Full Description
This timely exploration of social geography reveals how inequality and justice unfold across interconnected scales around the globe. Through embodied, relational encounters, the book unpacks how everyday spaces shape who we are and what we might become. Grounded in care and hope, it invites readers to imagine fairer futures and remain committed to meaningful, long-term change.
The text offers a dynamic, case-driven, and sometimes image-driven exploration of pressing social issues in our increasingly unequal, post-pandemic world. Designed for student engagement, the book provides real-world case studies that span the globe, critical concepts, and thought-provoking questions to help readers analyse injustice, build conceptual "toolkits," and imagine routes toward meaningful social change. Rather than offering easy answers, this book equips readers with flexible, practical frameworks—encouraging selective, critical thinking to better understand and communicate complex social problems. Ideal for classroom use and independent study, it empowers students to connect theory with action and to think like geographers committed to justice. The book also includes Engagement Questions, encouraging readers to reflect on the subject of the chapter and the wider topics within the field of social geography.
This book is essential reading for students of social and political geography, and allied fields of urban, health and wellbeing, and political geographies.
Contents
Lists of figures
List of tables
List of boxes
Preface
Acknowledgements
PART 1 - Foundations of the Textbook and a Relational Social Geography
Chapter 1 - Introduction
1.1 Social Geographies in our contemporary times: Themes of the Social, Inequality and Social Justice
1.2 Crosscutting threads: Relationality and encounter
1.3 The Structure of the Book
1.4 Moving Forward: Pedagogic Approach
1.5 The geographies of this book
Chapter 2: Everyday Spaces of Difference, Identity and Inequality
2.1 Geographies of Difference, Production and Social Reproduction
2.2 Identity and Intersectionality
2.3 From Difference to Inequality: Distributional and Recognitional Understandings
2.4 From Inequality to Inequity: Spatial Expressions
2.5 Conclusions
Chapter 3. The State, Citizenship and Rights
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The State and Governance
3.3 Citizenship and the Evolution of Rights
3.4 Geographies of Rights
3.5 Civil rights emerge amid contested geographies of citizenship
3.6 Tracing the Spaces of Exception in 'Ordinary' Everyday Lived Citizenship
3.7 Conclusion
Chapter 4: Geographies of State Support and Welfare
4.1 Social Justice Theories of State Support
4.2 Defining the Welfare State
4.3 The Welfare State Across the World
4.4 A Welfare State Divided and 'Reformed'
4.5 Localising and materialising encounters with the welfare state: street-level bureaucracy and contact zones
4.6 The post-welfare state alongside the pandemic expansion
4.7 Conclusions
Chapter 5: Geographies of Care and Voluntarism
5.1 Geographies of Care
5.2 Care and Social Infrastructure
5.3 The voluntary sector
5.4 Philanthropy
5.5 Conclusions
PART 2 - The Social Geographies of Spaces of Encounter
Chapter 6: Geographies of Youth and Intersectionality
6.1 The Social Construction of Youth
6.2 Intersectionality and (Stigmatised) Youth
6.3 Contemporary Geographies of Youth and the Spaces of Encounter
6.4 Conclusions
Chapter 7: Social Geographies of Race
7.1 Race and Social Geography: Definitions, Segregation and Early Interventions
7.2 Race and Social Geography Today: Social and Spatial Constructions
7.3 Race and Social Geography: Emerging Topics in the 2020s
7.4 Case Study: Immigration in the UK since 2000
7.5 Conclusions
Chapter 8: Poverty and Marginality
8.1 Social Geography and Poverty
8.2 Stigmatisation, invisibility and marginalisation
8.3 Marginality and the racialised American ghetto
8.4 Marginality, waste and excess
8.5 Case study of the poor, racialised and marginalised: Photo essay of homeless service hubs in Los Angeles
8.6 Precarity and the perpetual hustle
8.7 Conclusions
Chapter 9: Disability and Caregiving
9.1 Disability and the Social Geographies of Care
9.2 Disability and the Historical Geography of Care
9.3 Challenging Social and Spatial Exclusion of Disabled People
9.4 Caregivers in/by the Community
9.5 A Geography of Carers
9.6 Conclusions
Chapter 10: Mental Health and Addiction
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Mental Health and Social Geography
10.3 The social geographies of stigmatising mental ill-health
10.4 A societal view on managing stigmatising mental ill-health
10.5 In-between encounters: The social geographies of addiction
10.6 Conclusions: Mundane mental health during and after the pandemic
Chapter 11: The Housing Crisis: Homelessness, Gentrification and Generation Rent
11.1 Home, Housing and Security
11.2 The Housing Crisis and Housing Precarity
11.3 The Decline of Public (Social) Housing
11.4 Housing Crisis in Action: Platform economies and mega-events
11.5 Signs and Outcomes of a Housing Crisis: The State and the 1%
11.6 Signs and Outcomes of the Housing Crisis: Gentrification
11.7 Signs and Outcomes of a Housing Crisis: Homelessness
11.8 'Generation Rent' and Wealth Inequality
11.8 Conclusions
Chapter 12 Gender and Sexuality
12.1: Introduction
12.2: Gender Inequality: politics and work
12.3 Hegemonic and Contested Geographies of Masculinity
12.4 Gendered and sexed geographies beyond binaries
12.5 Conclusions
PART 3. Geographies of Hope for Social Justice
Chapter 13 Geographies of Alternative Spaces, Resilience and Slow/Quiet Activism
13.1: Social Encounters with Quiet Activism
13.2: The commons
13.3: Counterpublics, Safe Spaces and Counter-places
13.4: Resilience
13.5: Abolition Geographies
13.6: Conclusions and shifting encounters with activism and social justice
Chapter 14: Geographies of Resistance and Direct Action
14.1 Introduction
14.2 Public Space, Protest and Occupation
14.3 Unpacking Public Space and Protest
14.4 Case Study: Resistance and The Emergence of the Disabled People's Movement
14.5 Moving beyond parochial accounts of public space and protest
14.6 Going too far? The case of social unrest
14.7 Spaces for activists and hope
14.8 Conclusions
Chapter 15: Conclusions
Towards a more hopeful framing?
