Geographical South Asian Studies: Current Conceptions - Editorial

Abstract

Since the 1990s, “space”, “place”, “spatiality” and “geographies” have become key categories in social sciences. While disciplines like sociology, economics, social anthropology, history or political science have ignored such categories for a long time, the multiple globalization processes and their implications for societies worldwide after the fall of the Iron Curtain have led to a vigorous debate on spatial notions and their manifold meanings across disciplines. This re-discovery has been apostrophized as the “spatial turn” of social sciences and the humanities. For geography, this shift in perspective had at least two implications: First, it led to a much more pronounced discussion among geographers on what is actually meant by the notion of space. While geography has always understood itself as chorological science, there was surprisingly little controversy about the meaning of the key term of the discipline until the end of World War II.