reflexivity.
• Chapters caution against reading progress triumphantly, instead offering modest contributions to theoretical enquiry.
• Distinctions between sex/gender, material/discursive, social/cultural collapse under intense analytical scrutiny.
• Ambiguities in these distinctions raise questions about power and knowledge in disciplinary contexts.
• Essays aim to explore cultural understandings of the social while pursuing critical politics of difference.
• Combining cultural and spatial lenses opens up an exciting agenda for future research.

1. Reclaiming ‘the Social’ in Social and Cultural Geography

• Neil Smith observes divergent fates of cultural and social geography in the English-speaking world.
• Cultural questions dominate human geography research, contrasting with perceived stagnation in social geography.
• The trajectory of social geography in Britain during the 1990s defies singular depiction.
• Social geography’s evolution is relational and influenced by academic fashions.
• ‘The cultural’ influences ‘the social’ by enabling reconfigurations and refracting its meaning.
• ‘The social’ has been simultaneously reconfigured, reasserted, and evacuated within British human geography.
• Multiple understandings of ‘the social’ coexist, reflecting complex power-knowledge dynamics.
• Representation of British social geography highlights its complexity and contested meanings.
• Debates over ‘the social’ connect to societal reproduction and material conditions.
• Reclaiming ‘the social’ involves revisiting questions about societal materiality and inequalities.
• Consumption and material culture are critical in reframing ‘the social’ through ‘the cultural’.
• Questions about ‘the social’ extend beyond academia to critical scholarship and societal relevance.

EVACUATING OR RECONFIGURING ‘THE SOCIAL’?

• A generation ago, the future of social geography looked assured, with David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973) embedding social questions within broader debates about inequalities and redistributional politics.
• Social geography in the English-speaking world was characterized by critical and committed analyses of housing, health, and education.
• Informed by political economic approaches and to a lesser degree by feminism, this work exhibited vibrancy and intensity.
• The best of this work aimed to produce analyses that could make a difference to people’s everyday lives and life chances, with a radical intent.
• Neil Smith argues that social geography was squeezed out between political economy and ‘cultural deconstruction’.
• Significant lines of social differentiation, like class, gender, and race, were recast as identities influenced by psychoanalytically influenced cultural theory and post-structuralist thinking.
• Smith’s argument is problematic because writing histories of disciplinary traditions is complicated, and it presumes a common understanding of ‘the social’.
• Multiple understandings of ‘the social’ coexisted in the 1970s, influenced by political-economy-inspired readings and empiricist interpretations.
• Contemporary social geography reflects a coexistence of further representations of ‘the social’, indicating reconfiguration rather than demise.
• Recent work on sexuality, (dis)ability, children’s geographies, parenting, and youth highlights the diversity of current social geographical research.
• Critical work has countered ableism, heterosexism, and adult-centeredness in previous social geography.
• Different understandings of ‘the social’ have emerged, with work on (dis)ability revealing divergent perspectives, terminologies, and connections across various knowledge divisions.
• Approaches to (dis)ability research include centering the disability of the individual versus understanding disability as produced by societal processes.
• Some researchers connect disability with political economy, exposing how advanced capitalism devalues the labor power of those with disabilities.
• There is growing dissatisfaction with this position, advocating for an ’embodied’ and ‘biological’ approach to impairment.
• Research increasingly centers the notion of ‘mind and body spaces’, emphasizing corporeality as the site of social inscriptions and relations.
• Four key components of contemporary understandings of ‘the social’ include body-centeredness, individual-centered embodiments, the absence of societal-level analysis, and the reluctance to engage with the economic arena.
• Body-centeredness reorients the scale of ‘the social’ to individual bodies, differing from previous scales like nation-states or cities.
• The bodily social is often constructed as defining the person and particular embodiments, situated within everyday landscapes and institutions.
• There is an absence of a societal-level understanding of ‘the social’, often retreating to analyses of ‘the excluded’ or ‘marginalized’.
• This can result in research that reinstates the oppositions it seeks to challenge, defining exclusion primarily at the individual level.
• The absence of engagement with the economic arena signals the influence of cultural perspectives in reimagining ‘the social’.
• Social geography has been reconfigured, using an alliance with ‘the cultural’ to define its field, focusing on individual experiences and often disconnected from societal needs and the provision of goods and services.
• Political economic interpretations of ‘the social’ differ, focusing on the reproduction of social life within capitalist, market-led, and neoliberal regimes.
• This reconfiguration reads as an evacuation of ‘the social’ from political economic perspectives, pointing to an internal evacuation as well.

