Paul C. Adams

Jim Craine

This Companion provides an authoritative source for scholars and students of the nascent field of media geography. While it has deep roots in the wider discipline, the consolidation of media geography has started only in the past decade, with the creation of media geography’s first dedicated journal, Aether, as well as the publication of the sub-discipline’s first textbook. However, at present there is no other work which provides a comprehensive overview and grounding. By indicating the sub-discipline’s evolution and hinting at its future, this volume not only serves to encapsulate what geographers have learned about media but also will help to set the agenda for expanding this type of interdisciplinary exploration. The contributors-leading scholars in this field, including Stuart Aitken, Deborah Dixon, Derek McCormack, Barney Warf, and Matthew Zook-not only review the existing literature within the remit of their chapters, but also articulate arguments about where the future might take media geography scholarship. The volume is not simply a collection of individual offerings, but has afforded an opportunity to exchange ideas about media geography, with contributors making connections between chapters and developing common themes.

The Routledge Research Companion to Media Geography

Karen E. Till

Steven D. Hoelscher

Annotation A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works. The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.

Exploring Humanist Geographies

Textures of Place

A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works. The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.

Using the body as an axis for geographical theory, this book argues that communication empowers self to constantly transcend its physical limits. It urges complete review of personal borders in space and time based on symbols, signs and signals that redefine ties to the tangible world, i.e., "Dear John" letters, layout of furniture in rooms, or chronic illness. Paul C. Adams shows how vehicular transit has altered traditional modalities like walking or biking while navigation of space and virtual space has led to "boundary blurring." He covers transforming moments in communication from the rise of writing to invention of the printing press, telephone, and electronic media. To better understand human geography, he also plumbs the relation of space and time to notions of romance, identity, and meaning. Citing geographers throughout the ages and the effects of mercantile, industrial, and current global economies, The Boundless Self is sure to provoke thought and theory among geographers, communicators, and scholars alike.

Paul C. Adams

About

Books

Join the club