Alison Blunt - Böcker

Cultural Geography in Practice provides an innovative and accessible approach to the sources, theories and methods of cultural geography. Written by an international team of prominent cultural geographers, all of whom are experienced researchers, this book is a fully illustrated guide to methodological approaches in cultural geography. In order to demonstrate the practice of cultural geography each chapter combines the following features:·Practical instruction in using one of the main methods of cultural geography (e.g. interviewing, interpreting texts and visual images, participatory methods)·An overview of a key area of concern in cultural geography (e.g. the body, national identity, empire, marginality)·A nuts and bolts description of the actual application of the theories and methods within a piece of researchWith the addition of boxed definitions of key concepts and descriptions of research projects by students who devised and undertook them, Cultural Geography in Practice is an essential manual of research practice for both undergraduate and graduate geography students.

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.

Postcolonialism and geography are intimately linked through the spatiality of colonial discourse as well as the material effects of colonialism and decolonization.Geographical ideas about space, place, landscape, and location have helped to articulate different experiences of colonialism both in the past and present and the "here" and "there". At the same time, while spatial images such as mobility, margins and exile abound in postcolonial writings, more material geographies have often been overlooked.Postcolonial Geographies presents the first sustained geographical analysis of postcolonialism. Exploring and developing the connections between postcolonialism and geography, the essays in this book--ranging across Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa, and North America--investigate the geographies of postcolonialism and chart the contours of a postcolonial geography. Contributors:Morag Bell, Claire Dwyer, Haydie Gooder, Jane M. Jacobs, M. Satish Kumar, Alan Lester, Mark McGuinness, Karen M. Morin, Richard Phillips, Marcus Power, Jenny Robinson, James D. Sidaway, John Wylie

Postcolonialism and geography are imtimately linked through the spatiality of colonial discourse as well as the material effects of colonialism and decolonization. Geographical ideas about space, place, landscape and location have helped to articulate different experiences of colonialism both in the past and present and the 'here' and 'there'. At the same time, whilst spatial images such as mobility, margins and exile abound in postcolonial writings, more material geographies have often been overlooked. Postcolonial Geographies presents the first sustained geographical analysis of postcolonialism. Exploring and developing the connections between postcolonialism and geography, the essays in this book - ranging across Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and North America - investigate the geographies of postcolonialism and chart the contours of a postcolonial geography.

Drawing lessons from the complex and often contradictory position of white women writing in the colonial period, This unique book explores how feminism and poststructuralism can bring new types of understanding to the production of geographical knowledge. Through a series of colonial and postcolonial case studies, essays address the ways in which white women have written and mapped different geographies, in both the late nineteenth century and today, illustrating the diverse objects (landscapes, spaces, views), the variety of media (letters, travel writing, paintings, sculpture, cartographic maps, political discourse), and the different understandings and representations of people and place.

Studies of women travel writers have ranged from anecdotal and celebratory accounts to more critical essays on imperialism or the textualization of difference. This book does more. Drawing from the life and travels of Mary Kingsley, a nineteenth century travel writer and critic of the Crown Colony system, Alison Blunt cogently examines the relationships among travel, gender, and imperialism. Instead of studying either travel generally or women travel writers in the colonial period specifically, Blunt examines both to show how the spatiality and gendering of travel are inseparable. Underlying her examination are debates about women as a focus of historical research, Western women and imperialism, and the place of women in a historiography of geography.

Dissident Geographies is an accessible and lively exploration of radical perspectives in human geography. The perspectives examined in the book reveal and resist certain power relations that have constituted geographical knowledge.  The book has two main aims. First, rather than reify 'the' geographical tradition, Dissident Geographies introduces a number of geographical traditions that challenge and destabilize what counts as geographical knowledge. Second, the book shows how the production of geographical knowledge is tied to politics and struggles outside as well as within the academy.  In each chapter, case studies illustrate the spatiality of political practice and the politics of geographical thought. In this way Dissident Geographies reveals the connections between power, politics and geographical knowledge.

Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947. The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia. The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent. Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947. Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research. Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.