difficulties with this chapter, notably that it has
the tendency to ring fence rather than enable the
framing of future ‘debate’. Moreover, specula-
tions about ‘the future’ have the added drawback
of both positioning their authors in the unenvi-
able and untenable position of all-seeing clair-
voyant, and writing out the way in which
academic commentary is always situated in the
conditions of its production. So, in moving to
‘speculate about futures’ I’m only going to go
part way down the cooperation road. At this
point, therefore, I suspend the conventions of
academic writing practice – by admitting into the
text both comments on a previous draft of this
chapter and my responses to them. In so doing
then, I’m choosing to work with a tactic which
highlights how dialogic talk shapes practice in
the constitution of academic texts, and which
resonates with some of my earlier comments
about the importance of talk.
First then, and in speculative mode: I hope that
what I have labelled here as ‘reclaiming the
social’ is seen to matter, at least in some quarters,
and that some of my suggestions regarding
potential empirical foci receive a degree of con-
sideration. Moreover, I would hope that ‘recla-
mation’ is accompanied by transparent debate
within social and cultural geography about three
issues: (1) what we mean by ‘the social’, and –
perhaps even more importantly – how this con-
nects with and to society and societal reproduction,
and therefore with economy and polity as well
as culture; (2) what vision/s of society we have –
for example, whether this is (still) about commit-
ments to ameliorate and/or eradicate inequalities
through redistribution, or is based on equality of
opportunity – and whether these (still) construe
themselves as broadly left; and (3) the role we
attach to ‘the academic’ – simply commentator
or critic. All of these are questions which have
been largely sidelined or placed backstage in
recent formulations of the social. Particularly
within the ascendant ‘reconfiguration’ literature,
these would signal a re-evaluation of the use of
the much-used, and therefore potentially abused,
label ‘critical’ in human geography.
Secondly, and in response to another fragment
of ‘talk’ – yet less conventionally authoritative –
‘several people ... felt that the chapter was a bit
“too British”’, the implication being to do some-
thing about this by referring to other places too.
My response to this is both critical and resistant.
Indeed, I want to assert that this chapter is inten-
tionally and explicitly ‘British’, for two reasons.
First, as I have written elsewhere with others
(Gregson et al., 2001), it is about time that ‘we’
British started to acknowledge the partialities of
our knowledge, and to think about resisting thepower geometries which permit us to frame,
shape and know others through ourselves.
Secondly, any engagement with ‘the social’
requires an engagement with the spaces of the
social. These, at least at the moment, remain in part
the concern of nation-states. So, when we talk –
as I have done here in places – about facets of soci-
etalreproduction such as health, education and so
forth, we have to look inevitably at situations
within (and between) nation-states. Reverting to
speculative mode though, societies are not neces-
sarily closed, bounded spaces sealed by borders;
they are relationally constituted too, in ways that
connect and blur spaces to produce multicultural,
often diasporic, identities. This is indeed pretty
much the orthodox narrative within social and
cultural geography, and one which is located
within (although this is rarely acknowledged) the
context of its production – largely metropolitan,
largely British and North American. But there
are other places in the world where forging con-
nections between societies and space is about
more homogenizing, bounding practices, vio-
lence even – the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo,
Macedonia), Palestine, Rwanda to mention just
three examples. These places however, or at least
writing about them, remain seemingly the preserve
of political and economic geographers; they are
places which social (and for that matter cultural)
geographers have been apparently content
to leave alone. My hope is that ‘the future’ –
triggered by a reclamation of ‘the social’ – might
see a change to this insularity as well as an
explicit acknowledgement (as here) of the
partialities and particularities of the spaces and
practices we write about.NOTES1 An addition to the standard disciplinary history is
provided by the renaming of the Social Geography
Study Group as the Social and Cultural Geography
Study Group of the RGS-IBG. All naming has a politics,
and this relabelling as social andcultural seems, in
retrospect, to have been a key defining moment. It is
immediately suggestive of ambiguity: is this ‘and’ about
separation, combination or relation? At the same time,
the ‘and’ conceals the power relations between the two
terms, which, there can be little disputing, have seen ‘the
cultural’ (with the authority conferred by the cultural
turn) exercise discursive power over ‘the social’.
2 See, for example, Aitken (1994), Aitken and Herman
(1997), Bell and Valentine (1995), Bingham et al.
(1999), Holloway (1998), Holloway and Valentine
(2000), Malbon (1999), Skelton and Valentine (1997),
Valentine (1996; 1997).
3 My selection of work on (dis)ability is in no sense
meant to be either privileging this work or singling it54 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch01.qxd 03-10-02 10:25 AM Page 54