Rethinking concepts of the strange and the stranger

In this paper, we analyse debates regarding the strange and the stranger. In critiquing these debates in geography and the social sciences, we argue that the stranger as a term is often taken for granted and implies assumed knowledge. In deconstructing ‘the stranger’ in the complexities of the modern world, defined by hyper-mobility, super-diversity and increased contact with ‘strangers’, we question the way in which such definitions might lead us to new distinctions allowing us to think beyond the stranger as a figure in isolation to something more relational and complex in nature. In so doing, we flesh out a way in which the geographies of encounter and thinking across difference might build on these theoretical considerations to further knowledge across and beyond difference as identity category, social construct and lived materiality.