Spatial Turn Research Articles

The changing cityscape of Delhi: A study of the protest art and the site at Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh

The spatial turn in humanities and social sciences has contributed towards a significant discourse on the city and urban spaces, and street art is widely accepted to be one of the ways in which one can analyse and unravel the cityscape. The utilization of the public domain of the city, its entanglements with urban authorities and its diverse potential has sparked several debates, and I seek to engage in the same, and interrogate the role of street art in modifying the cityscape. Through the course of my paper, I seek to interrogate the changing cityscape of Delhi and the role that street art has played in the same, post the events of 13th and 15th December 2019. The walls of Jamia Millia Islamia serve as a canvas for the articulation of resistance against the State and its excesses, its personal testimony of the same, and the graffiti on the same covers a plethora of topics, ranging from assertions of revolution, encouraging slogans and ominous warnings by literary figures, and is a dynamic form of subversion of State Power, unlike the street art projects at Lodhi Art Districts that are aimed at gentrification. The murals have been painted by students but the anonymity of the artists is retained, and thus belongs to no one but the multiplicity. I seek to study the reorientation of the cityscape of Delhi by the protest sites of Jamia and Shaheen Bagh that is not just limited to street art but the rerouting and diversion of traffic, creation of temporary structures like classrooms and libraries outside the institution and on the roads through the works of Henri Lefebvre, and weigh the significance of this protest.

Double Weaving: A Bottom-Up Process of Connecting Locations and Scales to Mitigate Grand Challenges

Grand challenges are system-wide problems. While top-down approaches to mitigating grand challenges may have potentially far-reaching impact, such initiatives from the higher scales can fail because of limited knowledge of ground realities. At the same time, resilient local efforts to address societal challenges can have limited reach. How can a grassroots organization work across locations and scales to address a grand challenge? We report the findings of a longitudinal case study of the Child In Need Institute (CINI), a non-profit organization that successfully scaled its impact to reach over seven million beneficiaries. Based on 40 years of archival data and four years of intensive fieldwork, our findings reveal “double weaving” as a recursive process of diagnosing and addressing problems by connecting actors and resources across locations and scales. The double-weaving process gives researchers a framework to explore the complex interplay between locations and scales that is necessary to address grand challenges. Our study contributes to research on grand challenges and scaling, advancing the spatial turn in organizational studies by developing the scalar dimension and expanding research that has primarily focused on locations.

Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination

Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination

Introduction

When future scholars come to assess the humanities in our time, they will probably call it the age of buzzwords. Whereas previous generations of academics pledged allegiance to their intellectual heroes—Marx! Foucault!—that fervor seems to have shifted to catchy conceptual slogans. Anthropocene! Spatial Turn! New Materialism! Buzzwords dot conference papers and grant proposals, they ooze cognitive certainty, and those who chronicle our academic trajectory a few decades from now will surely wonder whether we really had a clear idea of what we were talking about. (Message to posterity: we were wondering about that, too.)Against this background, the guiding question of this roundtable is anything but tongue-in-cheek. The New Materialism is no longer a nascent intellectual current that has yet to reach conceptual maturity. We have a multitude of publications from a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars, and that provides us with fodder for a first assessment from the viewpoint of an empirically minded discipline. What are the approaches that matter for the historian's craft, and specifically for those who engage with the history of agriculture in one way or another? How does the New Materialism frame our understanding of topics, narratives, and intellectual goals? And what do we need to change in established readings, if anything? After all, agricultural history has never been nonmaterial because it's hard to imagine a nonmaterial agriculture—though a former Monsanto CEO once tried his best to suggest otherwise.The following interventions explore these questions with different case studies in mind and with different types of intellectual ambitions. Some scale the philosophical heights of the literature while others feel more comfortable with their feet on the ground (or, on a personal note, with their intellectual existence at sea). They engage with straw, ontology, and Robert Frost, among other things, and there is no obvious hierarchy. There is something unsettled and unrefined at the heart of the New Materialism debate, something that defies categorization and intellectual order. It is a bit like dealing with a monster that we thought was dormant for a long time—though monsters provide a poor metaphor owing to their inherent anthropomorphism. It would seem that, in engaging with the inherent power of the material, we are truly at the mercy of the elements.Going through these contributions and the literature that they survey, it seems that there is no obvious template for writing new materialist histories. There are a few paths that have been explored, there are recurring themes and challenges, but those who seek a checklist for their graduate seminars will come away disappointed. But maybe that is the entire point of engaging with the New Materialism? If matter really matters, we are reckoning with forces beyond our control, that lack a sense of human decency, and were around before the word. It is no small challenge to come to terms with forces of this kind. But if the following comments prove anything, it is that we need to try.This roundtable grew out of a session at the Agricultural History Society meeting in June 2021. Albert Way encouraged us to publish our views in the pages of Agricultural History and assured quick publication, though speed is a mixed blessing in academic endeavors and material flows alike. As you will see below, I had second thoughts about the circle of invitees when I penned my own comment. But even within the set boundaries, the following conversation may be inspiring and inconclusive in equal measure, and I trust that readers will find that an important insight in its own right. When it comes to the material, we are wrestling with a subversive force that will keep us on edge for the foreseeable future.

