Michel Foucault's Geography

From Geography

Background

Michel Foucault's geographical thinking and attentiveness to spatial relations, though less acknowledged in geographical theory, is however seen by some (Edward Soja and Chris Philo, for instance) as a blueprint for postmodern geography (Philo, 2000).

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 conceptualised through spaces of dispersion rather than as a set of events stacked on top of each other across a linear time-line. Foucault reasserted the importance of space, place and geography to stories of history and social thought(Philo, 2000). His concept of spaces of dispersion advocates a way of seeing the social world through space, if one might say so, as a space across which all events and phenomenon relevant for substantive inquiry to be dispersed (Hubbard, Kitchin, Valentine,2004 pp.124.)

Geography in some of Foucault's 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 psychical control over individuals achieved through the manipulation of spatial relations.

(Philo, 2000, pp.221-222)

References

• Philo, Chris, 2000, Foucault's Geography, in Crang, Mike & Thrift, Nigel, (eds) Thinking Space, Routledge, London.
• Hubbard, Phil., Kitchin, Rob., Valentine, Gill (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space and Place, Sage, London.

Contributors

• Page created by Kolar Aparna==Kolaraparna 21:23, 14 September 2011 (UTC)