After globalisation

Abstract

Globalisation has become an almost ubiquitous term in academic debates, policy circles, and popular culture. In this paper we critically consider geography’s characteristic form of engagement with the multifaceted features of globalisation discourses and realities. Globalisation provides an entry point for assertions of the conceptual and empirical importance of space, place, context, and locality. However, we argue that this form of engagement subordinates the central, and conceptually problematic, historicism of globalisation to a set of more manageable disciplinary concerns. We provide a critical discussion of the historicist dimensions of globalisation discourses, and indicate some of the ways in which critical accounts can reproduce this historicism. By raising this problem, we suggest that space and spatiality are not always or automatically the most significant entry point for conceptual critique and engagement. The case of globalisation therefore indicates some of the limits of established forms of interdisciplinary dialogue between critical human geography and related fields