Journal ArticleDOI
Rethinking space: an outsider's view of the spatial turn
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TLDR
In this article, a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru is presented to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale.Abstract:
Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.read more
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Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
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Cartography I Mapping narrative cartography
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the growing interest in the relationship between maps, narratives and meta-narratives and explore their current state in the Geoweb era.
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Spacing Practices: The Communicative Configuration of Organizing Through Space‐Times
Consuelo Vásquez,François Cooren +1 more
TL;DR: Using a space-time perspective to examine the ways that communication is constitutive of organization, a concept of space as an ongoing construct of multiple and heterogeneous sociomaterial interrelations is proposed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Confronting the data-divide in a time of spatial turns and volunteered geographic information
Abstract: Geography is enjoying a period of unparalleled visibility, driven by the growing use of geographic methods and concepts across the sciences and humanities—the so-called spatial turn—and the pervasive use of geospatial Web technologies and their concomitant influence on society, especially the phenomenon of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The field of public health is beginning to harness spatiality with gusto; however, the geospatial Web and its social phenomena are underexplored in this context even though they may be particularly useful for public health enquiry, especially in low-resource settings that lack traditional data collection mechanisms. A case study framed within these two current phenomena is presented to illustrate the influence of geography and its potential for addressing the data-divide—the disparity in availability of data for scientific enquiry and decision-making most felt in low-and middle income countries. A facilitated VGI data collection initiative collected public health-related injury data in Cape Town, South Africa, as a pragmatic alternative given the lack of data from traditional sources. Emergency medical services personnel interacted with a GeoWeb interface to volunteer their informed opinions of high-incident injury locations. Previously unrecorded injury location data were created, and combined with traditional injury data for use in an ongoing study examining the environmental determinants of injury in this setting, which speaks to the possibility for hybrid authoritative/asserted data collection strategies. This study speaks to the growing influence of geography and one of its driving forces, the techno-social revolution in geospatial technology and data. Future work should continue to examine their potential to address the data-divide.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The production of space
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a plan of the present work, from absolute space to abstract space, from the Contradictions of Space to Differential Space, and from Contradictory Space to Social Space.
Book
Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
TL;DR: Soja's "Postmodern Geographies" as discussed by the authors stands as the cardinal broadcast and defence of theory s spatial turn, from the suppression of space in modern social science and the disciplinary aloofness of geography to the spatial returns of Foucault and Lefebvre and the construction of Marxist geographies alert to urbanization and global development.
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The Production of Space
Kirsten Simonsen,Henri Lefebvre +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city, and seeks to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality.
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A Space for Place in Sociology
TL;DR: Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review as discussed by the authors, and it may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a socology of place, for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians.