Cultural Geography

C. Gibson and G. Waitt, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Affect In verb form, to influence someone or
something; to produce a mental or emotional effect. In
noun form, the conscious subjective dimension of
emotion or feeling.
Agency A capacity to control actions or exert power.
Binary A system of ideas or theories resting on two
parts or components, often diametrically opposed
antonyms.
Discourse Literally, a conversation or exchange of
verbal expressions. In cultural analysis, sets of
statements that through language and social circulation
make people, plants, places, and things knowable and
understandable.
Representational An epistemological perspective in
the humanities which emphasizes that all things, people,
and landscapes have symbolic or semiotic meanings
separate from consideration of their material or literal
existence. These meanings can be read or interpreted
in cultural research using methods of deconstruction and
discourse analysis.

An Introductory Note on the Meaning of

Culture
Cultural geography is now accepted as a major subfield
of human geography. However, its update in teaching and
research is relatively recent. What is cultural geography
shifts with context, philosophical traditions, and most
importantly, rests on ones understanding of culture and
the cultural. There are many variations on the manner
in which culture is used to describe a type of geographical knowledge. A literal reading of the term in a
verb form links culture to practices of cultivation to
grow, extend, feed, or rear as in agriculture, or in the
production of material objects and artifacts in particular
places and times. In the early twentieth century, another
popular meaning was a modern, humanist one that defined culture as something possessed by a society having
progressed or civilized to develop a set of shared norms,
behaviors, and rationalities (hence the related term,
cultured). In this vein, culture has often been used as a
synonym to describe the creative expressions, and intellectual and esthetic achievements of talented people
within particular societies. People who understood and
valued these intellectual and creative expressions were
often positioned as critics, agents, and managers

essentially arbiters of taste responsible for differentiating

between what was considered high art and common,
popular culture, such as popular songs. However, perhaps
the most common definition of culture is an identifiable
way of life. In this definition, culture is understood as a
set of shared values and beliefs based on language, religion, customs, and ethnicity. These cultural traits are
then expressed in material cultures, including creative
expressions, clothing, foods, buildings, and occupations.
In geography, this latter definition of culture as a
way of life remained uncontested for over six decades
from the 1920s. In geographical research, the idea of
culture as a way of life was often deployed to make
generalized claims about all people within a particular
geographically bounded area, termed a cultural realm or
region. So, for Rubenstein, culture is:
the body of customary beliefs, material traits and social
forms that together constitute the distinct tradition of a
group of people. Geographers distinguish groups of
people according to important cultural characteristics,
describe where particular cultural groups are distributed,
and offer reasons to explain the observed distribution.
(Rubenstein, 2005: 24)

Culture as a way of life is approached as a unitary

variable that is able to explain a spatial pattern. Following
this approach, culture is seemingly distinct from politics,
economics, or demographics. However, many contemporary cultural geographers often resist any attempt
to approach culture as a cause, or indeed define culture as
a thing, type, or even subject field. Drawing on a
number of geographical traditions, such as feminism and
postcolonialism, they challenge the unquestioned assumption of the realness of culture in the way of life
interpretation, arguing that it is impossible to analyze
culture to reveal intrinsic properties. Indeed, if Don
Mitchell is correct when he argued that there is no such
thing as culture, by inference, cultural geography also
ought to be considered a fabricated category of academic
knowledge, without any real material existence.
Such arguments are informed by a less everyday
understanding of the cultural: as knowledge production.
Culture as a way of thinking and knowing requires researchers to address two fundamental philosophical questions: first, what exists in the world, and, second, how do we
know, what we know about the world? This way of
understanding culture as a way of thinking and knowing
has become particularly germane with the advent of poststructuralist influences in geography. Post-structuralist

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Cultural Geography

theories encourage researchers to identify links between

knowledge production, power, practices, behaviors, and
possibilities for change and transformation. Thinking about
culture as knowledge production is particularly relevant
when attempting to understand how people make sense of
their lives and the spaces and places they live in and move
through. Culture as knowledge production is informed by a
concern for how we make sense of ourselves and the world
through the ongoing, unfolding, and emergent relationships
be they fleeting or more permanent between animals,
plants, material things, and people. Culture as a way of
thinking and knowing is informed by a concern for
examining how particular ideas are established, circulated,
maintained, and challenged.
Clearly, given these conflicting definitions, understanding what is meant by the word culture is not
straightforward. Equally, understanding what is meant by
cultural geography is not a simple task, given that these
competing definitions of culture have seeped into academic geography in various times and places, and have
enabled particular ways of doing cultural geography.
Attempting to decide what defines a singular essence or
meaning for cultural geography is therefore impossible.
Instead, our intention is to acknowledge multiple and
particular narratives about cultural geography. We have
enacted this in the structure we use in the remainder of
this article. Rather than a singular narrative, the account
of cultural geography offered here is written as if we were
directors of the opening scenes of a motion picture
Cultural Geography: The Movie structured into a series of
three parallel takes, each of which could replace the
others depending on personal preferences. To some, this
experimental structure may seem a little too clever, or
may be outright annoying if all one wants is a quick
reference guide and an explanation without fuss.
Nevertheless, this film-making approach serves a number
of purposes. First, rather than offering one grand narrative, our three takes provide a more open-ended way to
understand cultural geography. Each take provides a
particular angle on the intellectual imperatives of cultural geography. While each take builds up the picture,
even when read together they only provide a particular
interpretation of the stories of cultural geography. Second, while paying attention to origins, transformations,
and successions, our takes allow us to point toward
themes, relationships with other disciplines, and address
political considerations. Third, our three takes highlight
how this article on cultural geography is directed from a
particular perspective. In other words, whatever working
explanation is given is always situated in relationship to
the authors own geopolitical and institutional position.
Critical analysis of geographical knowledge has emphasized its partiality and situatedness. Our writing
perspective is informed not only by our many axes of
difference including our gender, age, language,

