Cultural Geography: By Whom, for Whom?

• Main Author: Kong, Lily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
• Subjects: cultural geography; geographical research; Geography; Human Geography
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1796; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3053/viewcontent/CulturalGeography_ByWhom_2004.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The "cultural turn," coupled by the "spatial turn" in recent years has drawn significant attention to cultural geography from those in other subdisciplines and disciplines. One might forgive those who sometimes mistake particular research as cultural geography which is in fact conducted by non-geographers or geographers who would not ordinarily identify themselves as cultural geographers. A pointed moment that illustrated this to me was when a sociology colleague insisted that he had read cultural geography, and when asked, indicated that he had read Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin. One interpretation of this is, as Shurmer-Smith (1996) offered through her title of a collection of postgraduate papers, that cultural geography is "all over the place." Another more positive interpretation is that the important questions and perspectives of cultural geography have become appropriately influential across geography and other disciplines. My reading of the multiple cultural geographies that have mushroomed over the last decade prompts me to sort out specific priorities that I believe deserve fuller attention and identify particular discomforts over other developments. By no means are all these priorities and concerns unique. However, the emphasis I place on these particular issues does reflect my positionality, a Chinese Singaporean educated in Singapore and Britain, teaching now in a Singapore university that aspires to compete in the first league, and appointed to the role of an academic administrator overseeing educational matters in my university.