The contemporary challenge of postmodernity draws our attention to the nature of reality and the ways in which experience is constructed. Sensuous Geographies explores our immediate sensuous experience of the world. Touch, smell, hearing and sight - the four senses chiefly relevant to geographical experience - both receive and structure information. The process is mediated by historical, cultural and technological factors. Issues of definition are illustrated through a variety of sensuous geographies. Focusing on postmodern concerns with representation, the book brings insights from individual perceptions and cultural observations to an analysis of the senses, challenging us to reconsider the role of the sensuous as not merely the physical basis of understanding but as an integral part of the cultural definition of geographical knowledge.

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, this study explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions in literature such as smell, sound, etc. that often challenge the rationalizing logic of modernity. Through close readings of writers such as Conrad and Coetzee, Moslund invites scholars to shift focus from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

Cartier and Lew's interesting and informative book explores contemporary issues in travel and tourism and human geography, and the complex cultural, political, and economic activities at stake in touristed landscapes as a result of globalization.

Geographical analysis of tourism spaces and places is advancing fast. In terms of human geography, the various recent academic ‘turns’ have led to fresh examination of existing debates and have advanced new theoretical ideas in geography that are more salient than ever for tourism studies. The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies seeks to examine such recent developments by providing a state-of-the-art review of the field, documenting advances in research and evaluating different perspectives, approaches, techniques and contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies considers recent disciplinary developments (including post-disciplinarily) in geography in relation to the study of tourism. It also analyzes the fledging relationships of the new mobilities paradigm, critical tourism studies and cultural political economy to tourism spaces and places, as well as acknowledging a spatial turn in poststructuralist social sciences more generally. In addition, it evaluates how postcolonial, feminist, sensory, performative and queer perspectives have diversified research in the tourism geographies field. Spatial analysis, time geography, placemaking and landscape concerns are addressed and issues such as transport, environmental discourses and development are also analyzed. Finally, the volume’s contributions highlight key areas for advancing research and map out the dimensions of future trajectories in tourism geographies in different theoretical and thematic contexts. Written by leading scholars in the tourism geographies field, this text will provide an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in tourism geographies, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context

Health geographers are increasingly turning to a diverse range of interpretative methodologies to explore the complexities of health, illness, space and place to gain more comprehensive understandings of well-being and broader social models of health and health care. Drawing upon postmodernism, many health geographers are concerned with issues of representation, the body and health care policy. Also related to an emphasis on the body is the growing literature in feminist health geography that investigates the metaphorical, physical and emotional challenges of the body and disease. Reflecting these interests, the chapters in this book set out the host of creative qualitative methods being used to explore the psychosocial experiences of individuals more directly, using such traditional methods as in-depth interviews and group discussions, participant observation, diaries and discourse analysis, but also more novel techniques such as 'go-along interviews’, reflexive writing, illustrations, and photographic techniques. There are several areas of qualitative research unique to geographers which figure prominently in this volume including: health and place, comparative case study analysis, and qualitative approaches to the use of geographic information systems (GIS). This collection brings together a wide range of empirical concerns related to questions of health and shines a light on the diversity of qualitative methods in practice. Illustrating how qualitative methodologies are used in diverse health contexts this book fills an important niche for health geographers but will have wide appeal to health and geographic researchers.

"With clarity and confidence, this vibrant volume summons up ′the social′ in geography in ways that will excite students and scholars alike. Here the social is populated not only by society, but by culture, nature, economy and politics." - Kay Anderson, University of Western Sydney "This is a remarkable collection, full of intellectual gems. It not only summarises the field of social geography, and restates its importance, but also produces a manifesto for how the field should look in the future." - Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick "The book aims to be accessible to students and specialists alike. Its success lies in emphasizing the crossovers between geography and social studies. The good editorial work is evident and the participating contributors are well-established scholars in their respective fields." - Miron M. Denan, Geography Research Forum "An excellent handbook that will attract a diversity of readers. It will inspire undergraduate/postgraduate students and stimulate lecturers/researchers interested in the complexity and diversity of the social realm.... As the first of its kind in the sub-discipline, it is a book that is enjoyable to read and will definitely add value to a personal or library collection." - Michele Lobo, New Zealand Geographer The social relations of difference - from race and class to gender and inequality - are at the heart of the concept of social geography. This handbook reconsiders and redirects research in the discipline while examining the changing ideas of individuals and their relationship with structures of power. Organised into five sections, the SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies maps out the ′connections′ anchored in social geography. Difference and Diversity builds on enduring ideas of the structuring of social relations and examines the ruptures and rifts, and continuities and connections around social divisions. Geographies and Social Economies rethinks the sociality, subjectivity and placement of money, markets, price and value. Geographies of Wellbeing builds from a foundation of work on the spaces of fear, anxiety and disease towards newer concerns with geographies of health, resilience and contentment. Geographies of Social Justice connects ideas through an examination of the possibilities and practicalities of normative theory and frames the central notion of Social geography, that things always could and should be different. Doing Social Geography is not exploring the ′how to′ of research, but rather the entanglement of it with practicalities, moralities, and politics. This will be an essential resource for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduates across human geography.

Geocriticism provides a theoretical foundation and a critical exploration of geocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding literature in relation to space and place. Drawing on diverse thinkers, Westphal argues that a geocritical approach enables novel ways of seeing literary texts and of conducting literary studies.

Gender and sexuality have long held an important place in western attitudes towards the people and regions of the world-from the titillating accounts of harem life in the Middle East to terrifying captivity narratives of North America. The Erotic Margin is a first attempt to pull together the large, disparate, and often contradictory literature, and view it as a corpus. Schick argues that such images served to construct spatial difference, and thereby helped Europe represent its own place in the world during an age of rapid geographical expansion. Informed by the recent literature on human geography as well as feminist and postcolonial theory, The Erotic Margin focuses on erotica and sexual anthropology as well as travel literature in which, from the eighteenth century on, both traveler and destination were portrayed in unmistakably gendered and sexualized terms. Reviewing examples ranging from the New World to India, the Near East to black Africa, and the South sea islands to the Barbary Coast, the book reflects on why foreign women were variously portrayed as alluring or threatening, foreign men as effeminate weaklings or dangerous rapists, and foreign lands as sexual idylls or hearts of darkness.

Given that touch and touching is so central to everyday embodied existence, why has it been largely ignored by social scientists for so long? What is the place of touch in our mixed spaces of sociality, work, domesticity, recreation, creativity or care? What conceptual resources and academic languages can we reach towards when approaching tactile activities and somatic experiences through the body? How is this tactile landscape gendered? How is touch becoming revisited and revalidated in late capitalism through animal encounters, tourism, massage, beauty treatments, professional medicine, everyday spiritualities or the aseptic touch-free spaces of automated toilets? How is touch placed and valued within scholarly fieldwork and research itself, integral as it is to the production of embodied epistemologies? How is touch involved in such aesthetic experiences as shaping objects in sand, or encountering fleshly bodies within a painting? The goal of this edited collection, Touching Space, Placing Touch is twofold: 1. To further advance theoretical and empirical understanding of touch in social science scholarship by focussing on the differential social and cultural meanings of touching and the places of touch. 2. To develop a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary explanations of touch in terms of individual and social life, personal experiences and tasks, and their related cultural contexts. The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation. Each chapter takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The contributors are a mixture of established and emerging researchers within a growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship, yet the volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.