Spatial Imagination Research Articles

The Checkpoint State

AbstractThis essay is about everyday encounters with the checkpoint state in a locus of enduring counterinsurgency. Specifically, the essay examines how road-transport workers in northeast Nigeria experience and negotiate the omnipresent threat of the checkpoint state in their workaday world. Further, the essay underscores the spatial practices and social imaginaries through which the checkpoint state is constituted as simultaneously an apparatus of predation and as a space of negotiation. For mobile subjects in extremis, the threat of the checkpoint state is not episodic, but a feature of the landscape itself — a permanent, radical sense of immobility and insecurity. The daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the “war on terror” compels road-transport workers to participate in the corrupt, coercive, and humiliating system they denounce.

Imagined Libya: geopolitics of the margins

Whether referring to the artificiality of its (post-)colonial construction or to the fragmentation of its sovereignty since 2011, the weakness of Libya’s statehood is a recurrent theme in policy and scholarly discourses. Scholars of history and international politics have expanded the framework to apprehend the processes of state (de/)formation underpinning Libya’s fragilities beyond the problematic “failed state” paradigm to accommodate longue-durée and multi-scalar perspectives. Building on these advances, yet noting the need for a more consistent use of social constructivist lenses, the article adopts the perspective of critical geopolitics to explore the spatial discourses and imaginaries, both domestic and imported, that across history have shaped “Libya”, as well as its internal constituents and its external environment, through processes of identification, othering and belonging. Given the diversity of uses – and abuses – connoting geopolitics and its critical variants, the first section of the article clarifies the meaning, relevance and methodology of the critical geopolitics approach herein employed. It is argued that Libya sits at the intersection of rival geopolitical imaginaries and competing spheres of influence that overlap and collide here. The subsequent sections analyze geopolitical discourses from different sources to offer a review of some important spatial imaginaries that have contributed to representing, constituting and apprehending Libya as a subject and an object of international politics: ancient geography’s environmentalism; Italy’s imperial colonialism; Gaddafi’s pan-Arabism and, later, pan-Africanism; and Turkey’s pan-Ottomanism.Before modern colonisation, the imaginary of (today’s) Libyan territory was long apprehended through the dichotomy between urban (hadari) and rural (badawi) spaces, with the political and normative centre of gravitation oscillating from the former (during the Arab and later Ottoman hegemony) to the latter (during the rise of the Sanussi order). During the Italian colonisation, Libya was subsumed in Italy’s Mediterranean projections, whether as a necessary “fourth shore” to Italy’s expansion in its “own” Lebensraum, or as a bridge welding Europe and Africa within a unitary geopolitical entity called Eurafrica. Gaddafi’s pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism combined short-term political opportunism with a more ambitious attempt to challenge (neo-)colonial geopolitical imaginaries about the country’s identity and belonging, and its related security priorities. Yet they both contributed to the abusive manipulation of domestic ethnic cleavages, the weaponization of (the research into) the country’s history, and the progressive de-legitimation of the regime. Today, Libya has acquired a prominent role in Turkey’s geopolitical imaginary. After more than a century of substantial disregard, the rise of a pan-Ottoman geopolitical repertoire in Turkey and the nationalistic emphasis on the redeeming of the vatan (homeland) provide the key for interpreting Turkey’s resurrecting interest in Libya, and the justification of its military intervention vis-à-vis Ankara’s domestic audiences. The exploration of these prominent geopolitical imaginaries on, by and about Libya highlights the tensions, intersections, and divergences underpinning different interpretations of the same territory. The enduring legacy of competing geopolitical imaginaries points to a plausible constitutive factor laying at the root of the polarisations and conflict dynamics that endanger the stability and survival of the Libyan state. Unearthing the competing geopolitical imaginaries on Libya can thus help illuminate the divergent approaches of the international actors intervening in the country, and those of their Libyan proxies struggling for recognition, be they Turkey’s allies, or Libya’s armed actors posturing as Europe’s gatekeepers in the contemporary iterations of the ambivalent geopolitical imaginary of Eurafrica. A critical geopolitics approach thus helps challenge the obsolete yet widespread view of Libya’s marginality in the international system, by unsettling reified spatial assumptions about the partition, position and constitution of Libya’s state. It is precisely Libya’s position at the periphery of rival geopolitical imaginaries and asserted spheres of influence that makes of it a crossroad of strategic vectors, a hotspot of collisions, and therefore a centre of concern.

