John Agnew is Professor and Chair in the Department of Geography at UCLA, Los Angeles, USA. He is the author of Place and Politics (1987), Geopolitics: Revisioning World Politics (1998) and Place and Politics in Modern Italy (2002). He is the co-editor of The Power of Place (1989), American Space/American Place (2002) and the Companion to Political Geography (2002).

Kay Anderson is Professor of Geography at Durham University where she teaches various threads of cultural geography, including colonial cultures of nature, race and identity politics. She has a long history of intellectual engagement with these issues in Australia and Canada, signalled by her book Vancouver's Chinatown (1991) and numerous other publications, as well as the genealogy of the culture concept and the subdiscipline Cultural Geographies (1999). She is also an editor of Progress in Human Geography.

Trevor J. Barnes is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where he has been since 1983. He writes primarily on economic geography, and most recently about its history. He is the author or editor of seven books including Logics of Dislocation (1996), The New Industrial Geography (with Meric Gertler, 1999) and A Companion to Economic Geography (with Eric Sheppard, 2000).

Liz Bondi is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently conducting research on voluntary sector counselling services in Scotland, which develops out of her long-standing concern with gender dimensions of urban social change. She has published extensively in feminist geography and is founding editor of Gender, Place and Culture.

Alastair Bonnett is Reader in Social Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Anti-racism (2000), White Identities (2000) and How to Argue (2001) and is currently researching the construction of the idea of ‘the west’ within the Soviet Union.

Michael Brown is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. His interests include urban political and health geographies. His work has considered issues of sexuality through research on AIDS politics, the spatial metaphor of the closet and questions of care.

Noel Castree is Reader in Geography at Manchester University. Co-editor (with Bruce Braun) of Remaking Reality (1998) and Social Nature (2001), his interests are in the political economy of environmental change. His current research focuses on the ‘dematerialization’ of nature and the transnational exchange and accumulation of genetic information.

[Page xii]Daniel Clayton is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews, where he teaches courses on the geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism. He is the author of Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (2000), and is currently working on a book entitled Colonialism's Geographies and a funded research project entitled ‘Tropicality in decolonisation: Pierre Gourou and French Indochina, 1926!–1972’.

Denis Cosgrove is currently Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles. His work focuses on the roles of vision and graphic images in the western geographical imagination and he has published widely on these issues. His books include Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984; 1997), The Palladian Landscape (1993), Mappings (1999) and Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (2001).

Tim Cresswell teaches Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (1996) and The Tramp in America (2001). He is co-editor (with Ginette Verstraete) of The Politics of Place (2002) and (with Deborah Dixon) Engaging Film (2002). His current research focuses on the politics of mobility from the body to the globe.

Simon Dalby is Professor of Geography and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research interests include political ecology, critical geopolitics, sustainability and environmental security. He is author of Creating the Second Cold War (1990) and Environmental Security (2002). He is also co-editor of Rethinking Geopolitics (1998) and The Geopolitics Reader (second edition, 2003).

Joyce Davidson is currently conducting postdoctoral research on experience and meanings of ‘biophobias’ at the Institute for Health Research, Lancaster University, UK. Her previous work on agoraphobia has been published in journals such as Area and Sociology of Health and Illness, and she has contributed chapters to The Ethics of Place and Geographies of Women's Health.

Mona Domosh is Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. Her research lies at the intersection of cultural, feminist and historical geography. She is the author of Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston (1996), and the co-author of Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (1999), and The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography (2001).

Isabel Dyck is Associate Professor in the School of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching focus on geographies of disability, feminist analyses of body and identity, resettlement and healthcare access issues for immigrant families, and qualitative methodology. Recent research explores the experiences of women with chronic illness; family and femininity in the lives of immigrant mothers and daughters; and the home as a site of long-term care.

Jody Emel is Associate Professor of Geography at Clark University. She teaches courses in resource geography, water resource management and materialist ecofeminism. Her research projects focus on the political economy of natural resource development and social activism, and corporate responsibility in the animal cloning industry. She and Jennifer Wolch are co-editors of Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (1998).

[Page xiii]Meric S. Gertler is Professor of Geography, Goldring Chair in Canadian Studies and a member of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. He studies industrial practices, institutions and cultures in North America and Europe. Among his recent publications are The New Industrial Geography: Regions, Regulation and Institutions (1999, with Trevor Barnes) and The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (2000, with Gordon Clark and Maryann Feldman).

Nicky Gregson is Reader in Geography at Sheffield University. She has research interests in consumption and material culture and is the co-author of Second Hand Worlds (2002, with Louise Crewe) and Servicing the Middle Classes (1994, with Michelle Lowe) and was a member of the WGSG Feminist Geographies collective (1997).