ethnicity, and training within Anglo-American geographic traditions but also betrays our institutional
position in Australia, where geography continues to be
fashioned by Anglo-American powers and interests. Our
knowledge of what we think as cultural geography is
therefore partial, situated, and anchored in our own
context.
Finally, and related to our third point, is that cultural
geography is a heuristic device that now means certain
things in English-speaking geographical traditions. Embedded in contemporary understandings of cultural
geography are meanings that dominate over those others
emanating from some non-English speaking worlds. In
Australia, we are in a place where it is acutely possible to
reflect upon this. Our position allows us to be immersed
in and make to contributions knowledges that are labeled
as cultural geography in Anglophone academic geography, but we are also aware of the manner in which they
do not reflect the cultural geographical knowledge production undertaken in nonacademic, everyday circumstances by other social groups. Such groups are
immediately in our midst, for instance, Australian aboriginal groups, such as the Anangu, Bunjalung, or Wadi
Wadi. These groups have particular ways of interpreting
the relationship between culture and geographical space,
and they create knowledges about this relationship (for
instance, through visual artistic practices and oral histories). Definitive statements about subdisciplines thus
invariably obscure the productive sites of cultural geographical knowledge in non-Anglophone and nonacademic worlds. Yet and herein lies a crucial paradox we
do not (and cannot) seek the role of benevolent spokesperson for these non-Anglophone or nonacademic geographies in some universal manner. Although it is possible
to identify epistemological plurality, we can never assume
to be speaking authentically across the myriad of cultural
differences that exist in the world.
For these reasons, we have adopted the format below
of three takes on cultural geography. Rather than giving
the reader a sense of comfort that the boundaries of
cultural geography are knowable and fixed, instead our
aim is to challenge readers to recognize the contributions
we have identified as belonging to a subfield of cultural
geography, and yet also continually question them. We
suggest that retaining a sense of discomfort and ambiguity around the subfield of cultural geography is important, and more true to the intentions and imperatives
of cultural geography itself.

Cultural Geography, Take One: In the

Beginning
Our first take follows a conventional narrative plot that
begins with origins and a classical period, then unfolds

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in a linear narrative of ongoing progress of new, newer,

and newest cultural geography. This will give the reader
a sense of comfort typical with linear, progressive stories, and it will suggest that the boundaries of cultural
geography are knowable, periodic, and fixed. This will be
deliberately challenged in the takes that follow.
Classical cultural geography is conventionally traced
back to origins in the 1920s, with the work of Carl Sauer
and his colleagues at the University of California,
Berkeley, United States of America. The Berkeley
School, as it would become known, embedded an
understanding of culture as both cultivation to grow or
rear and as way of life. Carl Sauer coined the term
cultural landscape to describe the manner in which
place was fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. For Sauer,
culture [as a way of life] was the agent, the natural area
the medium, the cultural landscapey the result [of
cultivation]. Under the influence of a given culture [as
way of life], itself changing through time, the landscape
undergoes development, passing through phases, and
probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different that is
alien culture [or way of life], a rejuvenation of the
cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of an older one. (Sauer, 1925)

Hence cultivation and way of life were intimately

linked through the concepts of cultural and natural
landscapes. Groups of humans with discrete population
sizes, densities, mobilities, housing styles, agricultural
styles, and social customs in short, cultures with particular ways of life would literally transform the prehuman natural landscape by cultivating a new cultural
landscape. Consistent in much Sauerian cultural geography, even into the 1970s, was a superorganic or cultural-determinist approach. Culture was a whole, rather
than an amalgam of the actions of individuals:
We are describing a culture, not the individuals who
participate in it. Obviously, a culture cannot exist without bodies and minds to flesh it out; but culture is also
something both of and beyond the participating members. Its totality is palpably greater than the sum of its
parts. (Zelinsky, 1973: 40)

In Rowntrees words, Sauerian cultural geographers

depicted the personality of geographical space in historical perspective. This approach especially followed
in North America in the decades following Sauer
tended to examine the geography of the material cultural
landscape, organized, patterned, and located usually in a
rural context at the regional scale. Common topics included the study of the diffusion of rural farming practices, modes of agrarian life, distributions and patterns of

413

material cultural products (from vernacular architectural

styles to musical instruments), and culturally specific
land-use practices.
There is further historical context also worthy of brief
explanation: in the 1920s Sauer was reacting against a
particularly mechanistic approach to understanding relations between humans and nature environmental
determinism which had dominated geography until
that time. Environmental determinists sought to identify
causal links between ecological and terrestrial variations
and cultural appearances, traits, and behaviors across the
Earths human population distribution. Environmental
determinists were prominent in Europe (e.g., Mackinder
and Ratzel) and their disciples brought it back to America
(e.g., William Morris Davis and Ellen C. Semple) and
Australia (e.g., Griffith Taylor), under the banner of
anthropogeography or sometimes, more simply, human
geography.
Environmental determinists sought not only to describe culture as way of life, but also heavily emphasized
a sense of civilization or progress cultural difference
was judged through the lens of environmental determinists as moral and intellectual superiority based on
a scale of perceived development. Humans were not all
considered equal. While humans may have risen from
nature, according to environmental determinists, some
were less human than others depending upon where they
were located along a course of ascension above nature.
Ascendance above the nonhuman world was understood
by environmental determinists as a process of becoming
civilized, and becoming cultured. Humans were differentiated by being classified into races. These classifications were regularly disputed, and relied upon crude
techniques, such as anthropometrics (body measurement), or drew upon the now discredited scientific ideas
of the 1930s, including eugenics and social Darwinism.
Certain races were regarded to have achieved higher
levels of civilization literally, acquiring cultured traits
(like reason, rationality, technology, etc.) as they
evolved away from nature. McClintock demonstrates
how in the nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas of
racial superiority were naturalized through depictions of
the human family tree which placed the white races
securely on the top branches. Fanciful assumptions were
made that the environment somehow determined cultural differences, including morality and intellect. In
other words, climate, remoteness, topography, and
available ecological resources were responsible for variations in ways of life, and enabled (or limited) peoples to
become cultured.
Such theories are dubious not only because of the
inherent racism and lack of cross-cultural understanding
typical of that time. They are also logically inconsistent
because environmental determinists mistook material
cultural evidence the extent of cultivation (literally, in

