Spatial Imagination Research Articles

Digital tools for gamification of the educational process of junior school students in conditions of distance learning

The article examines the role of digital gamification tools in the educational process of junior high school students in the conditions of forced distance learning. The main online platforms and digital learning tools used during forced distance learning are highlighted, in particular: online learning platforms (Storyboard, Ed Puzzle, Edugames), mobile digital applications (MinecraftEdu, BookWidgets). The concept of gamification is defined as a powerful tool for engaging and motivating primary students, which refers to the process of adding game elements or mechanics to the learning process, which promotes the development of various cognitive skills, such as spatial imagination, imagination, reaction and mental abilities, which is of particular importance in children of primary school age. Gamification turns out to be an important strategy in distance learning, as it is aimed at engaging students in learning tasks. It was considered that one of the key advantages of using digital gamification tools is the possibility of increased individualization of training. This allows you to adapt the tasks to the level of development of each student, providing a personalized approach. Also, graphic and visual elements of gamification make learning more exciting and understandable for children, creating a positive attitude towards learning. Digital tools facilitate interaction and social support between students, even at a distance. They can include online team tasks that develop skills in collaboration and information sharing. In the absence of face-to-face contact, teachers can use digital gamification tools to effectively monitor student progress and provide quick feedback. This allows to identify and solve the learning difficulties of students. The main requirements to ensure the implementation of the idea of introducing gamification into the educational process of elementary school include giving students the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and try to cope with the task again in case of failure, providing students with a mobile environment for independent learning, providing constant and instant feedback with each other and with the teacher, create interactive tasks or quests instead of homework. In general, we note that digital gamification tools are a necessary advantage in the conditions of forced distance learning to create a stimulating and effective environment that contributes to the learning and development of junior schoolchildren.

Research Focused on the Development of Technical Literacy of Elementary School Students

The article describes a strategic approach to the development of technical literacy of elementary school students from the point of view of research activities. The research activity is concretized for the development of graphic, spatial imagination, which is assumed by the activities related to the understanding of the text. Research aimed at determining the degree of correlation between reading an educational text with comprehension and geometric, spatial imagination will contribute to the evaluation of the issue.

Курсовая работа по инженерной графике как первый опыт конструирования

One of the priorities for higher education and the country as a whole today is serious engineering education. Geometric and graphic disciplines are the first ones directly related to the specialty in the curricula of any technical field of training. The extent of this stage cannot be underestimated: they carry out the required program work, students study the rules and modern means of developing design documents, and receive basic knowledge to continue mastering specialized courses.
 However, simply knowing the standards or being able to work with computer-aided design tools to solve engineering problems is not enough. A design engineer is a creator, an inventor. This means that one of the main tasks of teachers is to form a systematic technical, design thinking based on developed spatial imagination, the ability to think comprehensively, logically and creatively, and manifested in the ability to take specific actions to solve emerging problems and tasks, make decisions to achieve a specific result in the form of a technical product, a finished design based on the selected technology.
 This article explores the possibilities of including design elements in educational tasks at the initial stage of training students of mechanical engineering specialties. A description of the course work carried out in the third semester as part of the engineering graphics course at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University is presented.
 According to the assignment, students develop design documentation for the product according to the diagram, description of the operating principle of the device and drawings of the main parts, make, if necessary, changes to the design to increase the manufacturability of parts and assembly and improve the technical and consumer properties of the product, and one of the parts, as directed teacher, is replaced by a welded assembly unit.
 The article sets the goals and objectives of the work, describes the stages of implementation and the role of the teacher, and also developed a training manual to ensure independent work of students. An assessment was made of the first experience of using the technique. Conclusions and recommendations are presented.