Francis Harvey is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota and teaches Geography and GIScience at the University of Minnesota. His recent work emphasizes the political dimensions of local government bodies' geographic information practices. Working with grassroots groups, he is seeking ways to facilitate decision making processes in communities that engender learning from diverse forms of knowledge while respecting sensitive local knowledges. This work specifically addresses the political problems of knowledge representation.

Steve Hinchliffe works in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University, England. He is co-editor of a number of texts including The Natural and the Social (2000), Understanding Environmental Issues (2003) and Environmental Responses (2003). He has published a range of papers on the place of nature in contemporary western society and is currently working on a project entitled ‘Living Cities’.

Richard Howitt teaches Human Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He works closely with indigenous peoples throughout Australia on issues of the social and environmental impacts of mining, infrastructure projects and regional development. He is currently working with native title claimants in South Australia on negotiations with the state. In 1999, he was awarded the Australian Award for University Teaching (Social Science).

Peter Jackson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the cultural politics of identity and the geographies of contemporary consumption. Recent projects include studies of men's ‘lifestyle’ magazines, domestic consumption and transnational commodity cultures. Publications include Maps of Meaning (reprinted 1992), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (1993), Shopping, Place and Identity (1998), Commercial Cultures (2000) and Making Sense of Men's Magazines (2001).

Jane M. Jacobs is a Lecturer with the Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh. She has published widely in the area of cultural geography, especially in the cultural politics of cities, contested heritage and postcolonial spaces. She is the author of Edge of Empire (1996); co-author, with Ken Gelder, of Uncanny Australia (1988); and co-editor, with Ruth Fincher, of Cities of Difference (1998).

John Paul Jones III is Professor of Geography and Co-director of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky. His theoretical research has examined spatial epistemology, whiteness, objectivity, anti-essentialist identity theory, theories of [Page xiv]space and representation, and poststructuralist geography, among other topics. He also writes widely on geographic methodology. He served as editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers from 1997 to 2002.

Anthony D. King is Professor of Art History and of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has recently published essays in Global Futures (edited by J.N. Pietersee, 2000) and China and Postmodernism (edited by A. Dirlik and X. Zhang, 2000). With Tom Markus, he co-edits the Routledge ArchiText series on architecture and social/cultural theory, for which he is preparing Spaces of Global Cultures.

Larry Knopp is Professor and Head of Geography at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA. His interests cross many of geography's subfields but have tended to coalesce around questions of power as they relate to the spatiality of sexuality, gender and class.

Audrey Kobayashi is Professor of Geography and Women's Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include human geography theories, racism, gender, immigration, geography and law, and employment equity. She has published widely on these themes in a range of journals and popular articles. She also works as an anti-racist activist, and as a consultant in the areas of employment equity and anti-racism.

Robyn Longhurst is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. She is author of Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries (2001) and a co-author of Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (2001). She is interested in feminist cultural geography and is currently researching spatial aspects of body size.

Linda McDowell is Professor of Economic Geography at University College London. She is the author of numerous papers and books about economic change, class and gender relations in the UK including Capital Culture (1997), Gender, Identity and Place (1999) and Young Men Leaving School: White Working Class Masculinity (2001). She is currently investigating the working lives of European migrant women in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s using oral histories.

Cheryl McEwan is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Gender, Geography and Empire (2000) and numerous articles that draw on postcolonial and feminist theories in both contemporary and historical contexts. She is also co-editor (with Alison Blunt) of Postcolonial Geographies (2002).

David Matless is Reader in Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Landscape and Englishness (1998) and co-editor of The Place of Music (1998) and Geographies of British Modernity (2003). His current research focuses on cultures of nature in mid-twentieth-century England, relations of science and landscape, and the work of ecologist and artist Marietta Pallis.

Don Mitchell is Professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996) and Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000). He is the Director of the People's Geography Project. His research focuses on labour, landscape, homelessness and public space.

[Page xv]Katharyne Mitchell is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. She has published extensively in the area of migration, urban geography and transnational studies. Her co-edited book (with Gerard Toal and John Agnew) A Companion Guide to Political Geography, is to be published in 2002. Mitchell's current work centres on the impact of transnational migration on conceptions of education, with a particular focus on how children are educated to become citizens of a particular nation-state.

Pamela Moss is Professor in the Studies in Policy and Practice Program at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research coalesces around themes of power and body emerging from women's experiences of changing environments - women with chronic illness, women's collective autobiographies, and organization of support services for women in crisis. She edited Placing Autobiography in Geography (2001) and Feminist Geography in Practice (2002). She is also active in feminist community politics around issues in women's housing.

Anoop Nayak is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Newcastle. He is the editor of Invisible Europeans (1993, with Les Back) and has published papers on racialization and masculinity in Body and Society, Gender and Education, International Journal of Sociology in Education and many other journals.

Clare Newstead is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. She is currently completing her dissertation on the political implications of regional economic intergration in the Caribbean. In particular she is interested in the struggles of regional social movements to negotiate a public political space at the supranational level.

