CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY KEY IDEAS: SPACE Context: 'Space' and 'the spatial' have been widely invoked as a defining concern of Geography. Paying attention to them, many have argued, is what makes Geography a distinctive and valuable intellectual endeavour. In particular, the centrality of 'space' to Geography has been crucial for those parts of the subject seeking to position the discipline within the social sciences. The 1960s, for example, saw the emergence of Human Geography as a 'spatial science', seeking to hypothesise, test and establish spatial laws about society and economy. Subsequently, many geographers questioned the spatial fetishism of such work (i.e. its focus on spatial laws and modelling to the exclusion of social, political and experiential spheres), but retained space as a core concern within a wider socio-spatial dialectic. Marxist Geographers, like David Harvey, argued that space was central to the dynamics of capitalist economies, societies and polities. Interdisciplinary journals such as 'Society and Space' were established in the 1980s to bring together work in Geography and Social Theory. The so-called 'new' Cultural Geography of the 1980s and 1990s engaged this thinking with 'cultural' topics and processes. Thus over the last fifty years or so, the sense that Geography entailed spatial phenomena (areas, distributions, diffusions, networks) has developed into an explicit claim that Geography's role is to recognise and to theorise 'space' and the 'spatial'. We might want to be wary of a reduction of both Geography in general and Cultural Geography more specifically to matters of space. Note that space figures as (just) one of the key ideas you will be discussing this term. Nonetheless, the idea that space matters, and that society is not composed of angels dancing on the head of a pin, has become central to geographical thought, and is fundamental in some form to most scholarship in Cultural Geography today. In this session we therefore consider how space is, and might be, thought about. We will focus on reading a key text on this key idea: Doreen Massey's book For Space (Sage, London: 2005). Doreen passed away in 2016; you can read an obituary and find links to various writings here: https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2016/03/the-geographer-of- space-and-power-doreen-massey-1944-2016/. She was a central figure in the 'society and space' critique of spatial science and the promotion of Geography within social and political theory. For Space was an attempt to articulate thinking on space that had previously been either more implicit or directed at specific issues or debates within her work.
Reading: As signalled above, practically the seminar will be based on a textual reading of Doreen Massey's book For Space. You will be able to access the book via pdf on Moodle. Some wider contextual reading is suggested below, but this is not expected in advance of the seminar itself. For the seminar, whilst you are welcome to read the whole book if you are able, it is likely to be too much in the time available. So, we will be focusing on some limited extracts from the book. Part One 'Setting