Cultural geography and enchantment: the affirmative constitution of geographical research

Thrift (2008, p. 65) has identified disenchantment as “[o]ne of the most damaging ideas” within social scientific and humanities research. As we have argued elsewhere, “[m]etanarratives of disenchantment and their concomitant preoccupation with destructive power go some way toward accounting for the overwhelmingly ‘critical’ character of geographical theory over the last 40 years” (Woodyer and Geoghegan 2013, p. 197). Through its experimentation with different ways of working and writing, cultural geography plays an important role in challenging extant habits of critical thinking. In this paper we use the concept of ‘enchantment’ to make sense of the deep and powerful affinities exposed in our research experiences and how these might be used to pursue a critical, yet more cheerful way of engaging with the geographies of the world.