Geographies of Worth: Rethinking the Spaces of Critical Theory

This timely book provides a much needed spatial intervention into existing philosophical debates about ethics. It offers an innovative argument for the reconfiguration of critical spatial theory around 'ethical' modes of action, such as care, generosity, hospitality, and responsibility. This book engages with a range of perspectives across the social sciences and develops ideas drawn from philosophical pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, and theories of action, to offer a framework for analysing the relationships between everyday normative practices of concern and the emergence of public issues. Geographies of Worth provides an engaging and unique account of the relevance of key ideas and thinkers from continental philosophy to the social sciences. It reconstructs the movement of ideas through which key interpretations of philosophers have crystallized into understandings of subjectivity, power, and politics. It draws into focus the family resemblances between, and borrowings, by this tradition from analytical moral and political philosophy. In drawing these traditions together into dialogue, the book develops an original account of the politics of acknowledgement. By examining the spatial and temporal figures deployed by different theoretical traditions, this book argues for a reconfiguration of critical analysis in the social sciences away from the focus on recognition and resistance. A concern with the politics of acknowledgement focuses on analysing multiple ways of relating enacted through practices such as promising, caring, taking the responsibility, and being hospitable. This book synthesises current thinking in human geography and related spatial social sciences with debates in political theory, moral philosophy, and social theory. This seminal contribution will pave the way for the development of alternative theoretical positions.