ПРОСТРАНСТВЕННЫЙ ПОВОРОТ В ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯХ КУЛЬТУР КОРЕННЫХ МАЛОЧИСЛЕННЫХ НАРОДОВ

This article is devoted to the consideration of the features of the spatial turn in relation to the study of the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the North. It has become possible to talk about cultural turns, including the spatial turn, since the 1960s, when global theoretical generalizations, models explaining the structure, genesis or functioning of culture practically ceased to appear in the sciences of culture; an increase in the amount of data that is of interest to researchers has also become a sign of the times; at this time, there was also the rise of social movements, which entailed, among other things, criticism of the now traditional Western science with its ideologies and methodologies. The consequence of these changes, among other things, was the deployment of more than ten different turns. Pluralism became the basis of cognitive turns, which manifested itself, among other things, in the refusal to recognize Western scientific theories and methodologies as the only true and worthwhile ones, and to stop focusing on Western cultural processes. Within the framework of cognitive turns, it became possible to turn to previously non-canonical or even taboo objects of research. Cognitive turns imply interdisciplinarity of research, including not only the involvement of methods from different disciplines, but also the invention of new approaches and procedures for data analysis, including the mixing of previously uncrossed methods. The spatial turn refuses to centralize the temporal, emancipating space, one of the basic categories for the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the North. This article discusses the genesis of the relationship between the categories "space" and "time"; basic approaches to understanding space; typology of spaces; goals, categories and methods of spatial rotation.

Land Use in Flood-Prone Areas and Its Significance for Flood Risk Management—A Case Study of Alpine Regions in Austria

Increasing flood damage has led to a rising importance of land use in flood risk management policies, commonly referred to as the spatial turn in flood risk management. This includes policies aiming at making space for rivers, which, in practice, lead to an increasing demand for land. Although research has been conducted on the variety of policies, the resulting land use conflicts in flood-prone areas have not been paid much attention to. This paper therefore analyses the current land use and its changes in Alpine flood-prone areas in Austria. The results show that space for rivers has been decreasing due to human activities (e.g., river straightening and channel narrowing) since the middle of the 19th century, and settlements have been expanding into flood-prone areas. Furthermore, the share of valuable agricultural land (which is important for food production) located in flood hazard zones is higher in more mountainous areas. Given the limited space for permanent settlement in Alpine regions, these land use changes exert pressure on the availability of land suitable for flood risk management. Therefore, making space for rivers as part of flood risk management policies faces considerable restrictions in Alpine areas.

The landscape of informal economy research: a systematic review of transient trends, pivot, and emerging pattern: is there a spatial turn?

The landscape of informal economy research: a systematic review of transient trends, pivot, and emerging pattern: is there a spatial turn?

