Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both. Changing identitiesThinking space relationally, in the way we mean it here, has of course been bound up with a wider set of reconceptualisations. In particular it has been bound up with a significant refiguring of the nature of identity. There is a widespread argument these days that, in one way or another, identities are 'relational'. That, for instance, we do not have our beings and then go out and interact, but that to a disputed but none-the-less significant extent our beings, our identities, are constituted in and through those engagements, those practices of interaction. Identities are forged in and through relations (which include non-relations, absences and hiatuses). In consequence they are not rooted or static, but mutable ongoing productions. This is an argument which has had its precise parallel in the reconceptualisation of spatial identities. An understanding of the relational nature of space has been accompanied by arguments about the relational construction of the identity of place. If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (socalled) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing (Massey, 1994; Ash Amin in this issue).These theoretical reformulations have gone alongside and been deeply entangled with political commitments. What one might call the more general rethinking of identity engaged with a number of currents, from a determination to challenge the hegemonic notion of individuals as isolated atomistic entities which took on (or were assigned) their essential character prior to social interaction, through re-evaluations of the formation of political identities, to the fundamental challenges presented by second-wave feminism and by some in postcolonial studies. For these latter groups, rethinking identity has been a crucial theoretical complement to a politics which is suspicious of foundational essentialisms; a politics which, rather than claiming 'rights' for pre-given identities ('women', say, or gays, or some hyphenated ethnicity) based on assumptions of authenticity, argues that it is at least as important to challenge the identities themselves and thus -a fortiori -the relations through which those identities have been established. It is worth noting a number of points immediately. First, that although there are in the wider lite...

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This paper explores the possibility that there may be commonalities between physical geography and human geography in emerging ways of conceptualizing space, time and space-time. It argues that one of the things holding physical and human geography apart for so long has been their relationship to physics as an assumed model of 'science'. It is proposed here that not only is this an inadequate model of science but that it has led us astray in our inherited conceptualizations of both time and space. The urge to think 'historically' is now evident in both physical and human geography. The paper argues that this both forms the basis for a possible conversation and also obliges us to rethink our notions of space/space-time. key words space-time/time-space complexity emergence physics envy ConnectionsThis paper is a preliminary dip into deep waters. It will doubtless be taken to task on all sides. In a sense (although I would rather not be proven too horribly wrong), that might in itself not be too dismaying. For the argument presented here arises not only out of my theoretical interest in space(-time) but also out of another conviction. For a whole variety of reasons, the carving-up of the world and of scientific endeavour between disciplines has been experienced recently as increasingly untenable. One of the most well-established and best-fortified of these old divides within knowledge has been that between the 'physical' and 'human' sciences. Yet even that ingrained counterposition between so-called 'natural' and 'social' is increasingly being questioned, and my conviction is that if they are now up for reinspection and problematization, then geographers should be in a good position to make a leading contribution. In some areas they have long done so, of course -one thinks of socialist environmentalism, for instance. Moreover, there is new work: that of Whatmore (1999) and Murdoch (1997) among others springs to mind. This paper takes a particular tack at the issue. It stems from the idea that there may be some questions that both physical and human geographers are concerned with, which we might, therefore, be able to debate together. There are, potentially, many such questions (including those that branch off from the one under consideration here -questions of realist philosophy, of the conceptualization of entities, of reductionism, of path-dependence, of questions of probability and indeterminacy, etc); this paper is a tentative foray in one direction, but a direction that is at the heart of our joint enterprise -the nature of space, and therefore (I will argue) of space-time.The immediate stimuli for this paper were articles from geographers working in fields very different (I had thought) from my own. They were Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone's (1995) 'Development of a geomorphological spatial model Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 261-276 1999

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