This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading international scholars which explores the geographies of making and craft, and the different understandings of 'making'. It traces the geographies of making practices from the body, to the workshop and studio, to the wider socio-cultural, economic, institutional and historical contexts. The place of creative practices in 'making' geographies and worlds is considered, as well as the multiple lives of things in creatively re-working objects.

This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading international scholars to explore the geographies of making and craft. It traces the geographies of making practices from the body, to the workshop and studio, to the wider socio-cultural, economic, political, institutional and historical contexts. In doing so it considers how these geographies of making are in and of themselves part of the making of geographies. As such, contributions examine how making bodies and their intersections with matter come to shape subjects, create communities, evolve knowledge and make worlds. This book offers a forum to consider future directions for the field of geographies of making, craft and creativity. It will be of great interest to creative and cultural geographers, as well as those studying the arts, culture and sociology.

This book provides the first sustained critical exploration, and celebration, of the relationship between Geography and the contemporary Visual Arts. With the growth of research in the Geohumanities and the Spatial Humanities, there is an imperative to extend and deepen considerations of the form and import of geography-art relations. Such reflections are increasingly important as geography-art intersections come to encompass not only relationships built through interpretation, but also those built through shared practices, wherein geographers work as and with artists, curators and other creative practitioners. For Creative Geographies features seven diverse case studies of artists’ works and exhibitions made towards the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Organized into three analytic sections, the volume explores the role of art in the making of geographical knowledge; the growth of geographical perspectives as art world analytics; and shared explorations of the territory of the body, In doing so, Hawkins proposes an analytic framework for exploring questions of the geographical “work” art does, the value of geographical analytics in exploring the production and consumption of art, and the different forms of encounter that artworks develop, whether this be with their audiences, or their makers.

Explore your Creative Self with Mixed-media Maps You don't have to be a world traveler or a professional cartographer to embark on a grand journey of self-discovery through mapmaking. Personal Geographies gives you the tools and techniques you'll need to create artful maps of your self, your experiences and your personal journey. Chart the innermost workings of your mind, document your artistic path and create an unfolding maze of your future dreams and goals. Inside Personal Geographies you'll discover: • 21 mixed-media map projects featuring artistic techniques like working with alcohol inks and pochoir, painting on a black surface and carving custom stamps • Insight into the world of traditional and contemporary maps and how they relate to and inspire personal mapmaking • A gallery of maps by contributors from around the world to spark your own creativity From mapping your head, hands and heart to recording powerful memories or experiences, the maps in Personal Geographies are a gateway into the fascinating and meaningful world of you.

To be in one's comfort zone is perceived to be conservative, and socially and culturally unadventurous. At the same time the embodied, material experience of 'comfort' is anticipated for satisfying experiences of everyday life. To comfort is to support and strengthen. Bringing together conceptual and empirical research that deploys the lens of comfort to make sense of the textures of everyday life in a variety of geographical contexts, this is the first volume to engage critically with 'comfort' and 'discomfort' as substantive concerns for Human Geography. Comfort and discomfort have come to the fore in a range of works examining the relations between place and emotion, the senses, affect and materiality. This emergence reflects in part, we argue, how questions of comfort intersect humanistic, cultural-political and materialist registers of understanding. Geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have recognized 'comfort' as more than just an emotion through which we understand the world; rather, through its presence, absence and pursuit worlds are actively made and un-made. Advancing this recognition, in this volume we will engage seriously with 'comfort' as both an analytic approach and object of analysis. Geographers have begun to generate rich empirical materials on '(dis)comfort' and '(dis)comforting' experiences but, despite its colloquial prevalence as a term to understand our relationship to space and place, the disciplinary engagement with comfort remains largely under-theorized and in need of consolidation. Human Geography would benefit from a sustained commitment to defining, understanding and developing 'comforting geographies'; this book meets that need. Comfort and discomfort, we argue, provide a lens through which to develop new insights on central geographical themes, including embodied relationships to environments, encounters with difference, the material textures of place, and spaces of health an

Creativity has become part of the language of regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the 21st century. Concepts such as the creative class, the creative industries and bohemian cultural clusters have come to dominate thinking about how creativity can contribute to urban renewal. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity offers a critical perspective on the instrumental use of arts and creative practices for the purposes of urban regeneration or civic boosterism. Several important contributions are brought into one volume to examine the geography of locally embedded forms of arts and creative practice. There has been an explosion of interest in both academic and policy circles in the notion of creativity, and its role in economic development and urban regeneration. This book argues for a rethinking of what constitutes creativity, foregrounding non-economic values and practices, and the often marginal and everyday spaces in which creativity takes shape. Drawing on a range of geographic contexts including the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, the book explores a diverse array of creative practices ranging from art, music, and design to community gardening and anticapitalist resistance. The book examines working class, ethnic and non-elite forms of creativity, and a variety of creative spaces, including rural areas, suburbs and abandoned areas of the city. The authors argue for a broader and more inclusive conception of what constitutes creative practice, advocating for an approach that foregrounds economies of generosity, conviviality and activism. The book also explores the complexities and nuances that connect the local and the global and finally, the book provides a space for valuing alternative, marginal and displaced knowledges. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity provides an important contribution to the debates on the creative class and on the role of value of creative knowledge and skills. The book aims to contribute to contemporary academic debates regarding the development of post-industrial economies and the cognitive cultural economy. It will appeal to a wide range of disciplines including, geography, applied art, planning, cultural studies, sociology and urban studies, plus specialised programmes on creativity and cultural industries at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels.

In the past decade, there has been a convergence of transdisciplinary thought characterized by geography’s engagement with the humanities, and the humanities’ integration of place and the tools of geography into its studies. GeoHumanities maps this emerging intellectual terrain with thirty cutting edge contributions from internationally renowned scholars, architects, artists, activists, and scientists. This book explores the humanities’ rapidly expanding engagement with geography, and the multi-methodological inquiries that analyze the meanings of place, and then reconstructs those meanings to provoke new knowledge as well as the possibility of altered political practices. It is no coincidence that the geohumanities are forcefully emerging at a time of immense intellectual and social change. This book focuses on a range of topics to address urgent contemporary imperatives, such as the link between creativity and place; altered practices of spatial literacy; the increasing complexity of visual representation in art, culture, and science and the ubiquitous presence of geospatial technologies in the Information Age. GeoHumanties is essential reading for students wishing to understand the intellectual trends and forces driving scholarship and research at the intersections of geography and the humanities disciplines. These trends hold far-reaching implications for future work in these disciplines, and for understanding the changes gripping our societies and our globalizing world.