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Cultural Geography

the case of the sophistication of farming practices) and

assembly of material objects and edifices (like industrial
technologies, buildings, cities, etc.) as proof of ascent
(or otherwise) along hierarchical scales of civility and
cultural advancement. Enormous presumptions were
made about what evidence constituted culture as a way of
life, which was itself poorly theorized. For instance, environmental determinists were too quick to view the
absence of grand buildings in some indigenous cultures
as evidence of lack of advancement. At the same time, the
depth and complexity of indigenous cultural practices
and traditions was rarely recognized, or could rarely be
imagined outside the dominant Western hierarchical
worldview of the time which posited such peoples as
lower or less cultured. Ideas of culture as a way of life,
when partially and selectively deployed, operated to
justify a bounding of certain human worlds as cultured, as
separate from others; the remainder categorized as less
civilized, primitive, or as belonging to the natural world.
Such a conception of culture a thing possessed by
certain humans to various extents, in opposition to nature
(as without culture) became perhaps the most pervasive and influential example of binary thinking in
geography, sustaining imagined boundaries between the
civilizations of Europe and the savagery of new worlds.
Further, in this (European) human-centered moral universe, rights were allocated to only those certain people
who sat above animals, plants, and minerals. Indigenous
rights to land and resources in settler societies were not
recognized or were traded away in treaties acts which
set in train conflicts that remained the subject of political
struggle for centuries. Geographical knowledges thus
enabled European colonial dispossession to be seen as the
survival of fittest cultures and states over others,
while missionary evangelism and the appointment of
Aboriginal protectors could be justified as the benevolent ushering of indigenous and lower races along the
civilizing spectrum diffusing civilization and culture
through Christianization.
Although contemporary cultural geographers might,
with understandable moral outrage, recoil at the idea that
such ideas were a foundation for their subdiscipline, it is
important to note that environmental determinists were,
in effect, writing cultural geography prior to the
name cultural geography coming into widespread use
with the Berkeley School. Environmental determinists
conjectured on the qualities of culture, cultural differences, and geographical distributions. The logic of environmental determinist thinking in turn had its own
historical context it did not appear from a vacuum
either. It had been influenced by Western philosophy as
far back as Aristotle and Plato, and later Locke, Darwin,
Montesquieu, and Lamarck. It is thus possible to argue
that the production of cultural geographical knowledges
has been a mainstay of Western intellectual efforts

throughout many hundreds of years. In regular

use, however, the term cultural geography only
became prominent after Carl Sauer and the Berkeley
School rejected environmental determinism, introduced
the concept of cultural landscape, and injected
into geographical theory the capacity of humans to
transform their surroundings through a particular way of
life.
For essentially half a century, the superorganic,
Sauerian understanding of cultural landscape dominated
cultural geography, especially in North America, until
the emergence of humanistic geography in the 1970s, and
the so-called cultural turn of the late 1980s, which
transformed the subdiscipline and stretched what was
meant by culture. Throughout the 1960s, geography had
been engaged in an excursion into mathematical modeling and positivist exploration of spatial processes the
so-called quantitative revolution. In the 1970s, geographers reacted against this, drawing on Marxist theories
of uneven development, class conflict, and the structural
contradictions of the capitalist system, to enliven a new
radical geographical perspective. Throughout these
decades, cultural geography still very much seen as in
the Sauerian tradition as the study of cultural landscape,
region, ecology, and diffusion was a persistent, albeit
sidelined presence. Cultural geography did contribute to
the growing, interdisciplinary fields of cultural and political ecology, but by the 1970s it had become less
popular and less visible, a specialty considered by many
to be arcane or inconsequential.
By the late 1980s, however, Lester Rowntree, summarizing in Progress in Human Geography the advances
made by new cultural geographers such as Derek
Gregory, Peter Jackson, James Duncan, and Dennis
Cosgrove, was led to the following observation:
For geographers accustomed to the low, yet enduring
profile shown by cultural/humanistic geography over the
decades, a silhouette that sometimes engendered a certain defensiveness by its practitioners, this last year has
been characterized instead by highly visible activity: a
well-known, committed and productive cultural geographer as AAG president, recognition of cultural geography as a speciality group within the association, a
multitude of panels and special sessions on new directions and emergent themes in cultural geography,
even multiple-edition textbooks that attest to strong
undergraduate enrolments in the area. Has a phoenix
arisen? (Rowntree, 1988: 575)

Rowntree was describing the postmodern cultural turn

(as it would become known) that in the late 1980s and
early 1990s networked its way through Anglophone
geography, and to some extent further afield. The timing
of the cultural turn can be linked to a broader dissatisfaction across the social sciences and humanities

Cultural Geography

including geography with existing conceptual tools and

their ability to help understand the complexity and volatility of contemporary social change. The cultural turn was
influenced by the writings of theorists outside geography,
such as Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, and Clifford
Geertz, and captured in a series of important books on
meaning, power, and the symbolic landscape. According to
Cook et al., the foundational narratives and initial energy
for the turn in geography came mainly from geographers
based in the United Kingdom. They credited the collection by Chris Philo New Words, New Worlds for
putting the new into cultural geography, although
manifesto-like statements about the need for new cultural
geography had appeared earlier, in particular the papers
organized for Cosgrove and Jacksons session at the 1987
Institute of British Geographers (IBG) conference, on
new directions in cultural geography. During the 1990s,
momentum gathered for new cultural geography under a
series of conferences organized with the support of the
Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the
Royal Geographical Society and the IBG.
The curiosities of new cultural geographers in the
1980s and 1990s can be interpreted as a series of broad
intentions. First, although postmodernism was the
catchcry, much of cultural geography after the cultural
turn was politically post-Marxian, in the sense of either
seeking to advance from, or reacting to, the Marxist
political economy that dominated human geography
from the 1970s. Humanist geographers writing in the late
1970s and early 1980s were keen not only to reflect more
theoretically on the nature of the tensions between
socioeconomic structure and human agency, acknowledging Marxist insights into the macro-scale processes
and conditions that create social divisions and determine
life chances, but also to recognize how human agency is
enacted within the bounded and structured confines of
particular places and times. Influential at the time were
perspectives from phenomenology and structuration
theory. Even though Marxism emphasized structures of
capitalism, it did enable cultural geographers to move
further from superorganicism by recognizing the manner
in which esthetic and moral values were contested, and
configured in such a way that they reinforce [societys]
economic and political structures (Shurmer-Smith,
2002: 29).
Post-Marxist cultural geographers were also heavily
influenced by feminist thought and philosophy, and in
particular by the realization that socioeconomic class was
not the only axis of oppression. Whereas Marxist historical materialism provided a useful theoretical perspective for radical geographers in the 1970s who sought
explanations for the way in which capitalism was responsible for socio-economic forms of oppression, those
seeking explanations for racism, sexism, and homophobia
required different kinds of theoretical tools and empirical