Development of methodological recommendations for teaching physics based on the development of spatial imagination

Relevance. In modern education, much attention is paid to the development of critical thinking and cognitive skills of students, including the ability to spatial reasoning. This is important for the successful mastery of subjects, especially physics, where understanding of three-dimensional objects and phenomena is of key importance.Purpose. The purpose of this study is to create a methodology for teaching physics with an emphasis on the development of students� spatial imaginations. To test the effectiveness of the developed methodology, an experiment was conducted to assess the level of spatial imagination development of the participating students and to compare the results before and after the application of the methodology.Methodology. One of the key methods developed by the study is the use of visualizations and three-dimensional models in the learning process.Results. The main results of this study are related to the development of methodological recommendations for teaching physics based on the active development of students� spatial imaginations. This allows students to better understand abstract physical concepts, such as the structure of an atom or vector operations, through visual images. The study also identified effective techniques for developing students� spatial abilities. These include the inclusion of three-dimensional puzzle elements in assignments or solving problems involving the construction of spatial models, which helps students to better understand the geometric relationships and interactions of bodies in space. In addition, the importance of using interactive teaching methods, such as conducting virtual experiments or discussing three-dimensional simulations, was identified as contributing to a deeper understanding of the material.Conclusions. The practical significance of this study is to provide a specific methodology for physics teachers, which will optimize the learning process, increase students� understanding of the theory and develop their spatial imagination more effectively.

Theology from the Suburbs: The Challenge of Life for the City as a Whole

Abstract This article seeks to interrogate critically and problematize the silence on the suburb in urban theology: in the process the article seeks to illustrate the importance of the suburb through examining it considering the soteriology underpinning apartheid spatial planning and its persistent quasi-soteriological envisioning of the good life in the ongoing spatial imagination of the South African city. While this proposal does not present a fully developed contextual or public theology in response to the complex place of the suburb in the city, it highlights the persistence of this silence and illustrates key theological questions that could underpin such a focus in the future.

On Disease Configurations, Black-Grass Blowback, and Probiotic Pest Management

This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed “integrated” approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety. Pathogenesis, in this relational understanding, follows not from breaches of dangerous life into healthy space, but from ecological intra-actions that enable the proliferation of some life to compromise the multispecies livability of the body in question. The article contributes to the literature by detailing how this configurational approach works in the world. It traces the polymorphic spatial imaginaries required to map pests well; the process of knowledge intensification needed to reveal which configurations can resist pathogenesis; and the probiotic biopolitical interventions used to safeguard farmland productivity. The article uses black-grass to present a temporal metanarrative of intensive farming causing ecological blowback, leading to the development of approaches to pest management predicated on a pragmatic tolerance toward unwanted life.

Shifting notions of the rural: Protests over traffic infrastructure and far-right normalization

Current far-right attitudes to the climate crisis are highly ambivalent, oscillating between the glorification of nature and ideological fragments of “fossil fascism”. Invocations of “the rural” serve as semantic mediations, enabling populist radical right parties (PRRPs) to apply seemingly frictionless and multi-scalar narratives of far-right ecology to rural protests. Applying relational and scale-sensitive approaches can help to disentangle how far-right discursive and political effort ties into and transforms spatial imaginaries. This paper discusses the role of rurality for populist scalar re-articulations and the impact of the latter on local communities. Drawing on findings from a qualitative longitudinal study in small towns in Brandenburg, Germany, the paper shows how local PRRP chapters create a specific notion of ‘rural rationality’ that helps to normalize far-right politics and politicians at the local scale, contrasting a proclaimed albeit abstract cordon sanitaire.

A union in distress: Contested spatial imaginations, narratives and practices of European (dis)integration

Europe as a spatial concept and space in practice has witnessed a variety of integrative as well as disintegrative tendencies over the past decades. While a binary concept of the terms integration and disintegration has dominated a vast proportion of public discussion as well as academic literature, some authors advance a more differentiated view. The introduction of this special issue will pick up the threads of these debates and connect them to considerations of the spatialities of such processes. While theoretically dissecting the roles and meanings of spatial imaginations, narratives and everyday practices and conceptualizing their entanglements within Europe’s growing together and apart, the introduction will provide a basis for the detailed and empirical accounts of this issue. By paying particular attention to the meaningful and symbolic power of imaginations and narratives used within the struggles around European (dis)integration, the main aim is to engage closer with the central mechanisms facilitating and underlying the current struggles around European (dis)integrations. Consequently, the introduction opens the view for a multitude of spatially enhanced processes ranging between encounters and borderings.

