Key Thinkers on Space and Place: Edition 3

Mary Gilmartin · Phil Hubbard · Rob Kitchin · Sue Roberts

may 2024 · SAGE Publications Limited

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Space and place are at the heart of how geographers and sociologists think. This updated edition of the essential undergraduate text will introduce you to the most influential thinkers in the tradition of social theory, with a new focus on the past fifty years. This book is designed to engage with theoretical debates in human geography through the individuals who have made the most significant contributions to this field. This will show you how ideas are shaped by contexts, and how those ideas in turn effect change. This book shows how theoretical understandings evolve, shift and change. It also highlights the connections between different thinkers, whose ideas are developed in collaboration with or in reaction to others. Spatial thought is never developed in a vacuum, but is always constructed by individuals and groups of people located in particular institutional and social structures, with their own sets of personal and political beliefs. The biographical approach of this book reveals how individual thinkers draw on a rich legacy of ideas from past and contemporary generations.

With increased coverage of international and female thinkers, as well as those who work against Eurocentric notions of space and place, this book reveals the exciting reorientation of Geography towards new ideas and methods in the last decade. Each entry contextualises its subject within on-going (inter)disciplinary debates and important political moments, as well as highlighting connections between different thinkers. Together the chapters uncover the rich and diverse evolution of social theory, equipping you with the foundational ideas of geographical thought. Each entry offers the following components:

i) a short biography
ii) an explanation of ideas
iii) an exploration of how their ideas have been used and critiqued
iv) a selective bibliography of key publications (and key publications which review or critique)

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Mary Gilmartin is a Professor of Geography at Maynooth University. Her research examines migration with a particular focus on contemporary Irish migration and mobility. She has published widely on migration within the discipline of geography, and previous research projects have been funded by organisations such as the Irish Research Council and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. She was previously Managing Editor of Social and Cultural Geography, the leading international geography journal, and remains a member of the editorial board.

Phil is a Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London, specialising in cities and social charge, sexuality and space, urban consumption and legal geography. He is particularly interested in the city as a site of social conflict. His work draws on theories of the city developed in urban geography and urban sociology, and also engages with debates in socio-legal studies given his particular interests in the way urban disorder is regulated. He has contributed leading studies exploring how community opposition to particular ‘unwanted’ land uses shapes governmental and regulatory responses. He is particularly known for setting international agendas in the study of the relationship between gender, sexuality and the city via research on the spatial governance of sex work, summarised in his ′Cities and Sexualities.’ A major theme running through much of his work has been a focus on questions of displacement and spatial justice, something that is particularly relevant in the context of London′s housing crises and the ongoing gentrification of much of the capital. This is evident in his Economic and Social Research Council-sponsored research on the impacts of estate renewal in London, as well as studies of the impacts of retail gentrification on working-class communities (the latter summarised in his monograph ′The Battle for the High Street′).

Rob Kitchin is a Professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. He was a European Research Council Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project (2013-2018) and a principal investigator on the Building City Dashboards project (2016-2020) and for the Digital Repository of Ireland (2009-2017). He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 31 other academic books, and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

Sue Roberts is the Associate Provost for Internationalization and Professor of Geography at Kentucky University. Her interest in why some places and people prosper, and others remain marginal has led to wide ranging, interdisciplinary research interests including anti-development, geopolitics, neoliberalism, trade, hegemony, militarization, security, social theory, and gender. Sue has won research funding from the National Science Foundation for several projects, and has conducted research in Southern Mexico, the Caribbean, Ireland, and Australia. From 2012-2017, she was North American Editor of the top-ranked journal Progress in Human Geography. From 2008-2012 she was Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. In 2015-16 she served as Associate Dean for International Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences and directed the International Studies Program, a popular interdisciplinary undergraduate major.