415

approaches. By this time, racial conflict was widespread

and the Civil Rights Movement had reversed segregation
in the United States, the sexual revolution had confronted conservative norms about gender roles and had
empowered women, and decades of international
migration and the growth of tourism had produced more
heterogeneous cities. The idea of culture as a stable,
superorganic way of life held collectively by populations
needed to be improved upon. Culture became understood more relativistically as identities and behaviors,
held by some in a cultural geographical group (and not
by others), and deployed by individual people at different
times and in differing ways depending on context. This
theoretical shift was necessary for researchers interested
in confronting oppression, to understand human cultural
difference, challenge the idea of race, uncover the
gendered nature of social institutions, and unsettle conservative ideas of normal sexuality and family.
For example, the concept of queer (understood both
as an adjective and as a verb) became crucial to questioning and contesting normative assumptions about
sexuality, gender, and space, encouraging researchers to
replace assumptions considered fixed and natural with
more fluid and unbounded perspectives. Bell et al. demonstrated how space is often taken for granted as heterosexual by discussing the hostility experienced by those
who acted outside the codes and norms of heterosexuality,
for example, same sex kissing in the street. More recently,
the challenges posed by the gay-friendly marketing of
nations, cities, and festivals has been discussed, in particular how such efforts operate to assimilate particular
understandings of gayness into mainstream life. Other
related debates have included the practicalities of doing
and writing queer geographies, as well as potential political interventions that encapsulate the philosophical
commitment to ideas of slippage, in-between-ness and
liminality.
A second and related intention of the cultural turn
was to uncover how ideas, knowledges, and social
practices are produced, maintained, and circulated, especially in the realm of everyday life. Whereas Marxist
geographers, with their intent to explain socioeconomic
oppression, sought to understand the structure and
politics of the world capitalist system, cultural geographers interested in sexism, racism, homophobia, and
other axes of oppression needed to move beyond
superorganic ideas of systems and structures and grasp
with more subtlety the manner in which ideas and attitudes about people and places infused social life, and
were responsible for the ways that repression and cruelty
materialized. Influences from post-structuralist literary
theory permeated geography: meanings for culture were
no longer taken as fixed or stable; instead, depictions and
representations of places and peoples became subject to
analysis. Foucaults idea of knowledge as power and the

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Cultural Geography

related concept of discourse (understood as sets of

statements that make people, plants, places and things
understandable) were particularly influential. Representations and discourses could be captured as data in
formal documents, such as government policies and
planning approvals, and in everyday sources such as
newspapers, films, television shows, and songs. Analysis
of this could reveal the origins and contours of discursive formations ideas, knowledges, beliefs, attitudes,
depictions, and common sense notions that permeate
society and shape the contemporary worlds cultural
geography. For instance, racism toward Asians in
Britain, or Muslims in the United States, could be revealed through understanding how both groups have
been depicted (often in a demonizing fashion) in television and newspapers. Methodological advances included the literary technique of deconstruction, and the
development of latent and manifest content analysis a
more numerical, coding-based approach to representational analysis using the language and pictorial material in everyday media as evidence.
Thus, overtly drawing on post-structuralist semiotics,
geographers could read from everyday discourses the
signs and symbols that embody meaning. What these
meanings were and thus how researchers interpreted
them was argued to be open to political and ideological
processes, as different groups sought to maintain or
contest dominant meanings, or replace them with alternatives or pluralistic interpretations. Cultural representations in the everyday were outcomes of relations of
power, from contestations between hegemonic interests
(who install dominant meanings) and subordinate groups,
who to various extents resist these dominant meanings
and ideologies, and express their own interpretations.
Concurrent with this shift toward the representational
and the everyday was the reclamation in analysis of
popular forms of culture. Inspired by the manner in
which cultural studies emerged as a new interdisciplinary
field seeking to challenge the stuffy orthodoxies of literary criticism, classics, and musicology, geographers
embraced popular culture once considered fanciful,
escapist, or common as a new area of research to be
taken seriously. The meaning of culture as art was exposed as elitist and deeply tied to imperial notions of
European civilization as more cultured than other societies. Instead, popular culture in all its forms, from hip
hop to sit-coms, and magazines and comic books, became
possible sources of representational material for cultural
geographical analysis.
Despite the exciting possibilities offered by working
outside conventional paradigms, advances in new cultural geography were not without their critics. The offences supposedly committed can be condensed down to
at least five. Cultural geographers were charged with
neglecting the immediately political of drifting away

from a concern with oppression. At best, new cultural

geography was all hype and no action. Second, cultural
geography was charged with ignoring questions concerning rigor, morality, and truth. Cultural geography
lacked methodological rigor and had become an anything goes subdiscipline. Third, cultural geography was
charged with speaking an exclusionary language of poststructuralist jargon filled with its own self-importance.
Fourth, driven by theory, the cultural turn had transformed the word into the world. Scant empirical data
became a veneer, allowing theory-as-fashion to run
rampant. Conversely, a final critique suggested that the
cultural turn had discarded the possibility of integrative
or holistic theory, transforming the world relativistically
into a series of case studies, with a soft theoretical veneer.
At best, the cultural turn resulted in a number of highly
reflexive case studies. Thrift alerted us that such charges
are of benefit. Crucially, he pointed to the importance of
the application of analysis of everyday geographies into
government policies through initiatives in both teaching
and training. Others argued that cultural geographers
have continued to work politically (on forms of oppression beyond capitalist exploitation), that methodological experimentation was precisely what was required
to push the barriers of knowledge beyond problematic
assumptions and staid conventions. Futher, cultural geographys contemporary terminology was appropriate, and
no different to the technical language of the physical
sciences having its own theoretical origins, and specific
intended purposes and meanings.
Yet, throughout the 1990s, and on into the 2000s,
cultural geographers themselves would voice dissatisfaction with the dominance of the now mainstream
representational strand of cultural geography. The argument was that cultural geography had become too
reliant on textual analysis and cultural discourse, without
requisite ethnographic work required to understand how
these representations impacted on people, social policy,
and the material landscape. Instead, it was recommended
that geographers promote efforts to rematerialize
geography, through a newest cultural geography, intended to supersede the new cultural geography of the
1980s and 1990s.
One response was through the importation of yet another set of outside theoretical influences, this time from
history and philosophy of science and the work of authors
such as Bruno Latour: the so-called actor-network theory with its focus not on representations or discourse, but
on the relations forged in an ongoing manner between
people, objects, plants, and animals. The core of this
theoretical perspective was recognition that humans did
not have a monopoly over culture, nor over agency; instead, nonhuman objects, animals, and plants were theorized as agents with equal capacity to exist and enact
agency in networked sets of relationships with humans

Cultural Geography

and other beings. These sets of relationships often

described as assemblages, actor-networks, or hybrid
geographies move cultural geography away from
a purely discursive focus, and advance an understanding
of the world in which dualistic ideas about
humanity and nature as separate spheres are no longer
assumed.
While actor-network theory provided an excellent
tool for challenging naturehuman dualisms, concerns
were raised about how understandings of place rested
within this conceptual framework. Cloke and Jones extended the concept of networks by turning to the concept of dwelling. It offered deeper insights into how
(non)human actors are relationally co-constituted in
landscapes and places, as well as networks. Examples
would be the city, the orchard, or backyard, conceptualized not as bounded geographical entities, but as
a set of continually revised relationships between people,
the material objects (such as cars, roads, and ports, in the
case of the city), and ecological systems containing
plants, birds, insects, etc. Thrift also pointed out the
failure of actor-network theory to conceptualize place,
using the term ecology to signal that thinking about
relational places involves understanding interactions
between a wide spectrum of entities, some human, some
physical, some biological, and some human made. Further, Thrift argued that actor-network theory gave
conceptual priority to the technical over the human
body that is, its perceptual mechanisms, memory, and
various bodily skills. Hence, Thrift extends relational
thinking about the spatial by directing attention to
Judith Butlers concept of performativity. In this view,
identities are unstable, and not innate; instead, they are
performed repetitively by subjects interacting (whether
consciously, or in an embodied, unconscious level) with
historically embedded discourses, norms, and ideals.
Gender is not a given biological fact; rather it is performed by subjects in relation to social norms and ideals.
This has enabled the rethinking of the relationships
between scale, subjectivity, the body, and mobility. For
example, Knopp rethinks the role of mobility in the lives
of nonheterosexual people. Rather than explain the
mobility of people with same-sex desires purely through
attributes of the urban or the rural (as destinations and/
or places of origin), the embodied motivations of
individual people are also seen as crucial. On the one
hand, particular sexual desires may be played through
differences nonheterosexual people imagine between the
city and the country. On the other hand, identities
are created and performed through the experiences
and acts of physically moving through space. A focus
on embodied (dis)placement is a constant reminder
that personal-identity formation is spatially coconstituted, progressive, and fluid, and never complete
or fixed.

417

Cultural Geography, Take Two: yThe

More Things Stay the Same
Take one, which rests on an origins narrative, suggests a
logical, linear progression through which modern cultural geography has developed. Classical, new, and
newest cultural geography can be read off as sequential
paradigmatic episodes: one orthodoxy is challenged, and
replaced by an alternative, which itself becomes
orthodox. However, in take two, we want to complicate
this overly linear narrative by illustrating the ways in
which some themes endure, albeit refashioned through
an alternative conceptual lens, while other paradigmatic
revolutions can be alternatively viewed as more gradual
and uncertain transitions. We argue one way cultural
geography defies the origins narrative is through
how some objects of analysis continue, like landscape,
despite the changing definitions of the cultural. In other
words, through a discussion of different definitions
of cultural geography we hope to show that modifications and variations notwithstanding, there is also
stability.
One particular stability in cultural geography is in the
concept of culture adopted in particular the idea of
culture as way of life. Even though humanists and new
cultural geographers sought to move beyond superorganic conceptions of culture, enabling consideration of
individuals and subjectivity, the idea of culture as shared
traits linked to bounded geographical entities has persisted perhaps in part because this view of culture is
presumed common sense, and is thus so pervasive in
everyday life.
Cultural geographers influenced by the cultural turn
in the 1980s were quick to criticize the idea of culture as
way of life. They revealed how, in the idea of culture as
way of life, important assumptions based on learned
behavior were made about where to draw lines separating
allegedly distinctive cultures. The assumption that
everyone within a geographical bounded area had similar
behavior patterns, values, and attributes was deeply
problematic. Important differences between people by
age, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender are masked by
the idea that people share a definable way of life in a
given culture region. At best, culture as a way of life
noted the importance of human agency in the transformation of place; at worst, it supports highly essentialist,
sexist, and racist arguments.
Yet, despite critiques, the Sauerian tradition continues
to inform some introductory cultural geography textbooks, particularly those written for the United States
market. According to Jordan, Domosh, and Rowntree
culture is the:
learned collective human behaviour, as opposed to instinctive, or inborn, behaviour. These learned traits form

418

Cultural Geography

a way of life held in common by a group of people.

(Jordan et al., 1997: 5)

Despite cautionary statements, within the United

States, in particular, the Sauerian concepts of cultural
landscape and culture as a way of life have ongoing appeal. The understanding of cultural geography as concerned with regional variations in cultural practices and
norms, landscape, sport, popular culture, and so on is
still practiced.
In some respects, the culture as a way of life approach
has been put to important use, even after critiques, as a
way of replacing dominant Western understandings of the
world with more pluralized geographical imaginations.
Moving beyond its problematic colonial past, the culture
as a way of life approach persists in studies of the
geography of language which have sought to reveal the
extent to which smaller languages are under threat of
domination from English, or from government policies
seeking to encourage indigenous populations to abandon
traditions and adopt national languages (as in Indonesia
and Australia). Although such studies are critical, and
informed by an intention to resist dominant exercises of
power over subordinate groups, the conception of culture
adopted remains similar to that which characterized
early-twentieth-century geography. Much of the contemporary research in indigenous geographies (including
analysis of kinship systems, ceremonial performances,
political struggles, and relationships to land) still assumes
some level of collective shared culture and defined territory. Similarly, many ethnographic studies of international migration, diaspora, and cultural practice in
multicultural societies retain some sense of the way of
life approach for instance, in research examining
transnationalism, cultural maintenance, community festivals, music, marriage practices, sport, and so on.
Culture as way of life also persisted in other classic
ongoing debates, such as the cultural homogenization and
cultural hybridization debates. Despite first being voiced
in the 1980s, arguments still abound about cultural
homogenization and the influence of American popular
culture, fast foods, television, and the English language
on global cultural diversity. American culture is positioned as a hegemonic force, with detrimental impacts on
the diversity of ways of life in other parts of the world
homogenizing and standardizing the world into an oligopoly of pastimes, consumer behaviors, and brands. The
related debate about cultural imperialism concerns the
manner in which norms and morals of dominant cultural
groups are rendered natural within or across nations at
the expense of subordinate groups, whose ways of life are
denigrated and whose members are often subject to
racist attacks. Processes of cultural homogenization and cultural imperialism both rely on interpretations of culture as the way of life, albeit viewed through