Farming for the patchy Anthropocene: The spatial imaginaries of regenerative agriculture

AbstractWith its focus on the species level of the Anthropos, there is growing concern that the Anthropocene analytic lacks the conceptual nuance needed to grapple with the unevenly distributed harms and responsibilities tied up with issues of biodiversity loss, global warming, and land use change. Conceptual variants like the patchy Anthropocene have been proposed to better capture the justice implications of these socio‐ecological crises, directing attention to their spatially ubiquitous yet context‐specific character. The figure of the plantation has come to play an important role in this scholarship due to the contribution intensive agriculture had made to these interlinking crises. Through empirical study of the regenerative agricultural movement, this paper reflects on how regenerative farmers use different sites (fields, soils, livestock stomachs) to apprehend their agro‐ethical responsibilities to more‐than‐human actors both near to and far from the landscapes they manage. Our aims here are two‐fold. First, we provide a more affirmative account of agricultural management than is currently offered by plantation farming: a model of food production that is not just ‘in’ the Anthropocene, but ‘for’ it. Second, we contribute to ongoing discussions unfolding in the social sciences around the tools needed to conceptualise the interlinking spatial and justice aspects of the Anthropocene transition. By bringing the patchy analytic into conversation with more established geographic writing on scale, volume, and horizontal connections, we show the merit of juxtaposing multiple models of spatial relation as a way of gaining ethical and conceptual traction on complex socio‐ecological issues. We argue that the ‘polymorphic’ spatial imaginaries of regenerative agriculturalists can offer some guidance on the tools needed to attend to the specificity of local Anthropocene outcomes in relation to socio‐ecological forces actuating the world at much greater spatio‐temporal scales.

The elusive role of urban form, centrality and scale in the absence of a metropolitan planning agenda: Central European perspective

AbstractThis paper explores the implementation of grand spatial planning narratives such as the compact city and polycentricity in planning practice. The effects of overlapping scales on the application of spatial imaginaries in metropolitan space are examined. Using post‐socialist space, the research enriches the geographical context of metropolitan studies. On the basis of a spatial analysis of metropolitan form and centrality and a textual analysis of the relevant spatial plans of three Czech metropolitan areas, the key features in efforts of planning polycentric and compact metropolitan areas are identified as “Administrative blindness”, “(De)centralization ambiguity”, and “Reactive passivity”. By identifying the limits of translating spatial visions into the practical language of statutory regional and land‐use plans, the paper contributes to the debate on the effectiveness of metropolitan planning based on the specific context of Central Europe.

Mapping belonging: analysing spaces with oral history in the border region of Melilla and Nador

This contribution shows how oral history and the concept of ‘belonging’ can be used for the analysis of spatial notions in borderlands over time. By giving examples of her research in the border region of Melilla (Spain) and Nador (Morocco), the author presents a transnational and intersectional approach and shows how spatial imaginaries can be taken into view from a historical perspective.

DECOUPLING FROM LAND OR EXTENDING THE VIEW: DIVERGENT SPATIAL IMAGINARIES OF AGRI-FOOD TECH

ABSTRACT Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation—alternative protein and digital agriculture—showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space. The spatial imaginary underpinning much protein innovation is contained, aiming to bring as much production as possible into highly delimited spaces, whereas the spatial imaginary of digital agriculture is expansive, facilitating farm management at a scale far beyond what a farmer can directly experience. Such divergent technological trajectories, we argue, have always existed in food and agriculture, but they are now incongruously paired within the agri-food tech sector. In addition to being contradictory in their own terms, both wrongly conflate a spatial imaginary with socio-environmental improvement.

