Reanimating Regions

<p>Writing regions undertaking a regional study was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically or arguing culturally historically and politically with regions was deemed to be old-fashioned. Yet the region is and always will be a central geographical concept and thinking about regions can tell us a lot about the history of the discipline called geography. </p><p>Despite taking up an identifiable place within the geographical imagination in scholarship and beyond <i>region</i> remains a relatively forgotten under-used and in part under-theorised term. <i>Reanimating Regions</i> marks the continued reinvigoration of a set of disciplinary debates surrounding regions the regional and regional geography. Across 18 chapters from international interdisciplinary scholars this book writes and performs region as a temporary permanence something held stable not fixed and absolute at different points in time for different purposes. There is as this expansive volume outlines no single reading of a region.</p><p>Reanimating Regions collectively rebalances the region within geography and geographical thought. In renewing the geography of regions as not only a site of investigation but also as an analytical framework through which to write the world what emerges is a powerful reworking of the geographic imagination. Read against one another the chapters weave together timely commentaries on region and regions across the globe with a particular emphasis upon the regional as played out in the United Kingdom and regional worlds both within and beyond Europe offering chapters from Africa and South America. Addressing both the <i>political</i> and the <i>cultural</i> this volume responds to the need for a consolidated and considered reflection on <i>region</i> the regional and regional geography speaking directly to broader intellectual concerns with performance aesthetics identity mobilities the environment and the body.</p>