Social Production Of Space Research Articles

The Geostationary Orbit: A Critical Legal Geography of Space's Most Valuable Real Estate

This chapter attends to the legal and political geographies of one of Earth's most important, valuable, and pressured spaces: the geostationary orbit. Since the first, NASA, satellite entered it in 1964, this small, defined band of Outer Space, 35,786km from the Earth's surface, and only 30km wide, has become a highly charged legal and geopolitical environment, yet it remains a space which is curiously unheard of outside of specialist circles. For the thousands of satellites which now underpin the Earth's communication, media, and data industries and flows, the geostationary orbit is the prime position in Space. The geostationary orbit only has the physical capacity to hold approximately 1500 satellites; in 1997 there were approximately 1000. It is no overstatement to assert that media, communication, and data industries would not be what they are today if it was not for the geostationary orbit.------ This chapter provides a critical legal geography of the geostationary orbit, charting the topography of the debates and struggles to define and manage this highly-important space. Drawing on key legal documents such as the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, the chapter addresses fundamental questions about the legal geography of the orbit, questions which are of growing importance as the orbit’s available satellite spaces diminish and the orbit comes under increasing pressure. Who owns the geostationary orbit? Who, and whose rules, govern what may or may not (literally) take place within it? Who decides which satellites can occupy the orbit? Is the geostationary orbit the sovereign property of the equatorial states it supertends, as these states argued in the 1970s? Or is it a part of the res communis, or common property of humanity, which currently legally characterises Outer Space? As challenges to the existing legal spatiality of the orbit from launch states, companies, and potential launch states, it is particularly critical that the current spatiality of the orbit is understood and considered.------ One of the busiest areas of Outer Space’s spatiality is international territorial law. Mentions of Space law tend to evoke incredulity and ‘little green men’ jokes, but as Space becomes busier and busier, international Space law is growing in complexity and importance. The chapter draws on two key fields of research: cultural geography, and critical legal geography. The chapter is framed by the cultural geographical concept of ‘spatiality’, a term which signals the multiple and dynamic nature of geographical space. As spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre assert, a space is never simply physical; rather, any space is always a jostling composite of material, imagined, and practiced geographies (Lefebvre 1991). The ways in which a culture perceives, represents, and legislates that space are as constitutive of its identity--its spatiality--as the physical topography of the ground itself. The second field in which this chapter is situated—critical legal geography—derives from cultural geography’s focus on the cultural construction of spatiality. In his Law, Space and the Geographies of Power (1994), Nicholas Blomley asserts that analyses of territorial law largely neglect the spatial dimension of their investigations; rather than seeing the law as a force that produces specific kinds of spaces, they tend to position space as a neutral, universally-legible entity which is neatly governed by the equally neutral 'external variable' of territorial law (28). 'In the hegemonic conception of the law,' Pue similarly argues, 'the entire world is transmuted into one vast isotropic surface' (1990: 568) on which law simply acts. But as the emerging field of critical legal geography demonstrates, law is not a neutral organiser of space, but is instead a powerful cultural technology of spatial production. Or as Delaney states, legal debates are “episodes in the social production of space” (2001, p. 494). International territorial law, in other words, makes space, and does not simply govern it. Drawing on these tenets of the field of critical legal geography, as well as on Lefebvrian concept of multipartite spatiality, this chapter does two things. First, it extends the field of critical legal geography into Space, a domain with which the field has yet to substantially engage. Second, it demonstrates that the legal spatiality of the geostationary orbit is both complex and contested, and argues that it is crucial that we understand this dynamic legal space on which the Earth’s communications systems rely.

A Case Study of the Production of Educational Sanctuary in One Migrant Classroom

A notion of educational sanctuary as the production of social space in which historically marginalized and demonized social groups may experience—in and through social practice, either inside or outside of the home and school—the intellectual and artistic freedom, social equity, and concrete institutional access to educational services they are precluded from enjoying in typical everyday settings is introduced and elaborated. The object of study is a 90-minute lecture/presentation/discussion in a summer migrant educational programme at a University of California campus. Analytic focus is given to: a) the collective logic-of-inquiry or the conceptual path participants travel; b) co-authorship of meaning or the ways in which social actors create interactional openings for one another to ply their learning; and c) language and gestures of engagement in the production of an “essential We” social order.

‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.