Spatial Imaginaries “from the Ground”: Framing Fez’s Medina Contemporary Identity

ABSTRACT The medina of Fez started to play a key role in the tourism industry after the Second World War (Girard, M. 2006a. “Imaginaire touristique et émotion patrimoniale dans la medina de Fès (Maroc).” Culture & Musées 8: 61–90). The city’s image, traditionally linked to craftsmen, religious buildings and cultural heritage has contributed to the tourism industry and put Fez on the international map of world destinations. Labeled in 1981 as a World Heritage site, it has been experiencing government-orchestrated rehabilitations parallel to private investments in built heritage. Contributing to the economic development of the city, these investments have also transformed the image of the medina. A flourishing touristic destination and an urban environment of daily life shape the contemporary identity of the medina, structured around plural social imaginaries sometimes complementary and sometimes competing with one another. The paper qualitatively addresses the transformation of Fez’s medina from the angle of spatial imaginaries considering the latter as a defining factor in the formation of the medina’s contemporary identity. It discusses the emergence of new spatial imaginaries, which are thriving daily at the crossroads of diverse practices and initiatives of local and international actors. Results suggest that further understanding of the conditions of emergence, and spatial expression of these imaginaries can contribute to the debate on the development of historical medina in Morocco while highlighting the forces of reinvention of local identity.

The New Anglo-Saxons: Race, Space, and the Production of a Geopolitical Discourse

The question of how individuals produce and reproduce geopolitical ideologies is central to critical geopolitics, but there is little consensus on how this process works or what methods can meaningfully interrogate it. This article brings together methods from critical geopolitics, history, and sociolinguistics to assess the development, dissemination, and trajectory of Anglo-Saxonism, a late-nineteenth century movement which sought to unite the white English-speaking peoples of the world based on the racial heritage and democratic socio-political institutions they allegedly shared. We investigate the archival material of two prominent historians central to this movement—E.A. Freeman and H.B. Adams—to examine their own statements about their work, introducing the concept of “geopolitical metanarratives” to link between intention and discourse. We find that as Freeman and Adams intentionally worked to advance the movement, they relied on a spatial imagination that emphasized the historical continuity of socio-political institutions as the key racialized geopolitical metanarrative that served to underpin their efforts.

Coming into view: Engaging gentrification and displacement beyond aversive racism

Reflecting on Bloch and Meyer's exploration of displacement-by-gentrification and their use of “aversive racism” to address a lack of serious engagement with race and racism in gentrification studies, I offer a conceptual tour of both gentrification and displacement, specifically how some scholars have defined both terms and used them to explore various dimensions of socio-spatial shifts. Then, I clarify the incompatibility of aversive racism and a Black geographic framework, since Black geographies place Black agency at the center of spatial production and emphasizes Black spatial experiences in the expression of Black spatial imaginaries and geographic visions of society.

Spatial imagination in colonial Bengal

ABSTRACT This essay traces a changing geo-politics brought about by the forces of Western colonisation. It maps the intellectual pathways two Bengalis – Raja Rammohun Roy and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar – chalked out in their negotiations with real and mythical spaces of the East and the West. The fashioning of their own self-identities then becomes a part of this process. The evolution of Roy’s analytical frame, and Vidyasagar’s literary frame for examining and romancing the West is laid out, after the historical context is explained. Roy’s reflexive engagement with the Occident was to travel and see for himself this land of fantasy (which remained an elite practice and which Roy sets in motion). Ishwarchandra’s literary frame of translation formed a deep pool of imagination within indigenous minds – an internalised geographical space which did not need a validity check – therefore representing a deeper colonial penetration of the Bengali/Indian imagination.

