Spatiality (Cultural geography)

Last Call for Papers "Raumwissen und Wissensräume"; Deadline 25-04-12

by Stefan Schreiber

Call for Papers: "Raumwissen und Wissensräume. Interdisziplinärer Theorie-Workshop für NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen" des Lesezirkels der Cross Sectional Group V „Space and Collective Identities“ des Exzellenzclusters „Topoi. The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations” vom 7.–9. August 2012 in Berlin

more info at: http://www.topoi.org/event/raumwissen-und-wissensraume/

Espacios de poder en La Huerta, Quebrada de Humahuaca

by Ivan Leibowicz

Leibowicz, Ivan
2007. Espacios de poder en La Huerta, Quebrada de Humahuaca. Estudios Atacameños, Arqueología y Antropología Surandinas 34: 51-70. San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. ISSN 0716-0925

La construcción y resignificación de espacios fue una estrategia
del Imperio Inca en la conquista de todo su... more La construcción y resignificación de espacios fue una estrategia
del Imperio Inca en la conquista de todo su territorio.
Aquí se aborda esta problemática en el sitio La Huerta en la
quebrada de Humahuaca (Jujuy, Argentina), para entender
cómo el poder imperial impuso una nueva espacialidad sobre
las poblaciones conquistadas, reestructurando y resignificando
el paisaje socialmente construido, y cómo la imposición
de esta espacialidad ideológicamente constituida produjo y
reprodujo las relaciones de dominación y poder promovidas
por el Imperio. Para ello, humanizaremos este paisaje pensándolo
con gente dentro de él, analizando el modo en que
los sujetos se conducían en ese espacio tridimensional, lo
experimentaban y percibían.

Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies. Political Geography. 30 (2), 90-98.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that... more Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

Translations of Europe: Living ‘Paris’ and ‘Venice’ Vicariously in Las Vegas

by Helen Wood

Please contact Helen for more information about this paper

This paper examines the ways Las Vegas presents and revises ideas about ‘Paris’ and ‘Venice’ in the two major... more This paper examines the ways Las Vegas presents and revises ideas about ‘Paris’ and ‘Venice’ in the two major hotel-resorts, Paris Las Vegas and The Venetian. We could say that both hotels offer thematic representations of famous European cities in response to a growing global market for ‘experiences’ rather than physical commodities (following what many critics, such as sociologist John Hannigan for example, refer to as the ‘Disney Model’). However, in saying as much, we should also question the emergence and, indeed, popularity of this most spectacular form of recreation. To what extent, for instance, do these settings mirror American perceptual conventions about the rest of the world rather than they authentically re-create their namesakes? My paper considers the effects of this kind of inter-continental interaction, positioning Las Vegas’ ‘Paris’ and ‘Venice’ as symbols or monuments of what could be thought of as an invasive American gaze. In a kind of reverse colonisation, then, these intensely idealised spaces seem like attempts to transport American culture and ideas back into the Old World. It will also be interesting to consider in some detail whether Paris Las Vegas and The Venetian speak to a collective American unwillingness to engage with the cities of Europe on their own terms (and if they represent instead, a kind of ‘user-friendly’ Europe without the inconvenience of transnational flights or language barriers); or whether these representations of place work to recede the space separating our two continents, thereby blurring cultural boundaries in what might be a mutually-dependent, reciprocal relationship.

Response to "Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?"

by Roxanne Runyon

Written for Professor Melisa Britain's sociology class: queering the social.

Coming Out and Coming of Age in Rural Punjab: An Ethnography of Adolescent Same-Sex Sexuality

by Diepiriye Kuku-Siemons

Built on presentation at: The Changing Social Fabric in the Punjab and Haryana’ at India Institute for Advanced Studies, Shimla, Autumn 2010

Coming Out and Coming of Age in Rural Punjab: An Ethnography of Adolescent Same-Sex Sexuality

by Diepiriye Kuku-Siemons

Built on presentation at: The Changing Social Fabric in the Punjab and Haryana’ at India Institute for Advanced Studies, Shimla, Autumn 2010

Queering Subjectivities: On the praxis of outing gender, race, caste and class in ethnographic fieldwork

by Diepiriye Kuku-Siemons

El archivo en el campo: espacio, conocimiento y deslindes en la reforma agraria mexicana

by Raymond Craib

In Hector Mendoza Vargas and Carla Lois, coords., Historias de la Cartografia de Iberoamerica: Nuevos caminos, viejos problemas (Mexico: Instituto de Geografia de UNAM y INEGI, 2009), 353-378

Public Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Public Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 43 (2), 525-562.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article... more In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen. Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie. Volume 126, Issue 2, Pages 312–329

by Michael Crang

Follow the direct link from university repository for access

This paper examines the role of space in sustaining the action of Austen and Joyce’s writings. Using these contrasting... more This paper examines the role of space in sustaining the action of Austen and Joyce’s writings. Using these contrasting textual styles, it looks at the different geographies produced and the texts the different geographies enable. It examines the role of location and connotations from places in sustaining and enlivening novels. But more than this it looks at how the emplotment of novels build differing spatialities that encode senses of the world. In Austen we find a closed, coherent and
orderly world whose boundaries and exclusions make possible the polite society within. In Joyce’s Ulysses, we instead find the overlaying and intermingling of differing spatial scales and forms. The result is a tension between an ordered, systematic spatiality and a chaotic form when its recapitulative structure exceeds its
own boundaries. In both we find a fictive landscape which helps make the novels work by reframing and re-imagining the world. In this sense they do not take place in space but produce their own characteristic spaces.

