Swedish society has recurrently shown a keen geographical sense, meticulously documenting all matters relating to environments, resources and human activities through space and time from the sixteenth century on. Throughout the twentieth century in particular, Sweden won international acclaim for its groundbreaking geographic work on spatial planning, climate change, time-space modelling and landscape history by the likes of Ahlmann, De Geer, Enequist, Hägerstrand, Kant, Olsson and Willia...

Humanistic geography is one of the major emerging themes which has recently dominated geographic writing. Anne Buttimer has been one of the leading figures in the rise of humanistic geography, and the research students she collected round her at Clark University in the 1970s constituted something of a ‘school’ of humanistic geographers. This school developed a significantly new style of geographical inquiry, giving special emphasis to people’s experience of place, space and environment and...

What does it mean to dwell? Every civilization has a story to tell, according to Anne Buttimer, and exploring those stories brings fresh light to modern ideas about the relationship between humanity and its environment. In Geography and the Human Spirit, Buttimer ranges widely from Plato to Barry Lopez, from the Upanishads to Goethe, taking an interdisciplinary look at the ways in which human beings have turned to natural science, theology, and myth to form visio...

In White Innocence Gloria Wekker explores a central paradox of Dutch culture: the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia. Accessing a cultural archive built over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker fundamentally challenges Dutch racial exceptionalism by undermining the dominant narrative of the Netherlands as a "gentle" and "ethical" nation. Wekker analyzes the Dutch media's portrayal of black wom...

Many people regard Hegel's work as obscure and extremely difficult, yet his importance and influence are universally acknowledged. Professor Singer eliminates any excuse for remaining ignorant of the outlines of Hegel's philosophy by providing a broad discussion of his ideas and an account of his major works. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect w...

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written.Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of ...

No study of international relations is complete without consideration of foreign policy processes and an understanding of state security, conflict in global politics, and the relationship between the world economy and international behavior. Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies consists of twelve original essays that point out the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in these research ar...

"In his most ambitious work to date, [Edney] questions the very concept of 'cartography' to argue that this flawed ideal has hobbled the study of maps." —Susan Schulten, author of A History of America in 100 MapsOver the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has p...

This concise encyclopedia is the most complete international survey of sociology ever created in one volume.Contains over 800 entries from the whole breadth of the disciplineDistilled from the highly regarded Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, with entries completely revised and updated to provide succinct and up-to-date coverage of the fundamental topicsGlobal in scope, both in terms of topics and contributorsEach entry includes references and...

Philosophy is to question everything. More than a lifestyle, larger than any single idea, broader than a conviction, philosophy is the love of exploration, of knowledge, of uncertainty, and of that cornerstone of free thinking: doubt. Kevin Perry's "Philosophy" takes the reader on a grand tour of life's biggest questions, examining all that the world's greatest philosophers have said about life and death, love and loss, language, art and God, to name a few.Philosophy is a great com...

We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the n...

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world.The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a n...