From Home to Heaven: The Spatial Imaginaries of Nonprofit Organizations

We investigate how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) construct imaginaries of their premises, their local environment, and beyond. Based on a qualitative analysis of the websites of 209 randomly sampled NPOs in a metropolitan region in Central Europe, we find four distinct spatial imaginaries: (1) The world polity imaginary constructs NPOs as a part of a spatial environment that is neatly divided into nation states, supranational structures, and subnational units. (2) In the world society imaginary, NPOs are active in blurred, fluid, and overlapping spaces such as networks, commercialized spaces, or natural habitats. (3) In a religious imaginary, the material world is complemented by a transcendental realm and categorized into spaces of the sacred and the evil. (4) Finally, in a lococentric imaginary, NPOs construct a dichotomy between "home" and the alien rest of the world. Each of these spatial imaginaries conveys distinctive ways of situating the organization in their spatial environment and implies specific organizational practices and emotional enchantments of space.

HYPERBOLIC SPACE AND VIOLETA DINESCU'S MUSICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE ‘WOMAN'S SOUL’

AbstractThis paper proposes an approach to the representation of mental musical space, understood here as a mental ‘hologram’ of a musical structure created while composing or listening to a piece of music. Composers claim to ‘hear’ music in their mind and ‘see’ it in their spatial imagination; normally we see music graphically represented on two-dimensional staves, but we could mentally decode it in a three- or multi-dimensional space, and I argue that Violeta Dinescu's musical vision occupies a non-Euclidean imaginary musical space rather than the Western classical-music template. Dinescu's graphical design suggests a hyperbolic space, distorting the musical parameters accordingly. Two of her works are discussed: Gehen wir zu Grúschenka, for cello with voice ad libitum, and Herzriss – Aus deinem Herzen kannst du die Liebe nicht ausreißen, an opera for solo voice(s), percussion and cello. The first views the behaviour of musical parameters as if in an imaginary hyperbolic space; the latter exemplifies intertextuality in a cultural hyperbolic space. Both are metaphors of the woman's soul.

The camp as market frontier: Refugees and the spatial imaginaries of capitalist prospecting in Kenya

This article critically interrogates the ambitions of humanitarians, policymakers, and their corporate partners to fundamentally remake both camp economies and the refugees who inhabit them. It draws on a unique set of elite interviews with key actors from a network of organisations driving ‘innovative’ humanitarian projects in the Kakuma camp and Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya. We identify their shared spatial imaginaries which, first, reconfigure camps from spaces of dependency to capitalist frontiers of the market and, second, produce a normative construction of refugee personhood that corresponds to this space. We show that the camp as market frontier is imagined as an enabling environment that both redeems and creates the otherwise ‘subdued’ humanity of refugees through allowing their flourishing as rational capitalist subjects. Against popular depictions of refugees as ‘burdens’, we find that our interlocutors present camp refugees as entrepreneurial capitalists-in-the-making who are only inhibited by their own lack of training, humanitarian welfarism, and the deficiency of a proto-capitalist environment. And yet this latent surplus population is thought to live alongside camp paupers whose value cannot easily be made legible within market logics geared towards 'productivity'. The stratification of camp inhabitants in this way signals the (re)production of an authorised version of refugee 'being' that resonates with the objectives of exclusionary marketisation agendas. While the optimism expressed in imaginaries of economic potential and thriving may appear seductive, in that these spatial stories promise to restore the ‘dignity’ of refugees, we argue that they ultimately enable less virtuous economic practices and conceal the complicity of global corporations and financial institutions in perpetuating the exploitative operations of capital.

Claiming Space: A Case Study of Ndebele Zimbabwean Migrants’ Music in Johannesburg

Global technological advancements in transport and communication have led to a compression of time and space, but some populations are confined to their geographic regions. This paper uses a qualitative approach to conduct an intersectional analysis of music by Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg South Africa to explore how migrants respond to this phenomenon. It presents the ways in which the migrants construct identities and spatial imaginaries as a form of claiming space in Johannesburg and globally. Xenophobia in South Africa and the migrants’ memories of the Zimbabwean State violence necessitates the narration of identities and spatial imaginaries where the migrants can claim belonging. The paper argues that even where the identities imagined do not carry currency in the contemporary world. They work to critique the current racialised global hierarchy that does not include the migrants in its power geometry.