The Possibilities of Encounter

Abstract

Encounters, it seems, are everywhere and nowhere. The recent proliferation of work on encounters within Human Geography and across the social sciences demonstrates an emergent concern for engaging encounters as points of analytical interest. This chapter presents the recent work on urban encounters in context and highlights two important lineages of social theory from which a concern with urban encounters has arisen. The first is the longstanding body of work that has positioned the city as a key site for the negotiation of difference. The second, is a range of theoretical work that considers the excessive qualities of urban life, most notably drawing on non-representational modes of thought and 'new materialist' theories of practice, sensation and the everyday. The chapter then considers urban encounters in relation to the political potentials of the city as a space of transformative capacity and relational interconnections. Finally, it presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters in this book.

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