Space and sustainability: an exploratory essay on the production of social spaces through city‐work

The purpose of this essay is to locate the making of social spaces as a particularly salient approach for understanding sustainability. Castells’ spaces of places and spaces of flows are interpreted generically and a new social theory, Jacobs’ moral syndromes, is introduced to underpin the production of these two spatial forms: commercial agents through their network practices make spaces of flows; guardian agents through their territorial practices make spaces of places. Both spaces are considered to be the outcome of city‐work. A new division of labour is devised: four primary types of city‐work are identified: hinter‐work, net‐work, territorial‐work and hierarch‐work. These ideas are considered as tools for thinking about developing spatial policies for sustainability. In conclusion, Jacobs’ theory is used to discuss what the general strategy has to be for tackling sustainability.

Taking Place: The Spatial Contexts of Science, Technology, and Business (review)

Reviewed by: Taking Place: The Spatial Contexts of Science, Technology, and Business Greg Downey (bio) Taking Place: The Spatial Contexts of Science, Technology, and Business. Edited by Enrico Baraldi, Hjalmar Fors, and Anders Houltz . Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2006. Pp. xxi+402. $49.95. The editors of Taking Place declare that in the history of science, technology, medicine, and business, "place matters because history matters" (p. 374), and I could not agree more. This anthology's fourteen essays largely cover technoscience in the Swedish context, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present. They successfully bring together insights from both science/technology studies (how social relations are implicated in the coalescing or shattering of conceptual and material objects of technoscience) and contemporary geography (how spatial and temporal environments and relationships are implicated in these same processes) to reveal "the mutual interplay between spatiality and sociality" in the historical process (p. xii). Together, the wide-ranging contents demonstrate the editors' contention that "science is not simply an intellectual exercise conducted in a vacuum, [but] a highly social and material activity that needs to take place, literally, somewhere" (p. 375). Neither space nor time is simply a container for social activity in these stories; rather, spatial–temporal conditions are dialectically related to technoscientific productions. While "the places where science is performed are shaped and constructed by the very social side of scientific activities," these same places "in turn affect the daily performance of science" (p. 375). [End Page 416] Some of the analytical strategies will seem very familiar. Sociology-of-science research has long contrasted the constructed, quantified, and (presumably) controlled space of the laboratory with the more complicated and ambiguous world of economic, social, and political relations outside of the formal research site. The essays by Hjalmar Fors, Emma Shirran, Sven Widmalm, and Maja Fjaestad all fall into this tradition, mainly relying on architectural studies of sites as diverse as hospitals and nuclear reactors to interrogate the processes that occur there. Other authors take the wider scale of urban and regional geography as their analytic focus, with impressive results. Essays by Jenny Beckman, Per Lundin, Arne Kaijser, and May-Britt O¨hman demonstrate how conceptual examples drawn from sources as diverse as Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis can be applied to technoscientific landscape studies. The question of whether new global, technological, and largely interurban "networks" of one sort or another are a new kind of spatial–temporal relation demanding a new kind of theoretical and methodological analysis has been well debated in geography over the last two decades—especially by Manuel Castells and David Harvey—and a few of the essays here build upon these insights as well. Those by May-Britt O¨hman; Håkan Håkansson, Annalisa Tunisini, and Alexandra Waluszewski; Enrico Baraldi and Torkel Strömsten; Francesco Ciabuschi and Mats Forsgren; and Enrico Baraldi show how a careful consideration of flows—of people, materials, and ideas—can help uncover the shared history of spatially and temporally distributed projects. These essays tend to move away from technoscientific concerns, however, and into more business-oriented subjects. Finally, the last two essays explore other geographic traditions such as the spatiality of visual culture and knowledge organization (Olof Ljungstrom) or the time– space geographies of professional lives and institutional relations (Henrik Mattsson). I was surprised to see so little discussion of the space-and-time parameters of information and communication infrastructures in this volume, but, frankly, it was also refreshing to be reminded that a wider variety of technological systems than just telegraphs and the internet can (and do) engage in a spatial–temporal dialectic with social life. Apart from this lack of connection to "cybergeography" work by the likes of Stephen Graham, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Matthew Zook, Taking Place is a great primer both for students and for faculty in the history of science, medicine, technology, and business on how to engage with some of the leading geographical thinking of the past two decades, that of Castells, Harvey, Cronon, and others. Classic geographic analysis by Torsten Hägerstrand (time– space geographies), Henri Lefebvre (the social production of space), Allan...