OLD WOR(L)DS, NEW WOR(L)DS: ON EVACUATION FROM WITHIN

• Talking and thinking in terms of material inequalities used to be familiar terrain in social geography.
• Grounded in the historical materialist tradition, materiality comprised basic conditions necessary for social reproduction (shelter, food, income, health, education, employment, welfare).
• Inequalities in resource distribution, specifically their connections with class, were of primary empirical interest.
• These inequalities were understood to be produced by the workings of capitalism, with key defining relations being fundamentally unequal and exploitative (capital-labour).
• These inequalities were regulated by the state, particularly through welfare regimes.
• The UK’s regulatory matrix provided critical theoretical and empirical content for much of social geography.
• Focus was on the state: housing, health, education, (un)employment, and social divisions/inequities generated or countered by state policies.
• The rise of the new right in the 1980s through privatization and market development changed this landscape profoundly.
• Neoliberalism reconfigured the individual-society relation through the market, changing patterns of talk (customer/client, choice, opportunity).
• Thinking and talking in terms of inequalities became unthinkable and unspeakable within the emerging New Labour project.
• Social geographers in the political economy tradition found it hard to negotiate these changes.
• Some reasserted the primacy of class analysis and political economy, focusing on exposing the effects of market provision and two-tier markets in health and education.
• Inequality, if mentioned, was typically empirical, related to distribution and differences in service delivery/provision.
• Predictable geographies of inequality (inner city vs suburban, rural vs urban, north vs south-east) were noted.
• The connection to older theoretical understandings of inequality and its regulation receded.
• Market relations defined core relations in service delivery/provision.
• Inequality receded from view even in analyses of those expected to reference it.
• Some social geographers shifted focus to less overt political issues, like social polarization.
• Social polarization debate connected to the changing class structure and welfare regimes.
• Primary issues in the polarization debate: gaps in income/income differentials, changes in occupational class structure, globalization, and local scale.
• Some discussions of causal processes (e.g., gender relations to polarization) occurred, but focus remained on forms of polarization.
• Polarization debate often implicitly connected or elided with inequality.
• Inequality understood in terms of observable, measurable income differences/differentials.
• Polarization possibly a recast of poverty research, masking/obscuring and deflecting attention from poverty.
• Attention to class within polarization debate often categorical rather than relational, leading to erasure of inequality.
• Relational inequality is transparent in polarization, but focus on middle-class occupational change deflects this.
• Ambiguity around what inequality means, how to talk about it, and its place in class analysis.
• Polarization provides an acceptable way to talk about inequality as observable, measurable, controllable effects rather than relations.
• ‘The social’ as once understood is evacuated, leaving a trace even in expected research areas.
• The social is now contested through various representations of materiality (embodied vs conventional materialist).
• Association with ‘the cultural’ confers discursive authority on a particular (bodily) social, while disassociation defines political economy as ‘the economic’.
• Retreat from inequality as a theoretical concern is apparent, an effect of both internal evacuation and being defined out.
• Normative question for social and cultural geography: should this retreat from inequality continue?
• Theoretical importance of ‘the social’ cannot be divorced from ontological questions of individual-society constitution in time-space.
• ‘The social’ involves how individuals relate to others in regulated, institutionalized ways, with critical effects.
• ‘The social’ is about needs, resources, power, justice, rights, values, normativity, and societal reproduction.
• In capitalist societies, ‘the social’ is about inequalities and their regulation.
• Inequality need not be interrogated from a revisionist political economy position.
• Suggestions for reclaiming ‘the social’ within social and cultural geography focus on forms of materiality shaping social life reproduction.
• Need to address issues of consumption, material culture, and discursive connections with materiality.

