The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies

In this introductory chapter, we offer a brief preview of the content of the Handbook and provide some signposts to our growing and diversifying sub-discipline. We start by introducing the structure of the Handbook, explaining the rationale for the four parts: critical moments, entangled lives, cultural practices and spaces, and imperatives. We then turn to cultural geographers’ various attempts to delineate and discipline cultural geography, including the issue of how to define culture. We trace various routes through the history of anglophone cultural geography, providing a partial guide which we hope will be of some use to students. This sketch is framed as an ‘alternative history’ in an attempt to move away from some of the more introspective histories which are often produced. We then outline some of the changes in cultural geography which occurred during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period many scholars have associated with a broader ‘cultural turn’ and an increasing pace of change. We then examine key research agendas in contemporary cultural geography, suggesting pathways along which the discipline is currently developing.