a more thoroughly critical, political lens than in the

superorganic era of cultural geography.
Others have argued that diversity is growing in the
midst of Anglo-American cultural imperialism (through,
for instance, widespread international migration and
tourism), as people in their everyday lives adopt, mutate,
and reclaim as their own the products, stories, and
meanings of popular cultural flows in other words,
hybridization. For example, a transnational fast food
corporation founded in America, like McDonalds, may
not be thought of by many of its customers in Australia,
China, or Russia as foreign, but merely as part of
everyday life. For Appadurai, the cultural landscapes
imagined as stable in previous eras have been replaced by
new mediascapes, ethnoscapes, and technoscapes,
with more complex sets of relationships between global
flows and everyday lived realities. Examples include
television-watching practices outside the United States,
and the formation of musical subcultures that blend
American styles with local instruments and styles.
Another example of stability in cultural geography is
provided by a particular theme landscape that is
persistent, albeit reinterpreted through new theoretical
lenses. New cultural geographers certainly differentiated their interpretation of landscape from the classical
work of Carl Sauer. First, the idea that landscapes as a
signifying system had inherent meanings became relevant, emphasized by a humanistic approach. Landscape
was understood as socially constituted and the product of
an ideologically laden way of seeing. Although new
cultural geographers rejected Sauerian superorganicism,
landscape could be read as text, just like films and
newspapers; and just like those other texts, it embodied
ideology and meaning. Second, drawing on the work of
Marxist cultural geographers, the analysis of landscape
was explicitly political, particularly through how different social groups discursively layered meanings over a
particular landscape. For Daniels, an advocate of the
concept of landscape within new cultural geography, this
last point was crucial. He emphasized understanding of
landscape as site of contest, through which oppositional
social worlds were made meaningful through historically
situated visual codes and conventions. Following this,
from the early 1980s, new cultural geographers began to
investigate landscape as a discursive terrain across which
the struggle between different, often hostile, codes of
meaning construction has been engaged (Daniels and
Cosgrove, 1993: 59). Landscape came to be understood as
one of many texts, including those on canvas and on
paper to be interpreted, decoded, or deconstructed. Some
critics suggested that all cultural geography became
swept away by critical techniques of deconstruction. Yet,
this is an exaggeration. For example, Don Mitchell is a
supporter of ongoing critical engagement with the material dimensions of landscape. While Mitchell

Cultural Geography

acknowledges the importance of paying attention to

symbol and metaphor, he underscores a commitment to
understanding landscape as always more than representational. He suggested that landscape may demand a
theory of landscape, but it also demands that theories of
capital circulation and crisis, of race and gender, and of
geopolitics and power be built right into it (Mitchell,
2003: 790). In other words, cultural geographers should
not simply be producing accounts of ideologically loaded
landscapes, but working toward producing landscapes of
social justice through an account that situates landscape
within the relations of production that underpin the
global economy.
In other ways, the idea of a cultural turn in geography, responsible for a paradigmatic revolution, has
been exaggerated either by those wanting to proclaim
the new (and their place in it), or by those seeking
to generalize about new research prior to criticizing it.
Cook et al., for instance, warned that in geography there
was much less a revolutionary cultural turn than a
far more modest series of engagements with poststructuralist writings and debates, borne out of curiosity
for their implications when thinking spatially and doing
geography. Indeed, in a theoretical sense, geographys
cultural turn was less a revolution and more the
culmination of a steady transition already underway,
stemming from the reinvigoration of the humanist
tradition in geography. The same impulses that
drove Sauerian cultural geographers in North America
and the possibilists in France to react against the
disempowering determinism of their predecessors had
reemerged by the late 1970s. Social theory and dominant theoretical perspectives in geography in particular
had become once again too doctrinaire, too dogged in
pursuit of all-encompassing explanation; the subtlety,
variation, and capacity of humans to influence their living
conditions appeared to have been thoroughly erased. By
the mid-1980s, attempts have already been made to
survey the resulting eclecticism that the humanist and
behaviorist umbrellas captured and to more thoroughly
question the manner in which philosophical assumptions
were imported to geography in previous geographical
paradigms from neighboring disciplines, such as
economics and sociology. Terms like agency, sense of
place, perception, and mental maps had already fully
entered the geographical vocabulary before the cultural
turn, as geographers sought to understand more fully
the subjective links between individuals and their
surrounding environments, providing an expansive view
of what the human person is and can do (Tuan, 1976).
The entry of more humanist concepts into geography in
the 1970s and early 1980s took place in a series of
transitional moments without fervor or tumult which
set the scene for the new cultural geography that
followed.

419

Transitions were not only limited to cultural geography either. The dissatisfaction with existing conceptual
tools was manifest in a more widespread suspicion of the
ability of universalizing explanations to accurately and
adequately capture the complexity of contemporary
economic and political processes. To illustrate, in
the very same issue of Progress in Human Geography that
Lester Rowntree remarked on the rise of new cultural
geography, Trevor Barnes wrote an extensive and comprehensive critique of universalizing theories in economics and economic geography in particular the
notion of homo economicus (a theory that humans acted
rationally in ways that always maximized an individuals
ends given the limited means available), and Felix Driver
wrote a critical review of universalist concepts of history
in geography, arguing instead for context in theory, and a
breaking down of binaries between historical geography
(the study of the past) and other types of geography (only
dealing with the present). In other words, although the
cultural turn is now usually perceived as a radical
change in geographys direction stemming from cultural
geography, and in turn then influencing other sub-branches of the discipline, the changing theoretical directions
were actually more widespread, were perhaps not even
cultural at all. Rather than working to zone off a
subdisciplinary field of cultural geography, themes such
as identity, power, and discourse common in cultural
geography have ebbed and flowed in a parallel fashion
throughout research in political, economic, development,
social, and population geography. The cultural turn was
thus more accurately part of a discipline-wide transition
from the desire to develop complete, fool-proof theories
about human societies to a desire to develop theories that
were supple, less bombastic, and more capable of being
sensitive to contingencies, variations, and contradictions.