RECLAIMING ‘THE SOCIAL’: SOCIETAL REPRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION CULTURE/S AND RETHINKING INEQUALITY

• Return to fundamental question: how we think about the materiality of societal reproduction.
• Various authors emphasize importance of basic conditions for human life reproduction (food, shelter, etc.: Doyal and Gough, 1991; Sen, 1992).
• Others focus on the cultural conditions of production and intersubjective meanings (Slater, 1997).
• In the consumerist west, needs are reconfigured through consumption culture.
• Housing, food, and clothing are seen as expressions of identity and self.
• People, especially in the First World, relate to the world primarily as consumers, not producers (Bauman, 1998).
• This has implications for understanding societal reproduction and materiality.
• Discussions on inequality recognize the impact of First World consumption patterns on Third World poverty.
• Inequality is geographically displaced and masked by First World consumption.
• Inequality in First World societies is increasingly understood through consumer culture.
• Specific consumer items are crucial for household reproduction and social inclusion.
• Not having certain goods (e.g., mobile phones) is exclusionary and constitutes inequality.
• Consumption cultures are complex and influenced by thrift, value, and saving imperatives.
• Ethical consumption choices are often limited to the middle class.
• Branded clothing and its social implications highlight the importance of consumption in forming social relations.
• The role of talk, especially mobile phone communication, in enacting social relations is significant.
• Social categories like class, race, and gender intersect with consumption-related inequalities.
• Disadvantaged consumers often include elderly, single-parent households, certain ethnic groups, and benefit-dependent households.
• Women’s role in consumption work within households highlights gender inequalities in domestic labor.
• Shopping as love and routine food shopping reflect performance of gender roles.
• Housing, education, and healthcare remain critical components of societal reproduction.
• Connecting these services to consumption cultures and material culture can enhance understanding.
• Analyzing these services as consumed commodities can reveal their significance and meanings to consumers.
• Research should consider the discursive power in service provision and its impact on consumption.

SPECULATIONS ABOUT ‘FUTURE TALK’

• Editor’s feedback encourages speculation on future orientations despite author’s reluctance.
• Speculations about ‘the future’ risk author positioning as all-seeing, ignoring situational context of academic commentary.
• Author integrates dialogic comments on previous drafts to highlight the shaping of academic texts through dialogue.
• Hopes ‘reclaiming the social’ receives recognition; urges transparent debate in social geography:
  • Definition of ‘the social’ and its connection to society, economy, polity, and culture.
  • Vision of society: redistribution vs. equality of opportunity, and their political leanings.
  • Role of ‘the academic’: commentator or critic in critical human geography.
• Chapter intentionally ‘British’ to acknowledge and resist power geometries shaping knowledge.
• Engagement with ‘the social’ necessitates examining national contexts (health, education, etc.) within and between nation-states.
• Societies are relationally constituted beyond national borders, influencing multicultural identities.
• Orthodox narrative in social and cultural geography often metropolitan, British, and North American-centric.
• Calls for social geographers to engage with places experiencing homogenizing practices and violence (e.g., Balkans, Palestine, Rwanda).
• Urges broader engagement with diverse spaces and practices in future academic discourse.

2. Embodying Social Geography

INTRODUCING THE BODY IN SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

• Fascination with ‘body fixation’ growing in English-speaking academia.
• ‘The body’ seen as abstract, discursively inscribed entity, not singular or universal.
• Differentiation of bodies through processes like embodiment, lived experience.
• Key in theorizing human experience, subjectivity, power relations.
• Geography links body and embodiment to space, place, contributing to spatialized social geography.
• Body and embodiment attractive for theory-building:
  • Arising from bodily experiences and discursive inscriptions.
• Social changes at local, regional, global scales shape body-society articulation.
• Healthcare costs, biotechnological advancements redefine ‘healthy’ body limits.
• Technological control alters bodily functions, influences societal capacities.
• Global goods distribution impacts natural resources, economic welfare, social structures.
• Economic shifts transform paid and unpaid work, leisure dynamics:
  • From manual labor to dexterity-based tasks; atomistic labor processes.
• Commodification of caring and household tasks changes social reproduction dynamics.
• Leisure time expansion allows pursuit of ‘the body beautiful’ through fitness, diets, surgery.
• Media links material bodies with cultural representations, new disease narratives:
  • Public apprehension over medical advancements, disease outbreaks.
• Human genome mapping blurs science fiction and reality, challenges body-capital relationships.
• Postmodern critiques challenge dualisms (mind-body, culture-nature) in body studies.
• Emphasis on multiplicity, fragmentation, contingency in postmodern body theories.
• Social geography engages body and embodiment amidst complex relationships:
  • Charting their course through intellectual passages and spatialized embodiments.
• Differentiates theorizing body from pursuing embodiment in social and cultural geography.
• Three intellectual passages explore power, identity, difference through bodies and spaces.
• Geographical works in the 1990s reflect interests in body and embodiment.
• Critical examination of embodiment in chronic illness contexts.
• Geographical contributions to social geography through body engagement and future potentials.

SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF BODIES AND EMBODYING SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

• Not all geographical studies focus on embodiment, some do not invoke it analytically.
• Distinguishing between social geography of the body and embodied social geography is crucial.
• Social geographies describe personal and collective experiences in environments.
• They explore identities, power dynamics, bodily activities in specific spaces.
• Classical works like Marx’s writings are ‘recovering’ bodies for modern theory.
• David Seamon’s work illustrates humanist ‘body work’ in geography, contrasting with Sauerian geography.
• Early geographies explored how bodies fit into society (e.g., Buttimer, Sauer).
• These geographies often ‘hide’ bodies amidst theoretical focuses.
• Social geography of the body emphasizes connections among bodies, spaces, and places.
• Embodied social geography goes beyond studying bodies as discrete entities.
• It privileges material ways bodies are constituted, experienced, and represented.
• Situated knowledge challenges abstractions from materiality and spatial power dynamics.
• Embodiment involves lived spaces where bodies are located corporeally and conceptually.
• It encompasses bodily forms, social constructions, and material-discursive interactions.
• Chronic illness example shows how biomedical diagnosis legitimates bodily experiences.
• Diagnosis shapes identity, treatment decisions, and workplace interactions.
• Embodied social geography contributes nuanced understanding of how bodies create knowledge.
• Focuses on connections between bodies, identities, and power in spatial contexts.
• Emphasizes political engagement as integral to methodological, epistemological, and theoretical work.

BODIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND GEOGRAPHY

• Interest in the body and embodiment in geography follows a shift from modernist to postmodernist concerns.
• Postmodern thinkers use the body to discuss human experience, subjectivity, and power relations.
• Michel Foucault examines the discipline of the body in prisons, medical clinics, and sexuality.
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce the concept of the ‘body without organs’, linking body and society.
• Geographers’ engagement with Foucault and Deleuze’s work is limited but includes examples like Doel, Driver, Matless, and Philo.
• These works focus on representations of bodies by mechanisms and technologies, questioning frameworks for critical body studies.
• Feminism and queer studies have significantly influenced embodiment theories, challenging binary thinking through the body.
• Jana Sawicki critiques masculinity and femininity binaries, advocating for new power and knowledge configurations.
• Elspeth Probyn destabilizes sex and gender constructs, promoting complex understandings of gender within power relations.
• Elizabeth Grosz ties identity instability to bodily functions, advocating for a materialist framework in feminist politics.
• Feminist and queer works in various social sciences challenge binary thinking and explore body-related theories.
• Sociology’s interest in the body, exemplified by Frank and Zola, spurred feminist research on surgically altered bodies, surveillance, and gender differences.
• Feminist anthropologists study gender and the body in scientific knowledge, health, and culture, offering embodied fieldwork alternatives.
• In psychology, feminists explore contextual body explanations, blending discursive and material perspectives, challenging traditional counseling and politics.
• Geographers explore the history and geography of bodies, examining body and embodiment in feminist, socialist, Marxist, queer, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist contexts.
• Feminist, poststructural, and psychoanalytic work deconstruct the unitary body, highlighting power, gender, and sexuality.
• The materiality of the body contrasts with its view as a readable text.
• There is growing interest in classed and racialized bodies in economic production and postcolonial studies.
• Geographers use geographical concepts like space, place, and scale to understand body and embodiment.
• Investigating the body as a scale has methodological implications, such as using ethnographic methods or depth interviews.
• Geographers explore everyday life and bodily inscriptions, grounding body studies in specific spaces.
• The tension between theorizing body and embodied knowledge raises questions on their contributions to geographical understanding of bodies in different contexts.