Micro-spaces: church porches in pre-modern England

The ‘spatial turn’ in some recent historical and historical geographical writing has been theoretically invigorating. The concern with the representation of space – the discursive emphasis – has collided with ideas about the social production of space. Do these notions have to be dichotomous? Indeed, should we restrict ourselves to one or the other? This examination of a micro-space – the porch, predominantly the south porch, of English pre-modern parish churches – attempts to interpret the range of meanings and actions which were accorded to and took place within this small, but significant, space. In dissecting a considerable, if disparate, amount of empirical material, it acknowledges the complexities, even contingencies, of space. It suggests not a return to Kantian notions of space as container, but the varying influences of impositions of the representation of space and of social action on the production of space, without privileging either. Whilst recognizing that both acted upon and within space, we should allow for the differences and diversity within them.

Places of resistance

This paper examines the changing nature of spatial discourses and the dynamics of grassroots organizing in the migrant squatter settlement of Cova da Moura, in the periphery of Lisbon. It focuses on official discourses on this neighbourhood and the ways in which these have shaped local collective organizing. The first part of the paper maps out the origins and development of the settlement, focusing on the emergence of migrant neighbourhood‐based organizations. The second part explores how dominant official discourses and policies have produced, in the last three decades, an ideology of illegality and of ghettoization. The discourses of space are understood in relation to the concrete social and historical conditions in which they emerge. In the third part, special emphasis is given to the processes of negotiation, and resistance produced by local collective mobilization. It is argued that the ideologies of illegality and ghettoization have been a major driving force in shaping power relations and the nature of social action and collective consciousness. At the broader level, the paper draws on the case study of Cova da Moura to illustrate how grassroots mobilizing in slum neighbourhoods needs to be understood in the battleground of competing forces for the social production of space. This spatial politics constitutes the meeting place where domination meets resistance, where collective struggles become expressions of a greater awareness for the intersection of oppression, marginalization, exploitation and space.

Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control

The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of ‘materiality’ to understanding changing modes of control in organizational life. In doing this, materiality is not placed in a dualistic relationship with social relations. Rather a conceptualization of ‘social materiality’ is developed whereby social processes and structures and material processes and structures are seen as mutually enacting. In developing this concept of social materiality, I have drawn upon insights from three areas of social theory. These are studies of material culture, Lefebvre’s work on the ‘social production of space’, and sociological and phenomenological approaches to embodiment. The final section of the article explores how control and materiality are linked through spatial politics in one organizational case.

Recent Dissertations

Agbe-Davies, Anna Sophia. "Up in smoke: Pipe-making, smoking, and Bacon's Rebellion." PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Alwyn, Eleanor. "Traditions in a colonized world: Two realities of a First Nation." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Ambelang, Joel R. "Zuya: A journey of understanding Lakota leadership through the life of Little Soldier." EdD diss., Cardinal Stritch University, 2003. Anselmi, Lisa Marie. "New materials, old ideas: Native use of European-introduced metals in the Northeast." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004 Arndt, Grant Paul. "No middle ground: Ho-Chunk powwows and the production of social space in Native Wisconsin." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004. Ashley, Keith H. "Interaction, population movement, and political economy: The changing social landscape of northeastern Florida (ad 900—1500)." PhD diss., University of Florida, 2003. Beard-Moose. "Public Indians, private Cherokees: Indigenous identity at the intersection of tourism, acculturation, and cultural continuity." PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2004. Bieter, John Patrick, Jr. "Showdown in the Owyhees: Land, myth and government in the American west." PhD diss., Boston College, 2004. Blackbird, Russell Leon. "Understanding the reasons why Native American students are not entering the teaching profession." PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2004. Blair, Susan Elizabeth. "Ancient Wolastoq'kew landscapes: Settlement and technology in the lower Saint John River valley, Canada." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Bond, Bruno. "L'Entente sur les repercussions et les avantages dans le secteur minier: Un instrument qui permet de minimiser les risques et de maximiser [End Page 738] les avantages d'un projet minier pour les communautes autochtones. Le cas de l'era Raglan, au Nunavik." PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2003. Boomer, Holly Rae. "Writing red: Vine Deloria Jr. and contemporary American Indian fiction." PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2000. Bowes, John Patrick. "Opportunity and adversity: Indians and American expansion in the nineteenth century trans-Mississippi West." PhD diss., University of California, 2003. Boyd, Billy Joe. "Implicit racist attitudes towards African Americans and American Indians among Caucasian university students." PhD diss., Oklahoma State University, 2003. Burgess, Kim Graham. "The stakes of recognition: Contesting American Indian identity in Connecticut." PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004. Carroll, Alton. "Medicine bags and dog tags: How the military influenced American Indian traditions and how the image of Indians influenced the military." PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2004. Cattelino, Jessica R. "High stakes: Seminole sovereignty in the casino era." PhD diss., New York University, 2004. Craig, Douglas Broward. "Beyond snaketown: Household inequality and political power in early Hohokam society. PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2004. Curtis, Jenneth Elizabeth. "Processes of cultural change: Ceramics and interaction across the middle to late Woodland transition in south-central Ontario." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Danver, Steven Laurence. "Liquid assets: A history of tribal water rights strategies in the American Southwest." PhD diss., University of Utah, 2004. Dixon, Christopher A. "Indians in the house of God: A socio-economic investigation of the San Antonio mission community." PhD diss., Boston University, 2004. Dudgeon, Roy C. "Eco-holism and Native American philosophy: An exploration of their common ground." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2003. Elias, Brenda Denise. "The influence of the social environment on the health of Manitoba First Nations communities." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2004. Fowles, Severin M. "The making of made people: The prehistoric evolution of hierocracy among the Northern Tiwa of new Mexico." PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004. Fox, Shari. "When the weather is uggianaqtuq: Linking Inuit and scientific observations of recent environmental change in Nunavut, Canada." PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2004. Fuller, Amy. "A female Hispanic school leader's experience in a native American community: An heuristic inquiry." EdD diss., Arizona State University, 2004. [End Page 739] Garey-Sage. "Washoe women's wisdom: Ethnobotany and its role in contemporary cultural identity." PhD diss., University of Nevada, 2003. Gooding, Erik D. "Sing from the heart, sing for the people: An ethnography of Dakotan singing, 1660–2000." PhD diss., Indiana University, 2004. Hammond, James Quezon. "Leadership strategies for school...