지속가능한 발전을 위한 역사교육 - 환경사와 역사교육의 연대를 위한 제언

This paper contains some suggestions for a close connection between environmental history and history education. The ‘spatial turn’ of history, the global nature of the environmental history, and its relevance to the present raise the need to introduce environmental history into world history education. Although the current history curriculum and textbooks only recognize the environment as a current problem, environmental history education should, above all else, make it possible to reflect on the interaction between humans and the environment in a long-term context with the goal of ‘sustainable development.’ In order to introduce environmental history into the history curriculum step by step, this paper proposes three categories of themes, namely migration and trade, power, and global history of disaster, aligned with the world history education of exchange and interaction.

Peace geographies and the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies: Integrating parallel conversations through spatial practices

AbstractScholarship on the dynamics of peace and conflict is in the midst of a geographic renaissance. Within the discipline there is growing interest among political geographers in theorizing and exploring “geographies of peace”. At the same time, the interdisciplinary field of peace and conflict studies is experiencing a “spatial turn” whereby geographic ideas are increasingly engaged. This article provides an overview of these parallel conversations and proposes the concept of spatial practices as a framework for bringing them together. Elements of this framework can be seen within peace geographies and the spatial turn research, and they resonate with broader conversations taking place in the discipline of geography and beyond.

The place of space in urban metabolism research: Towards a spatial turn? A review and future agenda

The concept of urban metabolism has been profusely used by various disciplines over the last and current century to describe different urban phenomena. One theme that appears to gain importance in the interdisciplinary field of urban metabolism is the spatial dimension. In this article, we have carried out a bibliometric and qualitative analysis of the use of this multi-faceted notion in order to understand the place of space in urban metabolism research. Our results show that several communities within the urban metabolism field use and manipulate space for their research according to different approaches (territorial economic, socio-political, socio-ecological, governance and urban planning, and modeling). We discuss recent contributions of these communities and their approaches, their limitations, and a future agenda that might cross-fertilize them in order to embed space more consistently in urban metabolism research.

GIS-Based Approach for the Analysis of Geographical Education Paths

This paper presents a new geospatial approach, and a proposal to study the geographic educational path of individuals or social groups identified by researchers using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and spatial statistics. A scheme of research proceedings has been proposed, including obtaining data from various sources (including surveys and other sources, e.g., from the university and OpenStreetMap), their proper preparation and categorisation into one geodatabase on the GIS system, followed by visualisation and the calculation of statistics. The whole research procedure was carried out in GIS. The results can be useful for detecting patterns of educational paths in different countries and social groups, and comparing them. Indirectly, they can be used to study mobility, and to indicate the spatial range of studied schools. The study was carried out among a group of students of geoinformation at the University of Lodz. Visualization and analysis of their geographical educational path showed that most of them attended schools close to where they lived, indicating low mobility during their education. The results obtained may be relevant to the “spatial turn” in education research.

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

Self-realization and Children: Logics of Space Usage in the Narratives of Russian Women

Demographic issues inspire the steady interest of researchers. Therefore, a thesis about the interconnection of fertility decline with the spread of values of self-realization and individualization is still important. In this article, the mentioned interrelation is considered in the context of pragmatic and spatial turn in the social sciences. Analyzing interviews on family topics with Russian women (53 in-depth interviews conducted in 2008-2021), we found that categories of childbirth and self-realization are also interconnected with a spatial narrative. Three logics of space usage have been identified; these are “journey”, where a person sees an almost unlimited horizon of life strategies and abilities; then, “logistics” represents practices of organization of all family members due to the spatial distances between schools and other spaces for extracurricular activities, that is, places that ensure the self-realization of children. Finally, the metaphor “home” symbolizes the logic of the constant efforts of maintaining the integrity and unity of the domestic (or family) world as well as the balance between departures and arrivals. The values of self-realization are significant for all three types, but individualistic attitudes and behavior are clearly expressed only in “journey”. The metaphor “home” means that an individual corresponds his self-realization with the well-being of other family members. In case of “logistics”, a large construct of people, places, and relationships is created to provide the conditions for self-realization. All in all, this study suggests that the relationship between values and behavior of individuals (in particular, behavior related with childbirth) is more complicated than it often seems. The article suggests that various logics of using space allow us to see discrepancies between such seemingly tightly-connected things as building a family and having children (maximizing the number of children).

