Matter(s) in social and cultural geography

Abstract

Social and cultural geography has recently been enlivened by a renewed encounter with the diverse problematics that surround matter and materialism. This has taken form in a number of high profile calls for the re-materialisation of social and cultural geography (see Jackson, 2000; Philo, 2000; Lees, 2002). It has also involved, on a slightly different track perhaps, inventive re-imaginings of ‘the materiality of matter’ that develop ‘a set of images depicting the stuff out of which all things are made and speculating about how that matter is arranged or is liable to arrangement’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 89). It is this broad and by no means singular context that this theme issue emerges from and aims to contribute to. It is based on a one-day conference that took place at the Department of Geography, UCL on the 3rd of September 2002 entitled ‘Material Geographies’. The day featured eighteen papers from across the social sciences. Published here are six that exemplify the range of topics that afford a renewed engagement with different forms of materialism: memorial tokens of a spatially and temporally distanced landscape, the bodies of those who listen and hear recorded music, eighteenth century political disputes over measurement, the regulation of complementary and alternative medicine, design and everyday consumer objects, and the networks of circulation that surround second hand clothing. The papers were deliberately chosen to exemplify the heterogeneity of work that goes under the broad heading of ‘material geographies’. Each of them is primarily, although not exclusively, concerned with the specific materialities of different objects. Re-thinking the object, and the connected concept of landscape, is now one of the key sites for an encounter with various materialist traditions (see Bingham, 1996; Cook and Crang, 1996;