The question of culture in cultural geography: Latent legacies and potential futures

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to excavate a latent geographical approach to the question of culture. Specifically, I argue that the culture question has been developed by two schools of geographical thought: an Anthropogeographical School (represented by the traditions of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache) and a Landscape School (represented by the Berkeley School and new cultural geographers). My purpose for conducting this excavation is not only to illustrate the discipline’s distinct approach to the question of culture, but to make the argument that this tradition holds potential resources for posing the question of culture anew.

Affective life of financial loss: Detaching from lost investments in the wake of the gig economy

“…Geographers have always been interested in the concept of investment in terms of what is meaningful to people. Yet such concerns have been less prominent as cultural geographers have become more preoccupied with exploring bodily competencies than questions of what becomes meaningful and why (Rose, 2020). Responding to this charge, this paper has built on debates on affective investments within geography and beyond to argue that financial and affective investments are inextricably linked.…”

Bubble clash: Identity, environment and politics in a multicultural suburb

“…position statements or manifestos written in English, for them to infiltrate the existing policies and regulations). Relatedly, Rose (2020) points out that ‘affect’ does not automatically lead to ‘caring’:While it may be the case that witnessing our relational connectivity engenders an inclination to care for the relations that constitute us, there is nothing imminent to the relations themselves that explains this instigation. … how does a body—as a relational composite—transcend the relations that constitute it in order to witness itself as a subject, that is, as a body that does not simply exist but can potentially care?…”

Re‐engaging psychology for (more) human geographies of the future

“…However, it is worth noting that: psychiatric geography work has not only centred on people who fall beyond social parameters of what is considered to be ‘psychologically and behaviourally rational and sane’ (Wolch & Philo, 2000, p. 145), but has flagged more widely how people's ‘interior imaginings, fantasies and anxieties’ (p. 148) involve transactions with everyday spatial environments; work in psychotherapeutic geography has incorporated insights from feminist approaches and theory to situate personal human experience, thought, emotion and practice in wider social and environmental relations (Bondi, 2005); and psychoanalytic geography pushes understanding of human action and behaviour beyond the conscious, cognition‐centred, subject of mainstream psychology (Pile, 2010). However, even in work under the banner of non‐representational theory, where affect has been conceptualised as transpersonal, life includes —even as it is understood as (far) exceeding—experiential human consciousness (Rose, 2010); indeed, human geography could be enriched through consideration of both cognitive meaning and unreflective relations (Rose, 2021). Cultural and social geography research relating to psychology in a diversity of ways, including strands that focus on forces animating the world beyond or before acts of cognitive representation, can be brought into conversation with recent psychological work on the imaginative construction, prospection and emotional (pre)feeling of future scenarios.…”

“…Attending to individual human experiences or cognitive processes is not necessarily on the side of mis‐placed ‘be the change’ agency or heroic individualism (for a related argument on critiques of ‘resilience’ as neoliberal, see DeVerteuil & Golubchikov, 2016). On the contrary, linked sociocognitive processes can help understand how people come to form part of—and contribute to—wider movements and socio‐political imaginaries, and reveal how people identify with some futures and not others (Rose, 2021). Similarly, attending to more‐than‐human geographies, distributed systems of pre‐cognitive affective infrastructure, or what Anderson (2020, p. 614) recently referred to as the ‘assembled effect’ of culture, does not render work on individual human subjects in geography, or on experiential consciousness, intellectually or politically obsolete.…”