Lefebvre and the spatial turn in urban anthropology: Notes for an epistemology of lived space

Resumen La antropología urbana es una disciplina a la que le costó nacer. Su origen, en el seno del departamento de Sociología de la Escuela de Chicago, sitúa a la disciplina en una posición de dependencia frente a la sociología urbana. Sin embargo, el enfoque etnográfico de la Escuela de Chicago dura poco, fagocitado por una sociología estadística y cuantitativa, que durante mucho tiempo será la dominante. Por su parte, los antropólogos llegan tarde a la ciudad, ya entrados los años 1960’s, y cuando llegan, vacilan entre hacer antropología en la ciudad o antropología urbana. Es en las décadas de 1970 y 1980 cuando se intenta dibujar un marco epistemológico para la antropología urbana, que ha ingresado al siglo XXI huérfana de un objeto de estudio claro. Este es el diagnóstico del problema respecto al cual el filósofo urbano Henri Lefebvre puede darnos algunas luces. Usando fragmentos de etnografías propias como ejemplo, el presente texto realiza una relectura antropológica de algunos conceptos lefebvrianos como “espacio vivido” y “vida cotidiana”, resaltando su carácter socialmente transformador; igualmente, a través de una serie de reflexiones epistemológicas, se tiene la intención de avanzar en la formulación de algunas conclusiones metodológicas relevantes para la construcción de una etnografía urbana con perspectiva crítica.

Street art and protest under pandemic conditions in Colombia: A visual semiotic approach

This article engages in a visual critical semiotic analysis of Medellín street art and its interpretation as political action in the Colombian social mobilisation of 2021. I explore three epistemological turns towards a descriptive and contrastive methodology to contextualize street art and its transformative potential. Firstly, the spatial turn leads us to understand how space and street art function as a framework of life and conflict that challenges viewers socially and politically. Secondly, following Peirceʼs ideas, I reinter preted some images. I explain how they function as theoretical objects related to indices, signs and symbols. According to Mitchell's image turn, the image functions as a significant semantic unit. Thirdly, I read the political turn based on Rancièreʼs works in which he equates the political and the aesthetic as an act of visibility, always existing together at a conceptual and substantive level, and with which emancipation is objective. The article does not try to argue whether street art has a transformative power as this has been widely discussed in the literature. The article looks at street art that appeared in the context of the social mobilisation of 2021-2022, and partially in the context of the recent pandemic as a social transformation, the fact of which was proven by the recent elections.

Historical writing practices in the space of intercultural interaction

Over the past half century, historical science has experienced a series of “turns”, enriched with new approaches, which has led to qualitative changes in the subject field and research issues, in the structure of historical knowledge, in the practices of historical writing and professional self-awareness of historians. In this context, actual historiographic studies acquires a new status. At the heart of professional historical culture, a special type of collective memory is found, with characteristic values (primarily the requirement of reliability) and means of communication, both within one’s own community and with society as a whole and with representatives of another culture. We are talking about an attempt to analyze and comprehend the specific features of historiographic texts created in different chronotopes in the conditions of intense contacts and confrontation between emerging and mutually affirmed national and cultural identities. On the other hand, as a result of the so-called spatial turn, the most striking manifestation of which was the formation of interdisciplinary research fields of global, new world and new regional history, the focus of researchers was communication processes covering the development of relationships in the world over the past half millennium. Such a history appears today not only as a set of empirical studies that overcome the limited horizons of individual national-state histories, but also as a fan of differently defined macrohistorical approaches – as transnational history, histoire croisée, connected history, etc. The focus of transnational research is complex multicultural formations or various forms of other cultural communities that are in more or less close relationships. The main thing in this strategy of studying two or more related objects belonging to different cultures is to take into account the subjectivity and activity of all aspects of interaction. It also raises the question of overcoming latent exclusivity in the current intercultural discourse and the possibility of a new integrating conception, capable of covering the history of mankind, taking into account the differences in cultural traditions and ways of historical thinking.

