The Encyclopedia of Human Geography features over 300 entries from leading experts, offering an extensive overview of key ideas and concepts within the diverse field of human geography. This multidisciplinary work emphasizes contemporary understandings and incorporates significant conceptual shifts since the 1970s, including various social constructivist perspectives. It provides a cross-cultural exploration of human geography, making it a valuable resource for students and scholars alike.
Offering a comprehensive exploration of human geography, this book provides students with a deep understanding of its historical, economic, political, cultural, and urban aspects. It emphasizes critical thinking and analysis, making complex concepts accessible while encouraging engagement with the subject matter. Ideal for those seeking a serious and thorough introduction, it prepares readers to navigate the intricate relationships between people and their environments.
The book examines the concept of time-space compression through diverse historical and geographical lenses, highlighting its economic, cultural, social, political, and psychological dimensions. It delves into how individuals and societies perceive and navigate the rapid changes in their environments, offering insights into the complexities of modern existence.
Today, roughly 2 billion people use the internet, and its applications have flourished in number and importance. This volume will examine the growth and geography of the internet from a political economy perspective. Its central motivation is to illustrate that cyberspace does not exist in some aspatial void, but is deeply rooted in national and local political and cultural contexts. Toward that end, it will invoke a few major theorists of cyberspace, but apply their perspectives in terms that are accessible to readers with no familiarity with them. Beyond summaries of the infrastructure that makes the internet possible and global distributions of users, it delves into issues such as the digital divide to emphasize the inequalities that accompany the growth of cyberspace. It also addresses internet censorship, e-commerce, and e-government, issues that have received remarkably little scholarly attention, particularly from a spatial perspective. Throughout, it demonstrates that in cyberspace, place matters, so that no comprehensive understanding of the internet can be achieved without considering how it is embedded within, and in turn changes, local institutional and political contexts. Thus the book rebuts simplistic “death of distance” views or those that assert there is, or can be, a “one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter” model of the internet applicable to all times and places.
This book explores the geographical dimensions and implications of the post-truth era. Opening with a defense of the Enlightenment and the continued significance of science, objectivity, and truth, it then provides three key perspectives on the concept: The first is a philosophical analysis of post-truth. Social theory in various forms has sutured knowledge and power, in the process relativizing the nature of truth. This process reaches its apogee under post-modernism, which questions the very nature of truth itself. The second is the examination of the historical origins and development of the post-truth world. While post-truth has a history that can be traced back to the 18 th and 19 th centuries, more recently it has growth prolifically through the use of social media. The book examines post-truth as it appears in the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspapers, Holocaust denial, and contemporary attacks on science itself (e. g., the anti-vaccine movement, denial of evolution). Post-truth becomes a central issue in Western politics following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, who uses it frequently to advance a reactionary political agenda. Russian hackers weaponize it to interfere in the politics of Europe and the U. S. Fox News and other right-wing outlets also play a central role. One result is the proliferation of unfounded conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Today, autocrats and dictators the world over use fake news to maintain their power. Finally, this book links the rise of a post-truth society to the dynamics of contemporary economic geography. Knowledge-intensive capitalism has greatly elevated the significance of symbolic workers or the creative class. Geographically, contemporary capitalism has accentuated the agglomeration of producer services in large urban areas in which such workers labor. Conversely, rural areas and small towns have largely become repositories of the undereducated, and thus are more susceptible to fake news.
