Intimate Geographies

Abstract

Intimacy has emerged as an important inquiry for scholars of social sciences and humanities over the last decade. Geographers have expanded the concept of intimacy and intimate geographies by extending its meaning to multiscale and multitemporal analysis. Critical geographers have seen the potential of intimacy to convey the complicated nature of closeness, proximity, reciprocity, and belonging in subject formation against the essentialized understandings of the liberal self. Scholars have also demonstrated its potential to disrupt normative ontologies and epistemologies by emphasizing intimacy as messy and multilayered. This entry provides four layers of understanding intimate geographies by focusing on intimacy as political, intimacy as spaces of care, intimacy as methodology, and intimacy as pedagogy.