Accounting for space: Why geographers should explore the spatiality of balance sheets and how we can do it

This special issue introduction argues that financial and economic geography can be enriched by an engagement with the field of critical accounting. Drawing from the seven papers in the special issue, we highlight the advantages of this engagement in (1) opening up new sources of financial data; (2) improving the techniques through which geographers ‘follow the money’; (3) highlighting the ideology behind how accounting rationalizes finance’s mode of accumulation; (4) exploring the possibility of creating ‘alternative accounts’ of economic processes; and, (5) describing how private finance and the public sector are intertwined. As a whole the work in this special issue argues that accounting is not merely a technical process but a political site through which finance’s view of the world and spatialities are materialized.