This accessible textbook is a stimulating introduction to contemporary social geography. It provides students with the tools to understand the various frameworks that geographers use to conceptualize, document, and attempt to overcome social differences.

"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.

This book provides a round-up of the state of the sub-discipline of social geography, capture recent themes and directions, and chart new questions and challenges for theory, politics and practice.

`Introducing Social Geographies' is a major new text offering a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this important area of human geography. It presents a broad overview of social geography, clearly outlining the key theoretical and political positions, and making extensive use of examples to show how these frameworks can be used to analyse real social issues. The book is ideal for undergraduates first encountering social geography and includes topic overviews, summaries of key points, critiques, boxed case studies and suggestions for further reading.

Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.

What is the significance of food in our everyday lives? Food Geographies addresses this broad question by examining the social, political, and ecological connections that food weaves between people and places across the world and revealing the centrality of food in the human experience. This interdisciplinary and systemic perspective provides readers with key concepts, analytical tools, and critical skills to better understand and address the many issues facing the contemporary food system, including food insecurity, environmental degradation, climate change, labor exploitation, social inequality, power imbalance in decision making, and threats to health and well-being. It takes readers to places including modern plantations in Peru, collective farms in Tanzania, food halls in France, home kitchens in Japan, community gardens in Brazil, pubs in England, and animal feeding operations in America. By raising important questions about the current system, readers will explore ways to enact meaningful change to build better future food geographies by producing, consuming, and engaging with food differently.

Most social geography undergraduate textbooks are structured around different social categories, splintering the discussion of gender, class, race and increasingly now sexuality and disability, into separate chapters. This has the effect, firstly, of making social relations rather than space (the raison d'etre of human geography) the focus of undergraduate books; secondly of ignoring the way that social relations are negotiated and contested in different space. Rather than reproducing this conventional social geography format the aim of this proposed text is to make space the focus of analysis. In doing so the intention is to make complex theoretical debates about space more accessible to students and encourage them to look at their own environments in new ways.

In The Geographies of Social Movements Ulrich Oslender proposes a critical place perspective to examine the activism of black communities in the lowland rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast region. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in and around the town of Guapi, Oslender examines how the work of local community councils, which have organized around newly granted ethnic and land rights since the early 1990s, is anchored to space and place. Exploring how residents' social relationships are entangled with the region's rivers, streams, swamps, rain, and tides, Oslender argues that this "aquatic space"—his conceptualization of the mutually constitutive relationships between people and their rain forest environment—provides a local epistemology that has shaped the political process. Oslender demonstrates that social mobilization among Colombia's Pacific Coast black communities is best understood as emerging out of their place-based identity and environmental imaginaries. He argues that the critical place perspective proposed accounts more fully for the multiple, multiscalar, rooted, and networked experiences within social movements.

Analyses the construction of socio-spatial boundaries seen in gedner, colour, sexuality, age, lifestyle and disability, arguing that powerful groups tend to dominate space to create fear of minorities in the home, community and state.

This open access book analyses the global diffusion of social policy as a process driven by multiplex ties between countries in global social networks. The contributions analyze links between countries via global trade, colonial history, similarity in culture, and spatial proximity. Networks are viewed as the structural backbone of the diffusion process, and diffusion is anlaysed via several subfields of social policy, in order to interrogate which network dimensions drive this process. The focus is on a global perspective of social policy diffusion via networks, and it is the first book to explicitly follow this macro-quantitative perspective on diffusion at a global scale whilst also comparing different networks. The collection tests the network structures in terms of their relevance to the diffusion process in different subfields of social policy such as old age and survivor pensions, labor and labor markets, health and long-term care, education and training, and family and gender policy. The book will therefore be invaluable to students and researchers of global social policy, sociology, political science, international relations, organization theory and economics.