INTELLECTUAL PASSAGES

• Three key intellectual passages emerge: body as site of regulation, oppression, and control; embodied subjectivity and spatiality; challenging binary categories through problematizing the body.
• Categories like gender, race, sexuality, and disability are socially constructed through power relations.
• Early cultural geography questions unproblematized power categories regarding the body (Jackson, 1989; Jackson and Penrose, 1992).
• Intersectionality reveals how power relations regulate bodies and spatial manifestations.
• Material processes show how power saturates spaces (Gleeson, 1999).
• Bodies are regulated through societal surveillance and discursive control (Bray and Colebrook, 1998; Sanders, 1998).
• Interest in identity and subjectivity rises alongside body studies.
• ‘Becoming’ and ongoing coercion shape subjectivity (Price and Shildrick, 1999; Bordo, 1993).
• Politics often gloss over diversity within marginalized identities.
• Spatial regulation influences identity constitution (Cream, 1995; Cooper et al., 2000).
• Geographers explore Foucault’s spatializations in medical history (Philo, 2000).
• Body studies challenge binaries like male/female and nature/culture.
• Butler’s performativity theory sees identities as imitative and resistant (Butler, 1990).
• Gendered performances shift within spatial contexts (McDowell and Court, 1994).
• Gay and lesbian spaces subvert normative meanings (Bell et al., 1994).
• Performativity in space is fluid and imitative (Gregson and Rose, 2000).
• Surveillance influences gender and sexuality performances (Dirsuweit, 1999).
• Performativity mediates bodily activities and spatial constructs, challenging binary categories.

GEOGRAPHIES OF BODIES AND EMBODIED GEOGRAPHIES

• Intellectual passages in geography explore body as site of regulation, oppression, and control; embodied subjectivity and spatiality; challenging binary categories through problematizing the body.
• Geographers emphasize complexities linking bodies and spaces, both theorizing and utilizing knowledge emerging from bodies.
• Economic bodies in geography focus on labor relations and political-economic contestations (Harvey, 1998).
• Callard (1998) critiques laboring bodies through Marxist and queer theory intersections.
• Leslie and Butz (1998) discuss injured bodies in cybernetic labor processes and neoliberal discourse.
• Consumption bodies examine ideals and resistance in body building (McCormack, 1999) and agoraphobic experiences (Davidson, 2001).
• Intersectional bodies in geography explore power dynamics related to gender, race, sexuality, ability, age, citizenship, and nationality.
• Sharp (1996) examines gender, nationhood, and radical feminist politics.
• Day (1999) critiques racial constructions of oppression in body studies.
• Pulido (1997) analyzes environmental justice activism and racialized women’s identities.
• Bonnett (1996) scrutinizes ‘white’ identities in anti-racist discourse.
• Sexualized bodies challenge norms and power in public spaces (Namaste, 1996; Nast, 1998).
• Disability studies conceptualize disability as a social construct (Dorn and Laws, 1994; Gleeson, 1999).
• Butler (1999) explores political intersections of sexuality, space, and disability.
• Geographical studies emphasize embodied subjectivities and spatialized configurations of marginalized identities.

CRITICALLY RETEXTURING BODIES

• Geographical approaches to theorizing body and embodiment cross subdisciplinary borders.
• Influence of feminism and poststructural thought brings common theoretical problematics.
• Challenges binary thinking, opens categories for analyzing embodied subjectivity.
• Emphasizes spatiality of embodiment and its materiality (Pile & Thrift, 1995; Massey, 1993).
• Places encoded with meanings (Cresswell, 1996).
• Classed, ‘raced’, and gendered performances embody place meanings.
• Transgression contested through threat, violence, or self-surveillance.
• Feminism and poststructural thought open space for alternative voices.
• Queer theory challenges heterosexual, male, white, able-bodied norms.
• Grounds subject/body in concrete spatiality of everyday life.
• Fluidity of bodies and identities challenges fixed social categories.
• Body as corporeal and discursive, mutually constituted.
• Health geography explores body and embodiment, non-essentialist perspective.
• Reassertion of body as non-essentialist allows for body politics recognizing mutability.
• Feminist materialist perspective emphasizes discursively produced body.
• Materiality shapes and reads bodies, interacts with environment.
• Avoids binary thinking (structure/agency, nature/nurture, subject/object).
• Butler’s performativity theory: iterative, routinized behavior, culturally intelligible bodies.
• Corporeality and constancy of performance in gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, ability, age.
• Negotiations of identity through chronic illness experiences (MS, ME, RA).
• Biomedical discourses inscribe women as ‘deviant’, mediate access and space.
• Uncertainty in corporeal capacities affects social and financial positions.
• Gendered performance expectations influence strategies and navigation.
• Class, ‘race’, intersect in women’s embodied experience of chronic illness.
• Body as problem and site of change in managing illness experiences.
• Fluidity of bodies and inscriptions, management of discrepancies in performance.
• Being in transition highlights bodily boundaries, identity formation, and transformation.

