This paper calls for a re-engagement by geographers with the concept of social capital as a vehicle for framing narratives about socio-economic processes in context. Social capital theory is reviewed to illustrate how the desire for simplicity and parsimony in economics results in abstract theories of the social that erase context and reduce space to a static form. Going beyond this critique, a geographical framework is proposed for a revised social capital research agenda to produce social capital narratives grounded in the everyday practices of power, played out in real-world, sociospatial contexts.
Within geography, situated, contextualised, and contingent embodiment is a central theme in non‐representational theory, mobility theories, and feminist, affective, and emotional geographies. Despite this focus on the body, engagement with the strong embodiment hypotheses emerging out of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been limited to only selective theoretical borrowings with practically no attention given to the burgeoning empirical evidence of the relationship between body, mind, and environment. While the neural turn within the discipline has been acknowledged, the flow of influence is found to be largely unidirectional, where cognitive science, and the neurogovernance that stems from it, pays scant attention to the contingencies of spatial lives. At the same time, geographers have been critical of the universalising tendencies and narrow empiricism of neuroscience. This paper advocates a rapprochement between geography and neuroscience following Barad's agential realism approach. Using the geographies of ageing as a case that has relevance across the discipline, cognitive embodiments are understood as body–mind–environment assemblages that continuously co‐constitute material difference, constraint, and possibility for bodies as they age. A focus on recent studies of embodied ageing that show cognition to be both embodied and inherently spatial is used to inspire a critical neuro‐geography that rethinks ageing in place, age‐friendly cities, and age‐related public health interventions, such as those for the COVID‐19 crisis. The paper aims to inspire further critical neuro‐geographies that think through body–mind–environment assemblages and material–discursive intra‐actions without separating mind/body or nature/culture.
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