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Geography and Phenomenology

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Encyclopedia of Phenomenology

Introduction

Over the last century, phenomenology has made its way into geography, shaping debates on the nature of the subject, landscape, place, and other key geographic terms. In this overview, we consider three major points of engagement with phenomenology in Anglo-American geography – humanistic geography, postphenomenology, and critical phenomenology – in order to highlight the distinct ways in which phenomenology has been appropriated and put to use (on German geography’s engagement with [new] phenomenology, see also Hasse 2017).

We begin with Anglo-American geography’s first substantive engagement with phenomenology in the 1970s as part of a humanistic turn in the discipline, wherein phenomenology served as a counterpoint to structuralist and positivist approaches (Mercer and Powell 1972; Backhaus 2009; Lea 2009, 373; Cresswell 2013; Ash and Simpson 2016, 48; Jeffrey 2017, 1). In the following decades, humanism fell out of favor, both due to its subjectivist construal of...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Maximilian Gregor Hepach

  2. Department of Geography, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States

    Eden Kinkaid

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  1. Maximilian Gregor Hepach
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  2. Eden Kinkaid
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Correspondence to Maximilian Gregor Hepach .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Nicolas de Warren

  2. Dept of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Ted Toadvine

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Hepach, M.G., Kinkaid, E. (2024). Geography and Phenomenology. In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_363-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_363-1

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