Discourse

Increasingly being used as part of developments in cultural, social, and political geography from the late 1980s to the present, the term discourse relates to the ways in which meanings and identities exist and are created within modes of communication and language. Discourse analysis (the process of examining how we communicate meaning) suggests that modes of communication are not neutral but rather are embedded within the specific social and spatial relations they seek to describe. Within human geographic research, the words and practices used to describe places and people have come under closer scrutiny as theorists have shown not only that language helps to communicate our[Page 112] knowledge and research findings but also that this language—or discourse—itself shapes the kinds of results or experiences that can be described.

Discourse can refer to a range of communicative media—verbal interactions, written materials, media and artistic images, music, abstract symbolic icons, and so on—that come together to fit within a common understanding that makes these practices meaningful. For example, the image of a cross is meaningful as a religious symbol (e.g., signifying a church or a personal religious belief) or as a road safety guide (e.g., signifying a traffic intersection) only if it is recognized as being part of a religious belief system or a set of legal safety rules. If not part of a recognized set of meaningful discourses, this image could simply be viewed as two lines crossing. In this sense, the discursive field—or context—in which words, symbols, images, and gestures take place provides rules for meaningful communication.

The work of French theorist Michel Foucault has been particularly influential in geographic research examining the relationships among discourse, identity, and space. Foucault explored the links among knowledge, power, and discursive formations. Through his writing, Foucault attempted to illustrate that identities and truths that come to be viewed as common knowledge are culturally, historically, and geographically specific; that is, something that is considered “true” about certain people, social practices, or places in one context might not be considered so in another context—depending on what is seen as relatively typical, normal, or natural. The notion of normality is illustrated as being one in which subjective decisions are made about practices and identities that are considered culturally acceptable and thus part of mainstream everyday life. Such an approach toward understanding cultural practices challenges notions of an allegedly universal truth that transcends time and space. By examining the discussion and policing of subjects such as disease, gender, sexuality, and capital punishment, Foucault highlighted that the notion of practices (e.g., discipline, nationalism) or identities (e.g., criminal, hysteric, authority figure) could not exist outside of discourse; they had meaning, and actually came into existence, by being a part of the ways in which knowledge about them was produced, discursively constructed, and monitored through specific social practices. One of the most obviously useful ways of applying these ideas to human geography is illustrated through Foucault's examination of a reformulation of punishment through surveillance and the internalization of outside control in the context of a prison and the ways in which this becomes a space in which symbolic discipline is as important as physical limitations.

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