Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Building on broader developments in critical social theory, geographers have made significant strides in explicating the assumptions, motivations, and values involved in place naming.This has led to an emphasis on understanding the processes involved in the inscription, subversion, and revision of place names.Despite the increasingly sophisticated approaches found in place-name studies, the field of toponymy occupies a relatively minor position in academic geography.There are varied and complex reasons for this marginality, but perhaps the most salient critique is that place-name research has been slow to engage broader developments in geographic and social theory.The idea of scale, for example, has been the subject of wide-ranging discussions across many subfields of geography (Herod and Wright, 2002; Sheppard and McMaster, 2004).Numerous geographers have explored the use of scale in the spatial framing, assertion, and contestation of power, yet place-name research, even that involving explicitly scalar processes, often ignores how constructions of "scale" are deployed.In line with broader trends in geographic research, Brenner (2001: 592) argues that "notions of geographical scale as a fixed, bounded, self-enclosed and pregiven container are currently being superseded . . .by a highly productive emphasis on process, evolution, dynamism and sociopolitical contestation."Research on the process of scaling has covered a range 1
Source: ACME
Author: Hagen, Joshua
Institution: Marshall University
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2162098732