Basics

Question 1

Quantitive focus

Answer 1

Positivist - observable facts and testable theories, free from subjective and cultural beliefs
In geography, about spatial causation and relationships (areal differentiation)

Question 2

Qualitative focus

Answer 2

Late 1960’s onwards – critique of spatial science
‘there is no such thing as objective, value free and politically neutral science, indeed all science, and especially social science, serves some political purpose’ (Peet 1977)

Question 3

Marxist/radical perspective

Answer 3

Capital is the over-riding explanatory factor
Inequality and oppression are outcomes of systematic and unjust action of capitalism
Poor areas are poor because rich areas are rich
Should do something to change this situation

Question 4

Feminist perspective

Answer 4

About power relations between men and women
Significance of feminist theory in social geography – work that challenge the ingrained privileging of male perspectives within academic scholarship and political life (Nayak and Jeffries 2013)
Transformation of patriarchal social systems

Question 5

Feminist perspective - Cresswell

Answer 5

‘grounded political and theoretical approach that starts from the observation that the world is systematically skewed against women’ (Cresswell 2012)

Question 6

Patriarchy

Answer 6

set of social relations through which men are able to control and define women’s roles and cultural representations

Question 7

Structuralism

Answer 7

‘…lies beneath any particular instance in the world and can be used to explain all the variety in experience as we lead our lives’ (Cresswell 2012

Question 8

Post structuralism

Answer 8

Post-structuralists ‘don’t believe that it is possible to identify deep, generative structures beneath the infinite variety of the surface of life’ (Cresswell 2012)

Question 9

Discourse

Answer 9

More than just spoken words (representations, institutions, objects, practices)
Discourse not just about something but also brings it into being (e.g. illness, sexuality)

How do we know?
Where does such knowledge come from?
Who is authorised to profess it,
How is ‘truth’ established?

Question 10

Power relations

Answer 10

entanglements
of domination and resistance
which need to be traced as they
are enacted in spatial contexts

Question 11

subjectivization

Answer 11

truth effects’
How are norms/abnormal constituted?
What effect does the division between normal and abnormal have?
Close attention to the context of such processes (e.g. relation between place and practice)