Social geographies - Gill Valentine

Most social geography undergraduate textbooks are structured around different social categories, splintering the discussion of gender, class, race and increasingly now sexuality and disability, into separate chapters. This has the effect, firstly, of making social relations rather than space (the raison d'etre of human geography) the focus of undergraduate books; secondly of ignoring the way that social relations are negotiated and contested in different space. Rather than reproducing this conventional social geography format the aim of this proposed text is to make space the focus of analysis. In doing so the intention is to make complex theoretical debates about space more accessible to students and encourage them to look at their own environments in new ways.