Contending that culture is one of the most potentially divisive signifiers of human activity, this paper probes some of the complexities that attend the (un)popular culture of illicit -using with which many young people in contemporary Britain are identified. Irvine Welsh's multi-media drugs narrative Trainspotting is drawn on to explore the politics embedded in Edinburgh's low- and high-cultural spaces and interrogate how lived culture is spatially constituted and expressed. Investigations focus on the micro - mappings of Scotland's drug-using "Other" which disorder official cartographies of the capital and illustrate the processes of marginalization. The final part of the discussion argues that the academy's recent cultural turn can inform school geography by contributing to a cultural pedagogy which recognizes that informal sites of learning can be used with young people to examine the multiple dimensions and dynamics of in/exclusion
