Geographies of interpersonal relationships

Interpersonal relationships underpin everything that is ‘social’ or ‘political’ and are fundamentally spatial, therefore a core concern for human geography. Yet despite the growing dominance of relational approaches, geographical scholarship on interpersonal relationships remains limited and fragmented. Geographies of intimacy, encounter, care, and emotion offer rich insight into the spatiality of interpersonal relationships, yet limited dialogue between them constrains our ability to theorise interpersonal relationships as a coherent object of geographical analysis. This paper advances a more joined-up field of geographies of interpersonal relationships to explore how the spatial, institutional, relational, and political dynamics of interpersonal relationships interact.