Mapowanie teorii. Geobiografia teorii literatury fantastycznej w Polsce — propozycja badawcza i dwa studia przypadku

In the article the project of mapping the theories of fantastic literature in Poland is going to be presented. Methodology proposals have been completed by microanalyses of selected examples. It is of our conviction that the advancement of theoretical studies on the fantastic allows for introducing some arrangements, specifically in terms of reconstructing the mechanisms and conditions for building up the knowledge.
 We make use of the emergence theory focusing on repeatedness of accidental occurrences in, for instance, transferring and grounding notions or quite opposite in disqualifying particular scientific concepts and aiming at the strength of personal (biographical, geographical) conditions and idiosyncrasy in forming critical discourses on the fantastic phenomenon.
 The theory frame of the project is set up mainly by the concepts resulted from the spatial turn in the humanities. The arrangements of occurrences and cases made in the Polish theory of the fantastic are in reference to the concept of cultural geography, cultural mobility, migration studies and biographical materialism.
 It is proposed to benefit from derived therefrom the methods for data development, one of them the map. It is postulated also to identify the, so called, “lineages”, that is the theoretical and literary approaches to the fantastic,viewed in terms of long-term structures [longue durée] (it is mentioned in the article aimed at the study of the case dealing with the reception of literary works and theoretical studies of S. Grabiński via A. Hutnikiewicz). In turn, the study on cultural mobility (adaptation, reinterpretation, transferring, translation of particular approaches and concepts in the fantastic theory) will demonstrate the directions, speed and potentials in spreading the theory, for instance foreign ones in Poland and Polish abroad, respectively (it is emphasized in the study on the case of the reception of the T. Todorov via S. Lem fantastic theory). Finally it is of great interest to look into nomadic biographies (geographically and intellectually) of Polish fantastic literature theorists. It is proposed to reinforce in the studies not only the issue of human factor but also the material (artefacts, places) and the institutional (e.g. journals, universities) ones in determining communicative memory of particular theories of fantastic literature.

Introduction – Ricœur and the Problem of Space. Perspectives on a Ricœurian “Spatial Turn”

Introduction to special issue "Ricoeur and the Problem of Space"

Olli Jalonen’s Literary Explorations of Time, Space, and Existential Meaning

ABSTRACT I argue in this article that five of the Finnish literary author Olli Jalonen’s post-1999 novels – Yhdeksän pyramidia (2000; Nine Pyramids), 14 solmua Greenwichiin (2008; 14 Knots to Greenwich), Karatolla (2012; A Winter Bonfire), Taivaanpallo (2018; The Celestial Sphere), and Merenpeitto (2019; The Surface of the Ocean) – are intellectually connected: forming an intertextual web, all these works explore the existential significance and mutual connectivity of spatiotemporality, impermanence, and subjective meaning-making. In elaborating on this argument, I take my primary theoretical cues from two sources. First, I draw on twentieth-century existentialism’s basic tenets that we humans are “time-haunted ani-mal[s],” due to our awareness of our own mortality, and that this predicament “demands that we actively make our destiny.” Second, in challenging the assumption that the spatial turn has rendered temporality an outdated interest in literary studies, I draw on the work of Adam Barrows, who argues, convincingly, that both time and space should be brought to bear on the study of fiction. As this article shows, the ways in which time and space intersect and intertwine in Jalonen’s narratives significantly contribute to his fictional representations of existential meaning-making.

Journeying the everyday of civic space: movement as method in socio‐legal studies

AbstractArising from the spatial turn in the social sciences, metaphors and material practices of movement have developed into methodological tools for studying the transitory moments of everyday life. This article explores how socio‐legal scholars can use movement as method to trace law in the everyday of civic space. The research draws upon a project that explored how bodies, materials, concepts, and administrative processes are set in motion in the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury, England, where births and deaths are registered on the mezzanine floor of the municipal library, museum, and art gallery. The article teases out some of the challenges of journeying with law, in architectural settings where legal activity has not been explicitly designed for, but where it nonetheless surfaces in fleeting moments. Movement as method, I argue, expands the socio‐legal toolkit for examining spaces of law and bureaucracy while challenging assumptions made in socio‐legal studies about the buildings typically inhabited by lawyers in the Global North.