"1 + 1 = 3" and Other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in "Invisible Man", "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", and "Song of Solomon"

... the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the link immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. (Homi K. Bhabha 188) I won't even talk about the cultural heritage from Africa. (Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory 66) By representing aporia, dislocation, and caesura through vernacular space, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) asserts that Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Ralph Ellison's In visible Man (2952) constitute linked gestures toward the diasporic sensibility within which Morrison situates her own work. This strategy of foregrounding aporetic impasse and lapsed rhetorical connections addresses a significant tension in Ellison's work, recuperating an apparent blindness toward African retentions operating at the level of deep structure in his own text. Morrison's revision explores these moments of blindness in Ellison's text and exposes their contours. Relying on black vernacular motifs inspired by Ellison, Morrison's narrative strategy also reveals that, taken together, the three texts chart both individualized and collective evolutions of diaspora consciousness across national and geographic boundaries. These generational shifts reveal sites of neocolonial cultural arrest, rupture, and vi olence, thematized through a network of allusions to ascent, suspension, and rotation. In contemplating these representations as spatiotemporal features of diaspora culture, Song of Solomon constructs African diaspora subjectivity through what I will call an aesthetics of vertigo that reconfigures the of Black space. This usage of the term psychogeography posits, after Lefebvre, that, in the production of social space, foreclosed zones of resistance can be made habitable. (2) Such transgressive spaces are frequently represented through narratives of cultural chaos inscribed as incoherence and vertiginous anxiety, as in both Ellison and Tutuola. Morrison participates in these representations, but claims a route to equilibrium by rewriting vertigo as a liminal site of creative tension that can be better understood in the context of African diaspora cosmologies. These hybrid cosmologies which support her protagonist's acclimation to a vertiginous, diasporic subjectivity are derived primarily from Yoruba and related traditions, including Ifa, Vodoun, and hoodoo, and from archetypal figures within these traditions, particularly Obatala and Eshu. For the purposes of this essay, vertigo is an element in Ellison's and Tutuola's work that for Morrison becomes a vernacular event that reveals a habitable space organized by diasporic cosmologies, in which autopoesis, self-creation, can be realized. All three texts encode vertigo as more than inexplicable instances of perceptual disturbance. Vertigo captures the relationship of the internal experience of the colonized to the colonized environment. As the authors explore the uncharted spaces of diaspora subjectivity, they confront the unarticulated implications of vertigo as a cultural phenomenon. In environments organized by neo-colonialist constructions of race, the protagonists face unavoidable assaults on their humanity, sanity, and cultural coherence. In the aftermath of slavery, Tutuola's nameless protagonist occupies the emblematic position of having no right to describe myself (170). Milkman lack[s] coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self (Song 69). They experience the effects of colonialism and racism as psychological trauma, generally represented as fragmentation or splitting, framed by Du Boisian double-consciousness, as is evident when Tutuola's protagonist later comments, that we left ourselves on the road to beco ming slave and master (171). Because they inhabit places dominated by colonialist hegemonies that confront them with abnormally hostile negations, the protagonists lack spaces in which to redefine and voice themselves. …

