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Introduction: Doing cultural geography

‘Doing cultural geography’, the theme of this special issue, arose out of discussions about how cultural geography does things differently—both theoretically and methodologically. The Cultural Geography Study Group of the Institute of Australian Geographers held a conference on this theme in Melbourne in September 2003. What became obvious over the duration of the conference was that cultural geographers are engaging in an increasingly diverse range of enquiries. One coherent link uniting the subdiscipline, however, is the commitment to the production of knowledge that attends to difference and does not limit possibilities—possibilities for thinking and acting. It is also clear that our challenge to the discipline is to provide some grounding to this diverse array of intellectual projects. This special issue brings together some of the papers that were presented in Melbourne and others that were contributed following a subsequent call for papers. This introduction to the special issue does two things: it first surveys selected arguments regarding the validity of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography, and the status of cultural geography in Australian universities. Second, it discusses how the papers collected here demonstrate ongoing developments within and beyond the subdiscipline. We hope to show in our introduction, and through the collection as a whole, that responses to these debates require less overt engagement with a binary politics of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ method in geography, than demonstration, through research-in-action, of the potency and potential of cultural geography as a pursuit, rather than just a field of subject matter.