Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity: Institute of British Geographers Special Publication

More than ten years into the debate, the present collection of original essays seeks to assess both the impact and current state of the debate around postmodernism and the spatial social sciences. It aims not at solving contradictions and differences within the debate since such a claim would be both fruitless and immature; rather, it seeks to demonstrate the diversity of interpretations that has come about by the mutual discovery of postmodern discourses and human geography since the mid 1980s. Celebrations of postmodernity, the insistence of a continuation of modernity, interpretations of globally-emerging postmodern spaces, even the call for an analysis of hypermodernity thus coexist in the collection at hand. In-between the essays, a new discursive agenda for the spatial human sciences emerges: not to pave the way for a new orthodoxy but simply to allow for the recognition of new ideas taking root in today's academic environment.

This book is at once critical, provocative and accessible. It will be widely welcomed by advanced students of spatial and social theory in geography and related disciplines.