Anssi Paasi is Professor of Geography at the University of Oulu in Finland. He has written numerous articles on the problems of region and territory building and the social and cultural construction of boundaries and spatial identities. His recent books include Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border (1996) and J.G Granö: Pure Geography (editor, with Olavi Granö, 1997).

Steve Pile is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University. He is author of The Body and the City (1996) and has co-edited a number of books, including City A-Z (2000, with Nigel Thrift) and Social Change (2002, with Tim Jordan). He is currently researching a book on affect and city life.

Elspeth Probyn is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentity (2000), Outside Belongings (1996), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism (co-editor with Elizabeth Grosz, 1995), and Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (1993). She is currently working on a book entitled Dis/connect: Bodies Affect Writing about forms of writing and theories of affect.

Carolina K. Reid is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Washington. She is interested in the interlinkages between welfare and urban housing policy in the United States. Her dissertation focuses on the home ownership experiences of low-income and immigrant families.

[Page xvi]Jennifer Robinson is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her book The Power of Apartheid (1996) explored the relations between space and power in the construction of apartheid cities, and in the emergence of a post-apartheid urban form. More recently, her work aims to develop a postcolonial critique of urban theory and urban development policy. Other interests include feminist political theory. Jenny is also joint editor of Geoforum.

Joanne P. Sharp is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are in political, cultural and feminist geography with a particular interest in popular geopolitics. She recently published a monograph on the role of the media in the construction of US political culture as Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity (2000).

David Slater is Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, England. He is author of Territory and State Power in Latin America (1989), editor of Social Movements and Political Change in Latin America (1994) and co-editor of The American Century (1999). He is also an editor of Political Geography.

Don Slater is Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics. His main research concerns are consumption and consumer culture; the relation between culture and economy; and ethnographies of new media. Recent publications include Consumer Culture and Modernity (1997), The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (with Daniel Miller, 2000) and Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory (with Fran Tonkiss, 2001).

Matthew Sparke is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington. He is the author of Hyphen-Nation-States: Critical Geographies of Displacement and Disjuncture (forthcoming), and is currently working on a National Science Foundation CAREER project to integrate his research on the transnationalization of civil society with a series of educational outreach initiatives to schools in minority neighbourhoods of Seattle.

Ulf Strohmayer is Professor of Geography at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has studied and worked in his native Germany, Sweden, France, the United States and Wales before moving to the west of Ireland. In addition to being a passionate geographer, he is interested in social philosophies and architecture. Combining all three interests, he is currently finishing a book entitled Modernity and the Urban Geography of Paris, 1550–2000.

Sandra Suchet-Pearson is a Lecturer in Human Geography, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has worked closely with indigenous and local communities in Australia, Canada and southern Africa. Her recent doctoral work considered the nature and implications of indigenous involvement in wildlife management and involved fieldwork in several areas.

Nigel Thrift is Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His main interests are in social and cultural theory (especially the development of non-representational theories), the cultural impacts of science and technology, cultural economy and the joys of performance. His most recent publications include Thinking Space (2000, co-edited with Mike Crang), TimeSpace (2001, co-edited with Jon May) and Cities (2002, with Ash Amin).

Adam Tickell is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bristol and has worked at Leeds, Manchester and Southampton. His main research interests lie in the [Page xvii]cultural and political economies of finance and the seemingly endless restructuring of the state, and he is currently exploring the transformative capacities of neoliberalism.

Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is Director of the Masters of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Critical Geopolitics (1996) and a co-editor of A Companion to Political Geography (2002) and The Geopolitics Reader (second edition, 2003) among other works. He is Associate Editor of the journal Geopolitics. His current research interests are in the critical geopolitics of world risk society, and US foreign policy towards the Balkans in the 1990s.

Michael Watts is Chancellor's Professor of Geography and Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for over 20 years. He has published widely in development and geography and on Nigerian history and politics. He is currently working on a book on oil and politics in Nigeria.

Sarah Whatmore is Professor of Geography at the Open University. She has written widely on the labours of division that mark nature off from society, particularly in relation to the socio-material complications of agriculture and food, biodiversity and biotechnology. Her most recent book on these issues is Hybrid Geographies (2002).

Chris Wilbert is Lecturer in Geography at Anglia Polytechnic University, England. He is the co-editor (with Chris Philo) of Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Interactions. Other publications focus on non-human animals and agency, leisure practices in virtual spaces, and environmental politics. He is also a member of the Animal Studies Group in England, which promotes cultural and social studies of animals.

Jennifer Wolch is Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California, where she co-directs the Sustainable Cities Program and conducts research on cultural diversity and attitudes toward animals, and the impacts of urbanization and urban design on animal life. With Jody Emel, she is co-editor of Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (1998).

Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She teaches social and historical geography and her research foci include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and gender, migration and transnational communities. She has published a number of scholarly journal papers and books in these areas, including Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (1996).