Embracing dissensus: reflections on contemporary research strategies in cultural geography

Abstract

This introductory essay situates this edited collection on “contemporary research strategies in cultural geography” in relation to relevant scholarly debates, e.g., around positionality in feminist geography, reflexivity in critical human geography, and world-making in cultural geography. We claim that, taken together, the essays in this collection represent an “embrace” of dissensus, which is to say they stage encounters between often-irreconcilable senses of the world. We suggest that this dissensus in the subdiscipline is a source of dynamism and vitality, which promises to generate new ways of doing cultural geography and therefore new ways of making and knowing the world.

Keywords:

• cultural geography
• dissensus
• fieldwork
• methodology
• politics