Cultural geography I

Abstract

A series of ‘cultural turns’ across human geography have left cultural geography itself with something of an identity crisis. I suggest that overlapping strains of materialism are already providing cultural geography with some of its ‘connective wiring’ and core concerns. Common materialist sensibilities are evident in recent theoretically and empirically engaged work on value and waste, which highlights the transformative work of meaning-making cultural processes in the world. Close contextual engagements with waste have offered geographers an ‘enhanced’ means of grounding their materialisms by turning to processes occurring at the bottom of the value chain. Waste has also provided a window onto the contested cultural work of coding things for value, and the research has served to accentuate an engagement with materiality as transformation and process.