Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies

Poststructuralism brought to the field of geography in the late 1980s and 1990s a critique that unsettled both the epistemological (i.e., theories on how we know the world) and ontological (theories on what that world consists of and how it works) moorings of the then dominant theoretical frameworks: spatial science, critical realism and Marxism, and humanism. Its originality lies in its rigorous interrogation of core concepts—such as objectivity and subjectivity, center and margin, materialism and idealism, truth and fiction—that underpin much of modern-day academia. By claiming that any ontology is always already an outcome of epistemology, of our socially constructed ways of knowing, poststructuralists asked that we reflect not only on how we know but also on how elements of ontology—such as space, place, nature, culture, individual, and society—become framed in thought in the first instance. Criticisms that poststructuralists have been concerned only with discourse and representation, as opposed to the “real” material conditions within which these meanings were considered to be embedded, had a profound impact on geographic debate during the 1990s. In responding, poststructuralists have interrogated more closely the ontological ramifications of the work of Derrida and Foucault and have also explored the work of Deleuze and Latour.