Postmodern turn in geography

The emergence of the postmodern debate during the 1990s has transformed the cultural and intellectual scene across a whole range of disciplines, from literary criticism, the visual arts, and architecture to large portions of philosophy and the social sciences, all of which witnessed an unprecedented series of theoretical innovations and critical “streams” that are commonly brought together under the “postmodern” umbrella. This revolutionary set of events deeply marked human geography, especially in the English-speaking world. On the one hand, the generalized “rediscovery” of the spatial dimension in social theory and philosophy brought by the postmodern turn drew new attention to geographical thought and the geographical tradition; on the other hand, the postmodern contributed in an important way to the “return” of geography to the mainstream of the social sciences, paving the way to a new and highly prolific interdisciplinary dialog. The “postmodern turn” has by now become an integral part of the geographical tradition, and it is widely accepted that its advent has significantly contributed to revitalizing disciplinary debates and opening geographers’ eyes to a whole series of new research avenues and approaches.