Cultural Geography, Take 3: Re-Placing

the Human
The third, and perhaps most unsettling take on cultural
geography, concerns the very manner in which human
beings have been positioned in research and thinking.
Although cultural geographers engagements in the 1980s
and 1990s with themes such as landscape and identity
opened up the discipline to ideas of power, discourse, and
ideology, they left largely intact the idea that humans,
possessing culture, were somehow separate to nature. For
instance, Mitchell assumed that the cultural landscape
was an exclusively human attainment. Humans were the
sole actors in generating cultural landscapes. If landscape is conceptualized as a product of human culture
then there is no possibility to recognize nonhuman
agency in the land. Research that conceptualizes culture
as humans bearing traces, influencing, or creating

420

Cultural Geography

landscapes refuses the possibility of rocks, water, sun, soil,

and nonhuman animals having agency. Nature becomes
an inert medium, a passive field, rather than a creative
agent. Critical questions have emerged about how such
assumptions have been made, by whom, and to what effect. Insights from studies of the cultural geography of
human/nature relations in non-Western societies have
illuminated just how limiting European and North
American perspectives on the agency of nature have
been, in contrast to indigenous societies, where the
agency and cultural significance of landforms, rivers,
glaciers, and other natural features is more fully realized.
More deeply, geographers have questioned the very
ontology of human and nature as meaningful categories, inviting difficult questions about our existence
and relationships with various parts of the nonhuman
world. Dialogs have emerged particularly with science
and technological studies, and feminist philosophers such
as Val Plumwood. Rethinking agency in a way that involves collaboration between human and nonhuman
actors has necessitated conceptual tools that do not
separate culture (human presence) from nature (human
absence). The conceptual frameworks of researchers such
as David Crouch, Nigel Thrift, and Sarah Whatmore
incorporate the concept that landscapes are always more
than human. They offer narratives that prioritize the
active role of nonhuman worlds through concepts of
reciprocity, networks, assemblages, multiple interactions,
and collaborating agencies, instead of treating humans as
superior and apart from nature. One challenging research
agenda adopting such a collaborative model is to decenter the human in policies designed to manage environmental futures.
As well as paying attention to the agency of actors in
nonhuman worlds, cultural geographers are also interested in multiplying the sensory pathways through which
analysis takes place. Anglophone academic geography,
deeply embedded in the Western philosophical tradition
since the Enlightenment, has become heavily dependent
on the visual sense to provide it with suitable evidence
and analysis. Other senses such as smell, touch, and
sound rarely featured in research, and were considered
less reliable than sight when forming the basis of geographical explanation. Only sight appeared to provide
evidence worthy enough of rationalist argument. Recently, cultural geographers have sought to decenter the
importance placed on sight, and suggest instead that our
webs of relationships with other human and nonhuman
actors needs to be understood as mediated by all the
senses. Moreover, these relationships take place in ways
that involve humans as physical bodies interacting with
other actors and environments before and beyond cognitive processing through language and contemplation.
The focus within new cultural geography in the 1980s to
1990s on the representational was supplanted with other

insights that emphasized the more embodied ways of

knowing space. While representational or textual
understandings of the spatial remain important, and are
not jettisoned by those interested in pursuing embodied
approaches, an overemphasis of the cognitive and the
contemplative means geographers miss most of what is
going on in everyday experiences including smell,
sound, emotion, memory, and touch. These sensory
pathways do not rely upon the internal processing of
representations of an external world. In other words,
nonrepresentational experiences are central to our
making sense of space. As Noel Castree explains, such
approaches:
focus on a world in which we are dwellers not observers,
multi-sensual participants not detached spectators. We
come to know by doing, and we do because of what we
already know in an iterative process where the material
world affects us and we affect ity we engage with the
material worldy using all our senses: we are practical
beings not just intellectual ones. Much of our understanding of, and action upon, this world is thus, in
Thrifts view, never formally represented or representable at all because it is tacit, sensuous, habitual and
precognitive. (Noel Castree, 2005: 229230)

Cultural geographers have thus pursued soundscapes, smellscapes, or olfactory geographies. Space has
acoustic, rhythmic, and sonorous qualities, and thus
sound, noise, and music can be seen as integral to
understanding, experiencing, and making everyday
geographies, for example, in the use of personal stereos
or in dance clubs or street parades. These sorts of studies
provide insights into how people do things, and how
people constitute their worlds through sensing and experiencing. Music and sound elicit emotions that help
comprise the spatial through the ways in which people
individually respond.
By focusing on experiential responses, including those
aroused by smell, touch, music, and sound, cultural
geographers have started to think about the emotional
and affective dimensions of the spatial. Deborah Thien
attributed the registration of geographies of emotion to
what she terms an affective turn in social and critical
thought, meaning a shift toward understanding how
agents influence each other not just cognitively, but also
emotionally and bodily. The concept of affect has
philosophical origins with Spinoza and Deleuze and
Guattari, and is widely used in psychology to describe
the emotions, as opposed to cognitive, rationalist behavior. In more recent cultural geography, its deployment
is particularly meant as a way to open up theorizing on
the way in which humans relate with surrounding environments and nonhuman actors, and less based on clear
distinctions between affect and rationality (distinctions