The Experience of Home and the Space of Citizenship

by Kirsten Jacobson

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 48, Issue 3, 219–245, September 2010, DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00029.x

I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings.... more I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self-controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self-controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue. I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend— namely, those arising through our way of being-at-home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings.sjp_29 219..245

Space, cultural politics and education

by Kalervo Gulson

Chapter in:
Z. Leonardo (Ed.), (2010). Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education. Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

Placing the ‘post-social’ market: Identity and spatiality in the xeno-economy

by Angus Cameron

With Steve Brown, Simon Lilley & Geoff Lightfoot.
In Marketing Theory. Vol.10, No. 3, 2010:299-312.

Following Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002), an understanding of financial markets as ‘post-social’ environments has... more Following Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002), an understanding of financial markets as ‘post-social’ environments has gained sway. This claim is premised on the idea that new technologies, in particular screen displays of complex real-time financial information, have displaced ‘the market’ from the social and economic relations in which it might otherwise be assumed to be embedded. We argue that recent historical transformations in trading and markets are better characterized as ‘re-spatializations’ involving shifts in the placing and mediation of market spatiality. Material from the City Lives project and other sources is analysed to explore the transformation of the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the early 1980s onwards. Using the notion of ‘xeno-economy’ (cf. Rotman’s (1987) ‘xeno-money’) it is argued that the spatial redistributions of the market did not so much efface sociality as set up new kinds of relations between local traders and institutions, notably mediated through geographical displaced ‘trading arcades’. The immanence of modes of sociality to markets as intrinsically and necessarily social objects is thereby emphasized.

Constellations of ferry (im)mobility: islandness as the performance and politics of insulation and isolation

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Cultural Geographies

Drawing from three years of fieldwork — including over 250 journeys and about 400 interviews — conducted in... more Drawing from three years of fieldwork — including over 250 journeys and about 400 interviews — conducted in ferry-dependent coastal and insular communities of British Columbia, this paper extends the concept of constellation of mobility and provides empirical evidence to argue for its relevance. Coined by Cresswell, the concept of constellations of mobility refers to historically and geographically specific formations of movement inclusive of relational experiences, practices, and politics. By focusing on two of the constitutive parts indicated by Cresswell (experience and route) and a third one originally developed here (remove) ethnographic data description and analysis show how ferry (im)mobility in ferry-dependent communities contributes to spatializing dynamics of insulation and isolation. Positive affective aspects of these spatializations, such as uniqueness and distinction, place-attachment, sense of place, place-identity, safety, connection, and remoteness, as well as negative aspects, such as marginalization, divisiveness, disconnection, fear, and confinement are outlined.

Decoding Disaster, Understanding Society. (Analysis on Formal and Informal Settlements in a Disaster Risk Zone)

by Mickey Eva

In 2009 Metro Manila was caught off guard when Ondoy (Typhoon Ketsana) visited the country - billions of pesos worth... more In 2009 Metro Manila was caught off guard when Ondoy (Typhoon Ketsana) visited the country - billions of pesos worth of infrastructures and property was damaged and millions of liver were affected. The Manggahan floodway was built to prevent flooding in Metro Manila and ot would have been effective had informal settlers not congested the major waterway. Since disaster are not composed only of the natural hazard, but the human factor as well, the mere presence of informal settlements along the Manggahan floodway is not the sole cause of the problem; rather, it is a symptom of a larger problem of different facets. The solution to the problem of ineffective disaster mitigation is not merely technical, but it is also institutional, and more importantly social, thus, understanding the social aspects of disaster is a crucial part of the solution.

Performing Elusive Mobilities: Ritualization, Play, and the Drama of Scheduled Departures

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Environment & Planning D: Society & Space (2011).

The paper examines the process of catching a ferry in time for a scheduled sailing. Through performance,... more The paper examines the process of catching a ferry in time for a scheduled sailing. Through performance, interactionist, and nonrepresentational theory, the paper argues that the weaving of a journey toward the ferry terminal can be a suspenseful drama, within which a scheduled departure works as a potential to be actualized through the performance of skillful acts of mobility. The affective, ritualistic, and playful components of passengers’ journeys are examined through the lens of performance. Timing, spacing, and acting occasion differential ecologies of affect.

Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Mobilities (2011)

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute... more Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts to investigate lineups at small island ferry terminals. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time-spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.

Three Walks Through Fictional Fens: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Gaffer Samson's Luck

by Maria Nikolajeva

co-authored with Gabrielle Cliff Hodges and Liz Taylor

The Interpersonal Expression of Human Spatiality: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Anorexia nervosa

by Kirsten Jacobson

Published in ;Chiasmi International', 8 (2006), 157-73.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between human spatiality and our interpersonal engagements with... more In this paper, I explore the relationship between human spatiality and our interpersonal engagements with others.  My argument is that human communication is essentially spatial in nature, and that it is experienced and expressed as such.  To help me make this argument, I explore the relationship between communication and human spatiality through what I claim is an often misunderstood neurosis: Anorexia nervosa.  I consider how the body can be a spatially manifested expression of our intentions and interests—in other words, how it can serve as a performative gesture that can tell others (and ourselves) about how we feel about the world, and that can also effect changes within an interpersonal system.  I claim that anorexia should not primarily be understood as an eating disorder, but rather as a spatially expressed and felt communication disorder, or said otherwise, as an embodied expression of a person’s systemic withdrawal from the world.  Moreover, I show that anorexia is not an illness of an individual, but rather is a symptom of an ailing system of communication, most commonly that of an ailing family.