Don Mitchell
Syracuse University

  It is humbling – very humbling – to read the creative ways instructors in a range of universities have engaged with and taught Cultural Geography. I wish I were half as clever a teacher. I agree that (almost) all the shortcomings the commentators have identified in the book are indeed shortcomings. I am floored by the ingenious ways they have found to compensate for them.
  Cultural Geography is a product of its moment. If, as James Craine makes clear, the examples often seem dated, that’s because they are. I started collecting materials for writing the book in the summer of 1995. Apartheid had just been overthrown; we were living in the immediate post-Tiananmen, post-Cold War world; capitalism was presumably now unrivaled; the Sex Pistols were back on tour (by ’96, anyway). Most of the writing was done between 1996 and 1999. James does a brilliant job of updating the examples for his students and in doing so better develops the key arguments in the book for his students than the book does. If I were to write a new edition of the book – which Blackwell wanted me to do, and for which I even signed a contract a couple of years ago – I would likely have updated some of the examples (but not all because I think it is important for students to be able to imagine worlds different from their own, including past worlds), but they too would have been instantly dated.