Our lives do not happen outside of a geographical context. Our everyday existence happens in places - in the city where we live, the street, our house, the lecture room, the pub or the café. This course provides a critical introduction to Social Geography, focusing on the relations between place, identity and society. Geography - or place - as this course will reveal, matters to how our identities are understood and our position in society at large. Our identities come to define how we may belong in place, or may be situated as different, and ‘out of place’. Our identities - and where they play out - can be trivial, or they can be a matter of life and death.

The course will cover a range of key concepts, current debates and contemporary issues in Social Geography. The course outlines current geographical thinking about social geographies of place, scale, identity and power. It will also provide a series of ‘lenses’ for thinking about these themes through representations; practices; mobility; struggles and hope for the future. Indeed, drawing examples from around the world and at a variety of geographical scales, the module explores the contested nature of our social world and conflicting meanings of our place within it.