Cultural Geography

certainly not the case that social inequalities

of race, class and gender – the focus of research

for generations of social geographers – had

suddenly disappeared (far from it). Rather, new

concerns with cultural difference and the

politics of representation – informed by post-

modern, postcolonial and other forms of post-

structuralist theory – had taken hold across

the social sciences, leading to a relative lack of

research on structures of inequality and their

associated spatialities. In Gregson’s words,

questions of meaning, identity, representation

and ideology were increasingly replacing

studies that were more firmly grounded in

an analysis of the material world or con-

cerned with socially significant differences of

gender, class, race, sexuality and (dis)ability

(1995: 139).

The perceived evacuation of the social in

social and cultural geography is a serious con-

cern that each of the chapters in this section

addresses in a different way. Taken together,

however, the chapters provide strong evidence

that the ‘death of the social’ has been prema-

turely proclaimed. Nicky Gregson’s chapter,

for example, demonstrates that ‘the social’

has not simply been replaced by ‘the cultural’

but is increasingly refracted through the

cultural. Gregson demonstrates that multiple

social and cultural geographies coexist rather

than a single hegemonic social geography

being replaced by an equally hegemonic

cultural geography. So, too, in Katharyne

Mitchell’s chapter, the importance of ‘ground-

ing’ the analysis of hybrid cultures in the

materialities of specific times and places is

central to her argument. In place of stark

oppositions between the social and the

cultural, the material and the symbolic, dis-

course and practice, each of the following

chapters seeks to transcend such dualisms.

Instead, each chapter looks forward to a geo-

graphy in which symbolic meanings are embed-

ded in specific material contexts, defined by

unequal relations of power, structured by

culturally mediated notions of social difference.

The remainder of this introduction focuses

on two related issues. The first is intended to

further underline the potential for seeing social

and cultural questions through the lens of the

spatial. The second provides further evidence

of the value of seeing the social through the lens

of the cultural(and in so doing demonstrates

the need to transcend all such dualistic ways

of thinking).

SEEING THE SOCIAL THROUGH

THE LENS OF THE SPATIAL

Our account begins with a period when social

geography was in an upbeat and optimistic

mood: when geographers were opening up

a dialogue with other social scientists about

the reciprocal relations between society and

space(signalled by the journal of that name,

launched in 1983). Geographers were no

longer in the thrall of the other social sciences,

no longer content to be the cartographers

of social inequalities that were left to other

disciplines to theorize and explain. There was

an increasing acceptance that social relations

were spatially constituted (signalled by inter-

disciplinary collections such as Gregory and

Urry’s Social Relations and Spatial Structures,

published in 1985). With the cultural turn

in human geography, geographers felt a new

confidence about contributing to debates in

cultural studies, even while we were being

encouraged to question our ethnographic

cultural authority and examine our own

positionality.

The cultural turn, especially through the

influence of feminism, also led to a broader

understanding of what constitutes ‘the politi-

cal’. What might appear from one perspective

as evidence of the end of the social could be

read more optimistically from a feminist per-

spective as a broadening out of the political to

include questions of visual and textual repre-

sentation, the cultural politics of sexuality and

the body, and more expansive notions of

citizenship.This sense of optimism was, in turn,

challenged by voices ‘from the margins’ of

white western feminism which raised uncom-

fortable questions about the privileges of

power including the unexamined ‘whiteness’ of

much current academic practice (hooks, 1992).

While Gregson’s chapter explores these

issues in the context of recent disability stud-

ies in geography, geographies of race and

racism are equally revealing of the theoretical

ebb and flow of social and cultural geography.

The social was traditionally seen in terms of a

series of relatively independent ‘dimensions’

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