Building on a trans-disciplinary, feminist project that foregrounds the bodies of those at the 'sharp end' of various forms of international activity, such as immigration, development and warfare, the chapters included in this book cover a variety of sites, concerns, and hopes. These range from the fraught geopolitics of marriage and birth in Ladakh, India, to the fate of detained migrant children in the U.S., and from the human rights abuses of women and children in Uzbekistan to the body politics of aid workers in Afghanistan. The collective aim is to expose the force relations that operate through and upon those bodies, such that particular subjectivities are enhanced, constrained, and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited, and often abandoned. Oriented around issues of security, population, territory, and nationalism, these chapters expose the proliferating bodies of geopolitics, not simply as the bearers of socially demarcated borders and boundaries, but as vulnerable corporealities, seeking to negotiate and transform the geopolitics they both animate and inhabit. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.

"Ein hAchst verworrenes Quartier, ein StraAennetz, das jahrelang von mir gemieden wurde, ward mit einem Schlage A1/4bersichtlich, als eines Tages ein geliebter Mensch dort einzog. Es war, als sei in seinem Fenster ein Scheinwerfer aufgestellt und zerlege die Gegend mit LichtbA1/4scheln." Walter Benjamin Schriften (Bd. 1.). Frankfurt a. M. (Suhrkamp Verlag) 1955. Die meisten Menschen haben ein bestimmtes VerstAndnis ihres eigenen Lebens und verfA1/4gen A1/4ber mancherlei Kenntnisse der Umgebung - des Viertels, der Stadt, des Landes -, in der sie leben. Doch obwohl die Verflechtungen zwischen den LAndern und Regionen der Erde immer enger und vielfAltiger werden, weiA die Mehrzahl von uns letztlich auAerordentlich wenig A1/4ber das Leben anderer Menschen in anderen Gesellschaften oder auch darA1/4ber, wie deren Leben mit dem unsrigen zusammenhAngt. Das Zitat von Walter Benjamin mag verdeutlichen, dass wir Orte und Regionen erst verstehen kAnnen, wenn sie Bedeutung fA1/4r uns erlangen. Dieses Buch ist eine EinfA1/4hrung in die Humangeographie, die genau dieses Ziel verfolgt. Humangeographie zu studieren, bedeutet, vereinfacht gesprochen, sich mit den dynamischen und komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und den von ihnen bewohnten RAumen zu beschAftigen. Das vorliegende Buch vermittelt Studierenden die grundlegenden geographischen Techniken und Konzepte, die sie benAtigen, um die KomplexitAt von Orten und Regionen zu erfassen und die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen ihrem eigenen und dem Leben von Menschen in anderen Teilen der Erde richtig einschAtzen zu kAnnen. Das Buch stellt einen neuen humangeographischen Ansatz dar, der den bedeutenden VerAnderungen Rechnung trAgt, die RAume globaler, regionaler und lokaler Dimension in jA1/4ngster Zeit erfahren haben. Diese VerAnderungen umfassen eine Vielzahl von Prozessen und PhAnomen wie die Globalisierung der Industrie oder der Zusammenbruch des sowjetischen Reiches. Der in Humangeographie verfolgte Ansatz fA1/4hrt nicht nur zu einem VerstAndnis neuer Vorstellungen, Konzepte und Theorien hinsichtlich der genannten VerAnderungen, sondern erschlieAt darA1/4ber hinaus die Grundlagen der Humangeographie: die Prinzipien, Konzepte, das theoretische GerA1/4st und das Basiswissen, das fA1/4r weiterfA1/4hrende, speziellere Studien benAtigt wird. Das Buch hat sich A1/4beraus erfolgreich als Lehrbuch der Humangeographie eingefA1/4hrt. Es ist in der Neuauflage komplett aktualisiert, so wurde ein Kapitel A1/4ber Sozialgeographie ergAnzt, und es enthAlt viele neue Grafiken sowie eine Vielzahl an anschaulichen neuen Fotos.

"With clarity and confidence, this vibrant volume summons up 'the social' in geography in ways that will excite students and scholars alike. Here the social is populated not only by society, but by culture, nature, economy and politics." - Kay Anderson, University of Western Sydney "This is a remarkable collection, full of intellectual gems. It not only summarises the field of social geography, and restates its importance, but also produces a manifesto for how the field should look in the future." - Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick "The book aims to be accessible to students and specialists alike. Its success lies in emphasizing the crossovers between geography and social studies. The good editorial work is evident and the participating contributors are well-established scholars in their respective fields." - Miron M. Denan, Geography Research Forum "An excellent handbook that will attract a diversity of readers. It will inspire undergraduate/postgraduate students and stimulate lecturers/researchers interested in the complexity and diversity of the social realm.... As the first of its kind in the sub-discipline, it is a book that is enjoyable to read and will definitely add value to a personal or library collection." - Michele Lobo, New Zealand Geographer The social relations of difference - from race and class to gender and inequality - are at the heart of the concept of social geography. This handbook reconsiders and redirects research in the discipline while examining the changing ideas of individuals and their relationship with structures of power. Organised into five sections, the SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies maps out the 'connections' anchored in social geography. Difference and Diversity builds on enduring ideas of the structuring of social relations and examines the ruptures and rifts, and continuities and connections around social divisions. Geographies and Social Economies rethinks the sociality, subjectivity and placement of money, markets, price and value. Geographies of Wellbeing builds from a foundation of work on the spaces of fear, anxiety and disease towards newer concerns with geographies of health, resilience and contentment. Geographies of Social Justice connects ideas through an examination of the possibilities and practicalities of normative theory and frames the central notion of Social geography, that things always could and should be different. Doing Social Geography is not exploring the 'how to' of research, but rather the entanglement of it with practicalities, moralities, and politics. This will be an essential resource for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduates across human geography.

"Making Worlds" brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"--race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. "Making Worlds" both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, "Making Worlds" develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life--home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics ofurban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.