CONTRIBUTIONS AND CONTESTATIONS

• Social and cultural geography challenges binaries through narrative and qualitative methods, allowing embodied knowledge to emerge.
• Performance of gendered, classed, raced, sexed, sexualized, and abled identities disrupts normative categories.
• Identities are embodied and respond to performances in specific spaces.
• Body as material and discursive challenges binary categorization, grounded in everyday life.
• Studies show contestations of normative depictions of gender, class, race, sex, sexuality, and ability.
• Feminism and queer theory avoid biological reductionism while theorizing body and embodiment.
• Geography of the body versus embodied geography tensions in understanding power relations.
• Accessibility issues in geography highlight the role of power in shaping experiences and subjectivities.
• Integrating real, deviant bodies transforms geographies of the body into complex, embodied geographies.

3. Cultural Geographies of Transnationality

WHAT IS TRANSNATIONALITY?

• Transnational theory connects entities previously seen as discrete and autonomous.
• Emphasis on “trans” promotes relational theorizing across borders.
• Focuses on interactions and movement of goods, people, and ideas across national borders.
• Challenges state-centric and territorially defined narratives in migration and geopolitical studies.
• Rethinks economic categories by questioning exclusive focus on abstract global forces like capitalism.
• Impacts epistemological inquiries into identity, subjectivity, space, and time.
• Border crossings in transnational research reshape national-global relationships.
• Examines shifting understandings of cultural narratives and foundational categories.
• Cultural geography explores contemporary transnational research and its implications.
• Raises questions about identity, spatiality, and cultural interactions in a global context.

THE CONDITION OF TRANSNATIONALITY

• Marshall Berman (1982) defines modernization as urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization in Europe in the late 19th century.
• Modernism reflects cultural change in art, music, architecture, and literature.
• Modernity is the experience of change felt by urban and rural residents.
• Transnationality is discussed in cultural studies as in-betweenness or ambivalence.
• Marxist geographers advocate grounding transnational concepts in economic processes.
• Harvey’s (1989) “The Condition of Postmodernity” critiques postmodernism’s economic impacts.
• Globalization links to transnationalism through shifts in world governance and economic systems.
• Contemporary capitalism shows global flexibility in accumulation and production.
• Transnationalism involves cultural expressions amid global economic contexts.
• Canadian Business Immigration Program aimed to attract Hong Kong investors in the 1980s.
• Vancouver saw socio-cultural conflicts over urban development and immigration.
• Rapid urban changes in Vancouver due to Hong Kong investment and immigration.
• Business policies prompted dual residency for Hong Kong immigrants in Canada.
• Economic policies reshaped Canadian cities amidst global economic integration.
• Racism was a factor in socio-cultural struggles between transnational immigrants and Vancouver residents.
• Understanding Canadian immigration policy, global economic integration, and Asian economic attraction is crucial.
• Networks facilitate multidirectional flows of goods, information, capital, and people.
• Social networks influence immigrant adaptation, residence, and employment opportunities.
• Technology accelerates globalization and restructuring processes.
• Castells (1989; 1996) links global capitalism with new information technologies.
• Transnational cultural geographies intersect with economic processes and network society.
• Migrants maintain dual relationships across space, impacting economic and cultural flows.
• Globalization studies have often emphasized transnationalization “from above”.
• Postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives challenge homogeneous narratives of globalization.
• Local economic variations shape capitalist practices and understandings.
• Hegemonic struggles over property rights reflect varied economic regimes (China vs. USA).
• Information technology’s impact on local cultural identities is complex and culturally specific.
• “Spaces of flows” coexist with spatial fixity, impacting global exchange and cultural meanings.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE TRANSNATIONAL

• Transnational theory challenges singular, Western-centric views of capitalism and information.
• It reconceptualizes static categories like “the nation” and critiques state-centric narratives.
• Geopolitics traditionally focused on state autonomy and borders, assuming the nation as a natural unit.
• Transnationality emphasizes interactions over static formations, reimagining scales beyond the nation-state.
• Scales are dynamically produced and interrelated, crucial in capitalist restructuring.
• Boundaries and nation-building processes are integral to state practices in transnational theory.
• States’ roles and boundaries are fluid in globalization, impacting citizenship and capital circulation.
• Conventional views of state-territory correspondence are questioned by transnational migration studies.
• States extend citizenship rights based on transmigration currents and capital flows.
• State tensions and conflicts are exposed in transnational research, especially around migration issues.
• State practices often conflict with national narratives of multiculturalism or territorialization.
• Theoretical frameworks like core-periphery binaries fail to capture contemporary dynamics of refugee flows.
• Supranational institutions like UNHCR play crucial roles in global refugee movements and assistance.

