Michel Foucault's Geography

From Geography

Background

Michel Foucault's geographical thinking and attentiveness to spatial relations, though less acknowledged in the geographical academia, is seen however as a blueprint for postmodern geography (Philo).

Foucault's geography in history

Foucault is highly sensitive of spatial relations in his analysis of discourse, knowledge and power relations in society. He asserts that historical enquiry should be reconceptualised through spaces of dispersion rather than a set of events stacked on top of each other across a linear time-line.

Geography in his works

• In Madness and Civilization he concludes about 'Geography of haunted places'.
• In The Birth of the Clinic he deals with three different forms of spatialisations.
• In Discipline and Punish he explores the notion that 'discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space'.
• In his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's Panoptican, he looks at the physical and pscychical control over individuals achieved through the manipulation of spatial relations.

(Philo)

References

Philo, Chris,