…So Where Are You From?

February 2025
Overall Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ 
To buy this book, click here.

Why this book?
I picked up this book from La Biblioteka on a visit to Sheffield and knew it would form a key part of my half-term reading. Needless to say, it has, and I’ve flown through it- very much enjoying the tour of the world that Carl Lee takes the reader on. Although the blurb and sub-title suggest a book about identity and place, I would argue that the book goes far beyond these concepts and is better considered a compendium of our world in 2025. I say this because, impressively, Lee covers just about everything we teach about in A-Level geography in under 200 pages!

From Chapter 1 titled ‘Home’ to Chapter 7 on ‘The World’ (with explorations of neighbourhoods, cities, regions, nations, and continents between) this book gradually zooms out to consider human and physical processes on an increasingly large scale. As a geography teacher, I particularly enjoyed Chapter 4 ‘Regions’ and Chapter 6 ‘Continents’. This might be because in our current geography curriculums and specifications the study of ‘regions’ both between the local and national, and between the national and global, is the scale most neglected. We frequently explore the national and the global but with far less time given over to any exploration of ‘regions’ (or this is certainly my experience to date). Therefore, reading these chapters made me pause and think about the notion of a region and the opportunities and weaknesses of considering more processes on this scale in our classrooms.

For teachers:
Perhaps without meaning too, Carl Lee’s discussion of geography, identity, and place ticks off pretty much all of the content of Edexcel’s Migration, Identity and Sovereignty unit. Although, as I said above, come to think of it, Lee discusses nearly everything from the A-Level course- the human topics at least. Globalisation, national identity, deindustrialisation, place attachment, rural-urban migration, development theories, tax havens, Thatcher’s deregulation… I could go on… it’s got it all and, as a result, is an incredibly useful book for those who teach these topics. If you teach about Sheffield and / or Manchester, the discussion of the geography and history of these cities would make this book particularly invaluable for you.

In terms of what I’ve taken directly to use in my classroom resources, it is as follows:
p.7 on why national identities are powerful;
p.38 – 43 on the academic framework for the concept of place attachment
p.47 on the increasing separation between community and neighbourhood within advanced capitalist economies
p.89-91 on the concept of ‘non-places’ and how this phase might describe the increasing homogeneity of the global urban experience
p.106-107 on cultural landscapes and how there is nothing unaltered in the landscape of the UK, it is a cultural landscape.

To buy this book, click here.