Conjunctural Analysis

Abstract

Conjunctural analysis, a social science epistemology rooted in deeply contextualized and situated modes of explanation, was initially developed by the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to understand how particular spatiotemporal conjunctures diverge from the general structural tendencies driving society, and to identify emancipatory political interventions for social transformations. Drawing on these philosophers, Stuart Hall and colleagues in British cultural studies undertook a pioneering conjunctural analysis of the crisis of Fordism and the rise of Thatcherism in Britain, which stretches back historically and teases out the complex relations between the general and the particular. Geographers have implicitly (without naming it as such) or explicitly extended this approach by also attending to the multiple spatialities shaping what happens in place, stretching explanations to account for influences from elsewhere and across different scales, and examining how societal relations and processes are bound up with biophysical processes. They are also applying conjunctural analysis to extend relational approaches to inter‐place comparison.

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