Space, Knowledge and Power - Foucault and Geography by Stuart Elden and Jeremy Crampton

From architectural plans for asylums, hospitals and prisons; to the exclusion of the leper and the confinement of victims in the partitioned and quarantined plague town; from spatial distributions of knowledge to the position of geography as a discipline; to his suggestive comments on heterotopias, the spaces of libraries, of art and literature; analyses of town planning and urban health; and a whole host of other geographical issues, Foucault’s work was always filled with implications and insights concerning spatiality. many geographers, philosophers and social scientists have developed these issues in their own work, either through a sustained analysis of Foucault’s own work, or in application in a range of other areas. Taking these debates to a new level, this book provides a series of challenges, appreciations, critiques and developments concerning the relation(s) between Foucault and geography. In its sustained and in-depth encounter between Foucault and questions of space, place and geography Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography has two main aims. The first is to provide a comprehensive overview of Foucault’s engagement with geographical concerns and geography’s engagement with Foucault; the second is to begin to open up a new range of themes and questions for the continuation of that engagement. that continued engagement is, it seems to us, two-way, since there is much of Foucault’s own work still to discover: either in untranslated material published in his lifetime, or in the fascinating lecture courses that are appearing in French for the first time, and slowly being translated into english. as the French series editors have noted, because Foucault used these lectures as explorations rather than outlines for books, they do not reduplicate the studies he published in his lifetime. Foucault therefore still lives for us through these posthumous publications.


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