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Towards a geography of heterogeneous associations

Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Wales College Cardiff, PO Box 906, Cardiff CF1 3YN, UK

Dualisms have been a recurring feature of sociospatial analysis. Micro/macro, local/global, subject/object, particular/universal – one or more of these dualistic frameworks can be discerned in many geographical texts. Dissolving the dualisms, somehow finding a way through the gaps which open up between them, requires the development of an approach which allows the various scales of social life to be treated symmetrically so that we never have to shift to a different register when studying large-scale or ‘big’ (usually termed structural) phenomena. It is proposed in this article that a geography of associations, which traces how actions are embedded in materials and then extended through time and space, provides one means of overcoming the dualisms. Drawing upon actor-network theory it is argued that interactions are both ‘localized’ and ‘globalized’ using nonhuman entities and these permit certain actor-networks to act at a distance on others. Patterns of centrality and marginality thus emerge as particular power geometries are drawn. Tracing these power geometries by following the associations can only be undertaken in a nondualistic fashion.

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