Space and social theory

The last decade has been a decade of tremendous change across the board of the human and social sciences. Ancient certainties, trusted ideologies and tested methods all came under immense pressure once so-called 'postmodern' ideas and concepts gained wider currency particularly among those with an interest in social theory. No longer content with framing social reality according to the logic of one core metaphor, the human and social sciences both rediscovered the local particularity of truth where hitherto a general explanation was deemed sufficient. In short: the revitalizing and formative power of 'space' was acknowledged once again. More than ten years into the debate, the present collection of original essays seeks to assess both the impact and current state of the debate around postmodernism and the spatial social sciences. It aims not at solving contradictions and differences within the debate since such a claim would be both fruitless and immature; rather, it seeks to demonstrate the diversity of interpretations that has come about by the mutual discovery of postmodern discourses and human geography since the mid 1980s. Celebrations of postmodernity, the insistence of a continuation of modernity, interpretations of globally-emerging postmodern spaces, even the call for an analysis of hypermodernity thus coexist in the collection at hand. In-between the essays, a new discursive agenda for the spatial human sciences emerges: not to pave the way for a new orthodoxy but simply to allow for the recognition of new ideas taking root in today's academic environment. This book is at once critical, provocative and accessible. It will be widely welcomed by advanced students of spatial and social theory in geography and related disciplines.