Silencing in Classroom Interaction: Producing and Relating Social Spaces

Researchers have studied silencing practices in a number of ways, including focusing on turn taking and temporal dynamics, documenting specific interactional strategies, and analyzing the types of discourses expelled from a given context. The article forwards an alternate approach, arguing that silencing is an interactional achievement that involves producing, dividing, and relating social spaces such that participants are positioned as more or less privileged or silenced. In the production of social space for silencing, I argue that 2 key processes are active: narrating social "scenes" through talk and producing embodied spaces. The production of social space in the service of silencing is traced diachronically (as a joint, dialogic accomplishment over time) and synchronically (as the articulation of multiple social spaces in a single moment). The argument is developed from an analysis of a segment of interaction concerning women's rights within a high school history classroom, in which a girl is silenced by a group of boys. Methodologically, the article also develops alternate means of representing silencing within interaction, including maps of embodied spaces and an initial means of transcribing the shifting and nuanced participation status of a silenced participant.

Performing the “People's Palace”

This article examines the production of space through musical performance at the Chicago Cultural Center. Concerts at the Cultural Center produce space on the scale of the building, the city of Chicago, and the world. The process of the social production of space is examined through musical performance in terms of the relation between music and place, performance practices, and aural space. An analysis of the production of space in musical performances on multiple spatial scales provides a means of moving past the common distinctions made between material space, representations of space, and social space to a more integrated understanding of social space.

Struggling Pasts: A Commentary

This commentary is organized into three parts. The first discusses the papers presented in this volume, notably divided into two themes: those that looked at past struggles and those that look at struggling in the present. The second part deals more critically with the unifying analytical theme of the papers: a dialectical approach to historical archaeology and how it can be implemented through the theory of internal relations. The final section of this commentary takes this idea and applies it to the archaeology of landscape and the production of social space.

The Amusement Quarter in the Night Constructed as Social Space

In recent years, there has been much debate over the social production of space and the relationship between social subject and space. The author, emphasizing the social structural context, contributes to this debate by identifying social space focused on one district. This paper seeks to reveal the significant relationship in which society and space are reconstructed in the late modern era, considering the differences between subjective space and objective space, mass behavior during weekend nights, and the factors influencing the mechanism of perception. To put it concretely, the purpose of this paper is to explain how youths, between the ages of 15 and 29, use the space and act in the night amusement quarter applying the concept of social space, and to examine the experiences of this generation using the ethnographical method.A case study was carried out in the EKIMAE district, the redeveloped area in front of Toyama station, Toyama City. EKIMAE is a commonly used name for the space. Social space refers to subjective social space expressed as a mental map depicted in the youths' own way. On the other hand, objective social space is the space bounded by the regulator of public space, the Toyama Police Department, which is a police patrolling area defined by their own territorial perception in order to monitor and control the populace. Neither space, objective and subjective, is an official administrative district.The remarkable result of various examinations of these spaces is that NANPA spot, a place where girl or boy hunting are conducted, is equivalent to subjective social space and plays an important role for the youth to maintain their identity. Examining the way in which commodities were selected by the youth in the questionnaire, it was demonstrated that various commodities are obstacles to their entry. Furthermore, when they participate in the space as an actor or observer, space functions as theater in a high consumption society. As such, the space where youths encounter one another is constructed as subjective social space and they therefore tend to feel their perceived territory as home.This analysis assists us in understanding the quality of late modern places and how subject and place become inextricably intertwined in the context of social structure.

Narrative Subjectivity and the Production of Social Space in Chinese Reportage

In a little-discussed 1932 work titled Eventful Autumn (Duo shi zhi qiu), Ding Ling illustrates the reaction of the people of Shanghai to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931.1 The text opens, as many Chinese short stories and novels of the time do, with a bustling city scene described with a rich palette of sounds, colors, and movements and observed from the midst of the action. The scene envisioned is a large intersection on Shanghai's main commercial artery, Nanjing Road, from the point of view of the narrator on an approaching trolley.