Cultural Studies and Human Geography

Abstract

Human geography has an openness to ideas from other academic subject areas, which can change the shape and direction of the discipline. While there had long been a subdiscipline called cultural geography concerned with the mapping of culture areas through the material traces of different cultures, with the development of cultural studies from the 1960s onward, new ways of thinking about ‘culture’ began to emerge and generate debate. These impacted on human geography in the later 1980s, especially in the UK, through the work of social geographers, leading to the so-called ‘cultural turn’. At the same time, a ‘spatial turn’ was occurring in the social sciences, so there was a period of two-way traffic of theories and methods.