Geographies of Power: Placing Scale - Softcover

Herod, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631225587 ISBN 13: 9780631225584

Publisher: W.B., 2012

Synopsis

Following the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, terrorism has joined economic restructuring, climate change, environmental degradation, and the AIDS pandemic as another issue warranting 'global' attention. The contributors to this book explore the nexus of power and space behind this rescaling of contemporary social, economic, and political life. The book opens with an introductory essay by the editors, outlining some of the main themes that have arisen in discussions about geographical scale to date. The contributors then consider in more detail key questions about how our world is scaled, how we think about such scaling, and how social actors - whether terrorists, environmentalists, or corporate executives - go about scaling their activities in ways that allow them to exercise power or deny it to others. This timely book will stimulate readers to find new ways to define the terms and spaces of political struggle open to them.

About this title

Review:

"Anyone who has grown weary of the shallow and circular globalization debate, and the political fatalism that it breeds, should read this book. Pushing beyond the conception of globalization as a force of nature, the contributors to this volume ask a series of fresh and provocative questions about geographical scale, its social relations, and its political construction. But rather than simply asking the scale question, Power, Politics, and Geography explores the answers. It is the best collection yet on the theory and praxis of geographical scale." Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography and Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This exciting book levers open a space for a politics that regards space as a living thing rather than a dead backdrop. In doing so, it challenges a whole series of preconceptions about what politics is or might be, and begins to formulate means of eating away at the foundations of concepts like globalization that so often are used by the powerful to peddle one world fits all solutions." Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Bristol

"The book sets out to be an intervention in, and make a contribution to, a growing literature on questions of scale, rescaling, and politics of scale [...] this book is a welcome addition to what remains a very fertile and promising debate" Erik Swyngedouw, Environment and Planning

"Herod and Wright's book is well organized and coherent ... [Geographies of Power: Placing Scale] provides a useful overview of the new conceptualizations of geographical scale that are being developed by radical geographers."
American Journal of Sociology

About the Author:

Andrew Herod is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (2001), editor of Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism (1998), and co-editor of An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography (1998). Melissa W. Wright is Assistant Professor of Geography and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles in Environment and Planning A, Antipode, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

About this edition

• Publisher: W.B.
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0631225587
• ISBN 13: 9780631225584
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 332