Cultural Geography

which are blamed for denigrating emotion as less reliable or valid in a research sense). Emotions are a social
projection of an individual feeling, and while feelings are
understood as personal and biographical because they
rely upon interpretation and categorization from previous experiences, expressions of emotion are sometimes
refracted when experienced in particular contexts. Affect
is pre-personal; it is a nonconscious experience of intensity that is incapable of absolute explanation through
language because it exists prior to and outside of consciousness. Understanding how the world is mediated by
affect is therefore commonly understood as challenging
legacies of rationalist and masculinist social science that
kept feelings out of academic research and practice. What
bodies may be and do is now subject to debate because of
theoretical advances on affect, and how affect shapes the
relationship between subjectivity and space.
A third, voiced intention of researchers attempting to
reposition the human in geographical research is to
move beyond methodological orthodoxies and now
standard practices of reading cultural discourse. Further,
questions about sensory pathways, affective relationships,
and the agency of nonhuman actors demand a much
broader range of skills and methodologies than in the
tool bag of the cultural geographer trained from the
1930s to the 1980s. Typically, cultural geographers were
devoted to in-depth interviews, alongside some ethnographic techniques, and later on, deconstruction and
content analysis. While these tools remain important, the
emphasis on understanding the affective making of
everyday lives necessitates what Thrift terms a methodological break-out. Such a break has inspired a
plethora of experimental methodological strategies ranging from performative writing, interactive websites, photo
and film journalism, and 3D perception mapping using
geographical information systems, attempts to coproduce the world, for instance, through street theater,
and various methods which work with bodies, such as
music therapy.
Also infusing cultural geography in recent years has
been a concern with researchers themselves: how they
come to do research from particular perspectives, how
their identities shift and are challenged in research, and
how the work they do is conducted and interpreted in
relation to the institutions of universities, research facilities, and disciplinary traditions in different countries
and cultural contexts. Indeed, although cultural geography is now accepted as a major component of human
geography (even if impossible to bound or define), its
meaning and use is relatively recent, is geographically
contingent, and is interpreted varyingly by researchers
coming at their projects and written work from the
particular positions they occupy. How cultural geography
is done varies enormously in different linguistic and
national traditions, and conversely, researchers are

421

increasingly realizing that they cannot pretend to be

researching from a placeless, genderless, unethnic zone
of impartiality.
We have already encountered some of this variation in
positionality when in the above discussion of the
manner in which Sauerian cultural geography persisted
in North America more than elsewhere; and how in
Britain, in particular, new cultural geography found
traction. Far more complex again is the extent to which
perspectives and approaches in cultural geography have
diffused and been hybridized in other parts of the world,
and how researchers have negotiated their own positions,
identities, and limitations when undertaking cultural
geographical research. Spaces of geographical knowledge is a theme avidly explored in the country reports
of the journal Social and Cultural Geography, where differences in national practice are discussed. For instance,
Bunnell, Kong, and Law report on how in Southeast Asia,
research on national culture, religion, and multiculturalism dominate (linked in part to domestic political
priorities, as well as the relatively recent histories of
nation-states there). Whereas in places like Greece, New
Zealand, the Caribbean, and Australia, there is a combining and more ambiguous position prescribed for social
and cultural geography where geography departments
are small and lecturers cover more than one subject area.
Concerns have also been expressed about how AngloAmerican geography is producing geographies that are
assumed to be universal, creating discourses of what
international research means, even though such research
is thoroughly positioned from a particular perspective,
time, and place. In other outlets, cultural geographers
have debated the related issue of what acknowledgement
of positionality in research means practically, in terms of
writing and the conduct of using new methods in crosscultural circumstances, and more philosophically, when
coming to assess self-reflexivity in research and the value
of case-study research vis-a`-vis links to theoretical
developments.
So, cultural geography has come to be a diverse, enigmatic subdiscipline illustrated by the various entries of
Anderson et al.s (2003), Handbook of Cultural Geography. As
cultural geography rose in popularity in the 1980s and
1990s, singular definitions of culture were cast aside and
replaced instead with epistemological uncertainty and a
desire to promote plurality, self-reflexivity and transgression of inherited intellectual binaries. At the same
time, older and simpler traditions survived and retained
some meaning and relevance, particularly for debates
about cultural change and continuity in an ever-globalizing context. All the while, transitions occurring in
cultural geography were also taking place in allied subdisciplines, such as economic and political geography. At
its most experimental even nihilistic edge, cultural
geographers continue to work with elementary problems

422

Cultural Geography

about human existence, and our position in the world, in

such ways as to call into question the very utility of
categories such as human, nature, and culture. It may
turn out to be that cultural geographers retheorize the
world in such a way as to render the identity of the
subdiscipline itself redundant. If so, there could probably
be no more defiantly radical final act.
See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies;
Affect; Berkeley School; Content Analysis; Cultural Turn;
Culture; Deconstruction; Discourse; Dwelling; Ecology;
Historical-Geographical Materialism; Human Geography;
Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Hybridity; Identity
Politics; Imperialism, Cultural; Landscape Perception;
Landscape; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Mental Maps;
Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational
Geographies; Performativity; Phenomenology/
Phenomenological Geography; Popular Culture;
Possibilism; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist
Geographies; Quantitative Revolution; Queer Theory/
Queer Geographies; Sauer, C.; Sense of Place;
Sensorium; Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity; Structuration
Theory; Transnationalism.

Further Reading
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Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the Urban.
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Anderson, K. (2007). Race and the Crisis of Humanism. New York:
Routledge.
Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (2003). Handbook of
Cultural Geography. London: Sage.
Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (2006). Questioning affect and emotion.
Area 38(3), 333--335.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Barnes, T. (1988). Rationality and relativism in economic geography: An
interpretative review of the homo economicus assumption. Progress
in Human Geography 12(4), 473--496.
Barnett, C. (1998). The cultural turn: Fashion or progress in human
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Basch, L., Schiller, N. G. and Blanc, C. S. (eds.) (1993). Nations
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Bull, M. (2000). Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the
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Bunnell, T., Kong, L. and Law, L. (2005). Country reports: Social and
cultural geographies of South-East Asia. Social and Cultural
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Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of

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Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.

Cultural Geography

Hamm, B. and Smandych, R. C. (eds.) (2005). Cultural Imperialism:

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Relevant Websites
http://cgj.sagepub.com/
Cultural Geographies academic journal homepage.
http://cultural.missouri.edu/
Cultural geography specialty group of the Association of American
Geographers.
http://www.iag.org.au/study-groups/cultural-geography-study-group/
Cultural geography study group of the Institute of Australian
Geographers.
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/
713880/description#description
Emotion, Space and Society academic journal homepage.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0966369X.asp
Gender, Place and Culture academic journal homepage.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/08873631.asp
Journal of Cultural Geography academic journal
homepage.

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Cultural Geography

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14649365.asp
Social and Cultural Geography academic journal homepage.
http://scgrg.blogspot.com/2008/02/rgs-ibg-scgrg-sessions2008.html
Social and cultural geography research group of the RGS-IBG.

http://www.carleton.ca/space/
Space and Culture academic journal homepage.
http://www.cultural-geography.net/
The cultural approach in geographyCommission of the International
Geographical Union.