Cultural Geography

Cultural geography examines the ways in which people produce, contest and inhabit spaces through practices, meanings and material processes. It explores how cultural identities, values and power relations become inscribed in landscapes, place-names, urban forms and everyday routines. Key themes include the politics of naming and memory in public space, the interplay of human and non-human agencies in shaping environments, the lived experience of multicultural encounters and the production of attachments to objects and locales. Recent theoretical turns have emphasised the agency of matter, the emergence of affective atmospheres and the importance of voids or negative spaces in political life. Methodologically, the field spans critical discourse analysis, ethnographic walking methods, qualitative GIS and experimental collaborations that foreground sensory, temporal and relational dimensions of place. By linking fine-grained studies of local practices with broader patterns of global connectivity, cultural geography contributes to debates on heritage conservation, social justice in migrant cities and the co-production of more inclusive urban futures.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Taking a longer historical view of naming activism in the United States, recent work has traced how civil-rights organisations have deployed campaigns to rename streets and public institutions as part of wider antiracist strategies. Analysis of grassroots correspondence and transport-network interventions demonstrates that effective toponymic change must be embedded in broader discursive and material practices to reshape urban spaces. In parallel, an exchange between speculative thought and new materialisms argues that bringing speculative philosophy into dialogue with insights on intra-action and the material agency of non-human actors can advance cultural geography’s engagement with ecological crisis. By integrating ideas from feminist science studies and speculative philosophy, this approach proposes experimental methods for accounting for matter’s role in co-constituting social and political worlds.

Cultural Geography publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in cultural geography across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Toponymic activism: Deliberate campaigns to rename public places as a form of political and cultural protest.

Intra-action: A concept denoting the mutual constitution of entangled agencies, emphasising that entities emerge through relationships rather than pre-existing them.

Affective atmosphere: The mood or emotional tone generated by the interplay of people, space and sensory stimuli in a given environment.

Abyssal geographies: Analytical approaches that locate the world’s ontological inseparability in histories of antiblackness, foregrounding refusal and deconstruction over creative becoming.

Promissory scene: A temporal-spatial configuration in which objects or places come to feel necessary to a way of life, generating expectations and attachments.

References

1. Taking a longer historical view of America’s renaming moment: The role of Black onomastic activism within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024).
2. Putting speculation and new materialisms in dialogue. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2019).
3. Negativity: space, politics and affects. Cultural Geographies (2021).
4. Interstitial and Abyssal geographies. Political Geography (2022).
5. Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises. Dialogues in Human Geography (2022).