Mechanical Engineering Students at Dalian Jiaotong University Should Keep Learning Hand-drawing Courses

With the development of electronic information, digital drawing like Solidworks has become an increasingly large part of the mechanical field. Also, followed by the development of technology, mechanical engineering students need to engage in more courses. This has led to a discussion about the need for mechanical engineering students to continue learn hand-drawing courses. This paper takes mechanical engineering students at Dalian Jiaotong University as the subject of the study. This paper argues that mechanical engineering students at Dalian Jiaotong University should continue to take hand-drawing courses by introducing that digital drafting is just a tool, and using this tool requires spatial imagination, which can be developed by hand-drawing courses. This paper also verify the conclusion by experimental data, and show that there will be serious consequences if mechanical engineering students do not take hand-drawing courses. To sum up, mechanical engineering students at Dalian Jiaotong University should keep learning Hand-drawing courses.

Spatializing the Everyday in Post-Troubles Northern Ireland: Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture

Post-Troubles theatre in Northern Ireland has witnessed theatrical projects that push Belfast beyond its unenviable position as the predominant spatial imaginary of the Northern Ireland conflict. Informed by Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, this paper analyzes the spatialization of the everyday in post-Troubles Belfast in Scenes from the Big Picture (2003) by Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty. McCafferty prioritizes the ordinary over the traumatic. His dramatic project consists in re-imagining the quotidian space in which ordinary citizens of Belfast tactically endeavor to constitute their own spaces. McCafferty challenges the “given-ness” of quotidian space by offering a heterotopic conception of Belfast’s everyday space in which heterogeneous spatial practices are rearranged and juxtaposed to reveal the counter-sites of the everyday. In the play, the daunting parameters of the everyday space are delimited and controlled by a taciturn old city walker whose subdued presence leaves its traces to demarcate the contour of the quotidian space. Major issues addressed in the paper include the play’s relationship to and position in post-Troubles theatre, its thematic and experiential prioritization of the everyday, and its formal and linguistic features that enable the dramatization of everyday life in Belfast. McCafferty presents a “big” picture of Belfast, bigger than the Troubles, by staging those ordinary individuals whose lives are deeply affected but not determined by sectarian violence.

New Spatial Imaginaries for International Curriculum Projects: Creative Diagrams, Mapping Experiments, and Critical Cartography

This article explores the complex relational landscape of international partnerships where local and transnational education objectives are entangled. We present a methodological practice for experimenting with diagrams and maps. Our emphasis on spatial rendering of local/global relationality is intended to invite discussion about the postcolonial context of international education work and the geopolitics of transnational curriculum. We pursue a diagrammatic and archipelagic form of creative abstraction, which we present as a posthuman cartographic practice. To illustrate this practice, we focus on a specific international curriculum development project funded by the World Universities Network.

The role of planners in public open space production in contemporary African cities: a reinjection of the social agenda in planning practice

ABSTRACT African cities face challenges of delivering quality public open spaces within set time frames, under constrained budgets, varying levels of political will and professional capacity. These challenges in conjunction with the ‘emotional’ conundrum faced by planners, continue to define the roles of planners and prohibit them from confronting the status quo. This paper argues that the planning profession needs to acknowledge that; to respond to the challenges of contemporary African public open space, an intentional deliberate paradigm is required. This paradigm requires a spatial imagination to reconcile the disjuncture between the static place of planners and the active space of citizens.

Investigating the political economy of the territory: The contradictory responses of organisations to spatial inequality

The spatial imaginations of organisations can be particularly insightful for examining power relations. However, only recently they have gone beyond the limits of the workplace, demonstrating the role of the territory for organised action, particularly in mobilising solidarity for resistance. In this article, I investigate power relations revealed by the political economy of the territory to explain contradictory actions undertaken by organisations. Specifically, I adopt the theoretical framework of the noted Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, who recognises spatial multiplicity and fragmentation while maintaining an appreciation of the structural conditions of the political economy. This perspective is particularly useful for the analysis of civil society organisations (CSOs) in a Brazilian favela (slum), given the context of high inequality perpetuated by the selective flows of urban development. First, I show that the history of favelas and their role in the territorial division of labour explain the profiles of existing organisations. Then, I examine how the political engagement of CSOs with distinct solidarities results in a dialectical tension that leads to both resistance based on local shared interests and the active reproduction of central spaces even if the ends are not shared. The article contributes to the literature of space and organisations by explaining how territorial dynamics mediate power relations within and across organisations, not only as resistance but also as the active reproduction of economic and political regimes.

Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted

Introduction

Introduction

Swedish free school companies going global: Spatial imaginaries and movable pedagogical ideas

ABSTRACT Enabled by market-oriented policies implemented in the early 1990s, a nation-wide for-profit education industry has emerged and flourished in Sweden. As a more recent expansion strategy, Swedish school companies have begun exporting their school and early childhood education and care services internationally. In this article, three such companies and a selection of the foreign operations they have set up are studied to analyse how they describe the education services they are establishing in the new national settings. The findings show that the companies have developed and followed different edu-business models, using and transforming particular pedagogical ideas and connecting them to different spatial imaginaries. These include the Swedish/Scandinavian as both places and idealized spaces, infused with borderless global transformative spatial imaginaries on the creation of autonomous learners and futuristic education visions for global futures. Educational profiles and concepts from the Swedish context are both adjusted and marketed to the foreign settings, and entail stories on spaces and mobilities, encompassing pedagogy, teachers and students.

Conceptualizing In-Text “Kshetra”: Postcolonial Allahabad’s Cultural Geography in Neelum Saran Gour’s Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink

Literary renditions of cities have always gravitated towards the spatial imagination and its ethical counterpart outside the textual space. This paper explores the multicultural geography of the North Indian city Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj) observed through Neelum Saran Gour’s postcolonial narratives Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink, projecting the narrative alignment of spatial aesthetics and cultural ethics. Interrogating the spatial dimensions of a “narrative world” within narrative theory (Ryan) and its interdisciplinary crossover with cultural geography (Sauer; Mitchell; Anderson et al.), the article seeks to examine Gour’s literary city not simply as an objective homogeneous representation, but as a “kshetra” of spatio-cultural cosmos of lived traditions, memories, experiences and collective attitudes of its people, in the context of E. V. Ramakrishnan’s theoretical reflections. The article proposes new possibilities of adapting the Indian concept “kshetra” to spatial literary studies; its aim is also to suggest a new source of knowledge about the city of Allahabad through a community introspection of “doing culture” in the texts, bringing into view people’s shared experiences, beliefs, religious practices and traditions as offshoots of the postcolonial ethos. The article aims to re-contextualize the city’s longstanding multicultural ethics in the contemporary times of crisis, which may affect a shift in the city’s relevance: from regional concern to large-scale significance within ethnically diverse South Asian countries and beyond.

History at Sea

Abstract This article invites readers to rethink the work that routes can do in world history by braiding together the spatial and historical imaginaries of an itinerant community: the dhow captains (nakhodas) of Kuwait. Through a close reading of two genres of nakhoda writings, logbooks and nautical manuals, it explores the deliberate process by which they constructed their movement across the sea. It suggests that for dhows, travel across the Indian Ocean was a voyage through world history itself—a route along a recent and distant past, entangled with an imperial present. Through these materials historians can move towards a sense of space and time that foregrounds the imaginative processes that produce the Indian Ocean as an historical arena on the part of those who spent their lives traversing it.

A new structural model for measuring spatial intelligence

Introduction. The task of studying the structure and dynamics of spatial thinking of schoolchildren and students is relevant for general and educational psychology and private teaching methods. The research goal of the article is to theoretically substantiate, develop and test a structural model for measuring the spatial intelligence of students and schoolchildren.Materials and Methods. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the content of the definition of "spatial intelligence" in domestic and foreign educational psychology (I.S. Yakimanskaya, H. Gardner), a structural model and a rapid test for measuring the spatial intelligence of students and schoolchildren have been developed. The Structural Equation Modeling methodology was used to validate the developed express test. The research sample consisted of 688 schoolchildren from Novosibirsk at the age from 10 to 15 years.Results. The model for measuring the spatial intelligence of students and schoolchildren is developed by correlating the components of spatial intelligence: spatial knowledge, spatial abilities, spatial skills, with the corresponding cognitive processes: perception of space, spatial representation (thinking), spatial imagination. Based on the classification of intelligence tests into three separate categories: spatial perception, spatial visualization, mental rotation from intelligence subtests (R. Amthauer, M.C. Linn, A.C. Petersen, M. Sjölinder), a rapid test was constructed. The reliability (validity) of the express test was confirmed using structural equation modeling by the method of confirmatory factor analysis of models consisting of 15 indicators and one factor (spatial intelligence) or three factors (spatial knowledge, spatial abilities and spatial skills).Discussion and Conclusions. The theoretical significance of the developed structural model is that it reveals the mechanisms of the natural development of spatial intelligence, depending on the degree of formation of its substructures. The practical significance of the obtained result lies in the development of methodological foundations for screening diagnostics of the spatial intelligence of schoolchildren and is due to the high importance of spatial thinking for solving educational problems.

Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.

Основные причины плохого усвоения начертательной геометрии

Descriptive geometry is the most difficult subject studied by first-year students in technical universities. The paper considers the reasons for poor geometric knowledge among university graduates. It is determined that there are three main objective reasons. 1. Poor geometric training in high school, where they study planimetry and stereometry, but not all the knowledge that future students will need at the university is included for passing the Unified State Exam. Also, in high school, students do not develop the habit of thinking analytically, although when proving geometric theorems, this function has developed greatly. 2. Descriptive geometry has a completely different method, which differs from all the methods of disciplines that are studied at school, is the projection method, which develops spatial imagination. Exactly the method that gives any description in the daily activities of any person and in the work of any engineer. 3. Disadvantages of university textbooks on descriptive geometry. Each section of the textbook on descriptive geometry has been based on a particular geometric image since ancient times: a point, a straight line, a plane, etc. As a result, tasks that could be collected in their own section of the textbook (for example, all positional problems or all metric problems) are scattered throughout the entire body of the textbook. And from this there is an opinion that each of the tasks has its own unique solution algorithm. It is shown that with a systematic approach, all positional problems, as well as all metric ones, are solved, in principle, according to a single algorithm.

BRI and beyond: Comparative possibilities of extended Chinese urbanisation

AbstractIn terms of spatial imaginaries and as physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spurs new geographies of comparative urban study. Irrespective of whether it is the primary driver for developments carried out in its name, ‘the BRI’ is a label that serves to bring previously unassociated project sites and non‐place‐based infrastructural developments into comparative relation. This paper considers some of the possibilities presented by the BRI for comparative urban studies in – and from – Asia. Building upon insights from postcolonial urban studies, planetary urbanisation and inter‐Asia cultural studies, I sketch two key possibilities of the BRI as (comparative urban) method. The first concerns the BRI as a series of openings to much (spatially) wider and historically deeper forms of comparison. Second, I argue that BRI as method impels forms of urban comparison beyond conventionally territorialised units of analysis at a variety of scales, including both the city and the (area studies) region.

THE EFFECT OF 3D TECHNOLOGIES IN STEREOMETRY TRAINING

The software proposed in the report can be used as a technological tool in the teaching and learning of the discipline of stereometry. The aim is to improve the learning process by supporting the development of students’ creativity and spatial imagination, qualities needed in the study of spatial geometric bodies. A new boundary method is used in the generation of geometric objects. This new method uses elements of the Cavalieri Indivisible method and Isaac Newton's boundary method, thus achieving higher accuracy with respect to generated objects compared to 3D systems that use the rules of trigonometry in the construction of geometric bodies. This article performs a comparative analysis between a traditional and a new method for generating 3D geometric objects according to certain parameters and criteria. The new method involved in the analysis was proposed by the author of the report. While the traditional one is based on trigonometry. Two parameters were studied, one for accuracy in generating objects, and the second determining speed. In order to generate cylindrical bodies, are used the quadratic Bézier curve and the 3D modeling technique known as an extrusion, which transforms two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional ones.. One way to generate a prism and pyramid is by extruding polygons. This report presents a new way of constructing edged bodies. The considered technique for 3D modeling participates in the analysis of the studied methods.

The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake

The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake

Wykorzystanie STEAM-owego projektu w kształtowaniu wybranych pojęć geometrycznych u przedszkolaków

The article presents the concept of using steam design in the shaping of geometric concepts in preschool children. Attention was paid to shaping the spatial imagination of children, i. e. developing spatial orientation, discovering the properties of solids and the concept of symmetry. However, mathematical knowledge was not treated as a separate field of knowledge, but as a tool to solve a specific problem, which in this study is the creation of a tourist, mobile guide.

Sydney Post-war Metropolitan Planning: The Rise and Fall of the Satellite Town as a Spatial Imaginary

ABSTRACT Taming metropolitan expansion by developing satellite towns was conventional wisdom by the mid-twentieth century, but Sydney’s early attempts highlight the disjuncture between theory and practice. Viewed through the theoretical lens of the spatial imaginary, longer term metropolitan planning was problematised and tested through inadequate governance, flawed population projections, and aggressive public and private sector developers. Archival records permit a detailed account of the challenges faced into the post-war period. While Sydney failed to emulate the satellite town achievements of other capital cities, the lessons learned helped establish foundations for more effective planning in a new era from the late 1960s guided by a revised imaginary of the ideal metropolis.