PIC W5 L1 why social and cultural geography

-              Social and Cultural geographies as ‘sub-disciplines’

o   People are presenting certain types of commitments to forms of knowledge

o   Organising ideas and debates

o   In some sense having some power over them

o   sometimes problematise this power

-              Social and cultural geographies as ways of asking questions

History: 1

-              Geography in general doesn’t really have a canon (n literature refers to a core set of texts which have a coherent genre/ view of world)

-              With the breadth of geography comes messiness – the canon doesn’t really exist for geography, although there are several key well known texts

-              Two of they key people related to early 20^th c geography aren’t British – Karl Sauer and Richard Hartshorne

-              Dennis Cosgrove key in thinking about landscape

History 2-              Social geography vs. sociology

-              In 19^th c we get first mention of social geography and way of imaging spaces of people

-              The problem of history and ratzles’ liebensraum’

o   In book anthropology – lay out pseudo anthropological story about history of the world in relation to the human

o   Influenced by Darwin

o   Adopts a full throated social darwinsim where some people are superior to others – based on fittest survive narrative

o   Ideas are coopted by hitler and national socialism 50 years later

-              Humanistic geography – Johnston

o   Came with importing of French philosophy

o   Scale. Body, emotions, difference – not how to scientifically study but with discourse, debate and imagination

 

Landscape:

-              Essentially that landscape painting soften depict the strength of a man/ whit eman

-              In shows, posh white men are talking about the paintings

Imaginative geographies:

-              Orientalises part of the world

-              It is ‘othered’ something ‘other than us’

-              Reality of that other place, whether middle east, north africa, south america, Japan is secondary to the imagination of them.

o   We prioritise the imagined version of these worlds over the existing ones

o   Less interested in telling ‘factual, true, authentic’ stories about these places than we ar einterested in telling stories that are ‘compelling, romantic, make us feel confident in our own superiority’

o   This practice hasn’t gone away – I many regards similar stories are told today in relation to other pople- non=white people by anglophone media outlets.

o   Bbc pulled up on it many time – critiques of white people going to none-white countries and presented knowledgeably about them rather than getting a local

o   Usa government does this too – gaza

 

Issues 1

-              Social geography deals with the ways in which particular kinds of spaces become delineated by the virtues of practices that happen in them that make people feel things

o   Vary at different times of day/ week

-              Space gets divided by all of us by virtue of the kinds of things we don in it – produces kinds of tension etc

Issues 2

-              Many ways were encouraged to reflect and understand ourselves in media

-              Forms of imaginations are not just about groups of people somewhere else byt also you, here and now

-              Through which we are all mediating the world around us

-              Contested forms of meaning – ways in which we are perhaps faking it

-              All of us are involved in forms of imagination of our world

Issues 3

-              social, cultural capital, political and mony as currency – in housing market

-              what happens when people are evicted from hones – from gentrification, marco – economic policies

-              social geography used to explore this

-              the personal experiences of people effected

-              kinds of places