THE TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL FIELDS OF MIGRATION

• Postmodernism in architecture influenced postmodern theory by emphasizing fragmentation, historical reference, and pastiche.
• Similarly, transnational migration theories challenged traditional migration frameworks in the 1980s.
• Older theories focused on unilinear or circular migration patterns, which were inadequate for describing contemporary migration flows.
• Transnational theory critiqued boundedness and fixity, embracing mobility and hybridity in migration studies.
• Roger Rouse criticized the moral undertones in US migration research, challenging the idea of migrants’ singular allegiance to one place.
• Transnational theory introduced the concept of “social fields” where migrants maintain dynamic connections across borders.
• Technological advancements like electronic banking and telecommunications enabled migrants to participate in multiple national contexts simultaneously.
• Empirical studies showed migrants actively engaging in business, politics, and family affairs across two nations.
• Examples include political activities of migrants influencing elections in New York City and diaspora communities forming political entities within home countries.
• Governments, like El Salvador’s, supported overseas citizens through legal assistance, influenced by the economic importance of remittances.
• Transnationalism is often seen as a form of “deterritorialization” but can be more accurately described as “respatialization.”
• Respatialization involves reworking spatial arrangements on a global scale without necessarily implying liberation or loss of power.
• Gender dynamics play a significant role in transnational experiences, affecting power dynamics and perceptions of liberation among migrants.

POSTSTRUCTURAL SPACES OF THE TRANSNATIONAL

• Epistemological transgressions via transnationalism critique linear and containing views of time, space, and narratives like capitalism and culture.
• Scholars advocate anti-essentializing subjectivities emphasizing plurality, mobility, hybridity, and in-between spaces.
• Anthropologists like Clifford (1992) propose the concept of the informant as traveller, highlighting movement over dwelling.
• Appadurai (1988) critiques Western analyses for privileging the local, celebrating deterritorialization in cultural mediascapes.
• Hybridity and in-betweenness are celebrated by Bhabha (1994) as spaces for subverting hegemonic narratives of race and nation.
• Challenges arise in theorizing capitalism without essentializing it; Gibson-Graham (1995) warns against stripping capitalism of explanatory potential.
• Cultural mobility discussions often overlook socio-economic oppression; hooks (1992) criticizes neglect of actual border-crossing experiences.
• Theoretical celebrations of hybridity as resistance often overlook how hybrid subject positions can serve economic gain rather than political intervention.
• Empirical grounding is crucial; theorizing transnationalism without empirical data risks losing political efficacy.
• Geographically informed research is needed to address complex questions of borders, identities, and global processes.

TRANSNATIONAL RESEARCH IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

• Cultural geography explores how transnationality influences perceptions of place and mobility in a globalized world.
• Transnational practices shape cultural identities and social dynamics for both mobile and immobile populations.
• Scholars like Ong (1999) analyze global shifts and their impact on transnational practices and imaginings.
• Vertovec (1999) discusses how multiple ties across borders reshape cultural geographies.
• Jackson and Crang (2000) focus on commodity flows, linking them to transnational cultural implications.
• Yeoh and Willis (1999) explore gendered impacts of transnational business networks on identity constructions.
• Hong Kong-Vancouver migrations reveal gendered divisions of labor and identity.
• Transnational movements challenge traditional notions of nationhood and cultural belonging.
• Cultural geographies study how economic and cultural processes intertwine across borders.
• Ethnographic research emphasizes multisited approaches to understand global flows and their impacts.
• Future research could expand into economic effects beyond remittances, exploring broader impacts of transnational mobility.
• Political effects of transnationalism should be further investigated, including impacts on education and institutional politics.
• Social reproduction issues like health and urban consumption are influenced by transnational dynamics.
• Research should explore shifts in market demands and production processes due to transnational movements and cultural interactions.