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Consumption Geographies: Turns or Intersections?

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Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural Geography

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Abstract

The last 20 years have seen an explosion of work on geographies of consumption. Much of the research has been informed by approaches arising from the New Cultural Geographies. While cultural geographers have examined issues of representation, identity, landscape, and sociality, economic geographers continued to focus on geographies of retail and of commodities informed by political economic and commodity chain perspectives. Although the need to integrate production and consumption has long been discussed and the merits of particular approaches debated, economic and cultural perspectives have until recently remained relatively largely separate. As geographies of consumption expanded rapidly in the latter decades of the twentieth century they have not so much undergone a singular economic or cultural turn but have been characterised by the growing intersection of cultural and economic perspectives through particular research agendas. The chapter discusses these and then concludes with a discussion of research themes in which perspectives derived from cultural and economic geographies are providing new insights into the nature of social and spatial change.

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Mansvelt, J. (2012). Consumption Geographies: Turns or Intersections?. In: Warf, B. (eds) Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural Geography. GeoJournal Library, vol 104. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2975-9_4

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