Handbook

Cultural geography is an important sub-discipline of human geography. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s it has been one of the discipline’s fastest growth areas. What do cultural geographers do and why has there been this rapid growth? This course explores these questions by examining the concept of conflict. We will use this examination of the changing nature of the concept of conflict to think through how different understandings of conflict create different mechanisms of inclusions and exclusion through three different spatial scales: territory (maps and geographic representations), borders (security and no-man zones), and bodies (desire and difference). In what ways do territory, borders and bodies relate to each other? And how do they define the idea and instance of conflict? Cultural geography approaches such questions by examining the way meaning is constructed differently according to differences in times, spaces and places.