seriously consumption, material culture and a
discursive that connects with the material. This is
a tactic not just which is indicative of personal
academic investments, but which works by
refracting facets of ‘the cultural’ – specifically
material culture – onto a particular reading of
‘the social’ (see Jackson, 2000). Although few
will probably agree wholly, or perhaps even
partially, with such a course, my hope and inten-
tion here are that such thoughts might at least
precipitate a degree of reflection. For – in agree-
ment with Neil Smith – I would argue that ‘what
constitutes and comprises “the social” ’ are ques-
tions that go beyond the academy to connect
again with an older, yet no less pertinent, vision
of critical scholarship. Asking these questions
might indeed be a necessary radical act for an
increasingly self-styled and self-referential criti-
cal human geography.EVACUATING OR RECONFIGURING
‘THE SOCIAL’?A generation ago the future for social geography
looked assured. Theoretically, David Harvey’s
inspirational text Social Justice and the City
(1973) provided a means of embedding a range
of social questions within broader debates about
inequalities and redistributional politics. Empiri-
cally, much of social geography – at least in the
English-speaking world – was characterized by
critical and committed analyses of housing,
health and education, to take just a few of the
most obvious examples. Informed by political
economic approaches, and to a more limited
degree by feminism, such work exhibited
vibrancy and intensity that is evident even now,
as witnessed by recent contributions to the gen-
trification literature or to uncovering geographies
of health. Importantly, too, the best of this work
was not simply ‘radical’ in its analysis, but radi-
cal in intent too. It was about trying to produce
analyses that, potentially, could make a differ-
ence to people’s everyday lives and life chances.
In short, it was work that wore its political
colours on its sleeve; and those colours were
unashamedly of the left.
So, what happened? Reflecting on the very
same question, Neil Smith posits a disciplinary
explanation, arguing that social geography was
squeezed out – the victim of a pincer movement
between political economy and the move to what
he labels ‘cultural deconstruction’. In the
process, he maintains, what had come to be seen
as significant lines of social differentiation –notably the much recited mantra of class, gender
and race – came to be recast: as identities, even
as subjectivities, to be informed more by a
psychoanalytically influenced cultural theory
and various versions of anti-foundationalist post-
structuralist thinking than by a social theory
tainted with materialist associations. Thus, ‘the
cultural’ usurped ‘the social’, or so the story
goes.^1
Although attractive in its simplicity and
persuasive in the way in which the demise of ‘the
social’ is hinged to the progressivist develop-
ment of the discipline, Smith’s argument is
problematic in at least two ways: first, because
writing (the) history/ies of disciplinary tradition/s
is, as Smith himself is well aware (Godlewska
and Smith, 1994), a rather more complicated,
altogether messier, activity than is given credit
here; and secondly, because there is a presump-
tion in this narrative that we all know what is
meant by and included within the term ‘the
social’, although it is important to note that this
is a very long way from presumed by the end of
Smith’s commentary. As I go on to argue in this
section and in the subsequent one, weaving
together these two threads results in a more
nuanced reading of the trajectory of ‘the social’
and in a rather different narrative from a straight-
forward tale of demise.
In developing my argument here, I want to
begin with two of the core tenets of recent writ-
ing/s on disciplinary tradition/s: their situated-
ness and their relation to debates over authority,
authorship, inclusion and exclusion (Driver,
1995; Livingstone, 1992; Rose, 1995). In terms
of ‘the social’, these points are suggestive imme-
diately of the coexistence of multiple, rather than
singular, understandings of ‘the social’ – ones
which have relative degrees of authority within
the discipline, depending on their relation to pre-
vailing and/or fashionable theoretical canons.
This we can see, not least when we look back to
the 1970s, when political-economy-inspired
readings of ‘the social’ held sway over, yet were
copresent with, more empiricist interpretations,
characterized notably by the then plethora of
segregation studies (Peach et al., 1981; see Jackson
and Smith, 1984). Correspondingly, what this
should alert us to in the contemporary period is
the coexistence of yet further representations of
‘the social’; and that, rather than having lan-
guished, social geography might have been
reconfigured.
When we look at a range of work produced
through the 1990s by geographers, we can
see that such suggestions are indeed borne out.
Studies of sexuality, (dis)ability, children’s geo-
graphies, parenting and youth, for example, are all44 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch01.qxd 03-10-02 10:25 AM Page 44