Across the world urban semioscapes emerge from multiple and mutually interlocking social activities of the members of sociocultural groups and are established through the deployment of layered configurations of semiotic resources and discourses which index patterns of these activities as well as the underlying norms and values of these groups. A particularly conspicuous semiotic practice which has established itself as a distinct semiotic layer in Slovakia’s urban semioscape is one through which social agents declare certain segments of space as private. (...) By erecting ‘private property’ signs they impose a certain ‘power regime’ on a physical territory but also imprint upon that space a particular ideological meaning. This practice is particularly salient in Slovakia’s geopolitical environment in which the notion of ‘privateness’ was excluded from official ideology under socialism. As language is a principal semiotic mode for the construction of the practice of constructing private space, the practice can also be looked upon as a sociolinguistic phenomenon indexing the post-1989 political and economic transformation processes in Slovakia; that is, the re-establishment of ‘private ownership’ within the larger processes of ‘rectification’ which post-socialist societies underwent in the transformation period. My argument is that the practice is a manifestation of geocultural globalisation on a local scale-level which leads to the emergence of new forms of locality. In the paper I employ Blommaert’s innovative conceptual toolbox of the sociolinguistics of globalisation’ along with the analytical practices and procedures of geosemiotics and linguistic landscape, and apply them to the corpus of signs which I believe index this practice and establish the topography of private space’ in the urban semioscape examined. (shrink)

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of these binaries will (...) define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory. (shrink)

The biological Brain createst the mental Mind. Today our collective Mind becomes so fascinated by its source, the Brain, that all sciences incorporate neuro models in their concepts to increase global brainpower with technology. The most significant discovery is probably technology. We learn how the Brain creates consciousness and how the Brain generates momentaneous Time. Discover how at each moment in Time, our body runs the whole program of Evolution. What we know about the Brain is phantasy from the Mind.

Drawing on reflections from a collaborative autoethnography, this article argues that ultramarathon running is defied by a 'dark' ecological sensibility (Morton 2007, 2010, 2016), characterised by moments of pain, disgust, and the macabre. In contrast to existing accounts, we problematise the notion that runners 'use' nature for escape and/or competition, while questioning the aesthetic-causal relationships often evinced within these accounts. With specific reference to the discursive, embodied, spatial and temporal aspects of the sport, we explore the way in which participants (...) begin to appreciate the immense power of nature, while being humbled by the fragile and unstable foundations of human experience. Accordingly this article contributes novel insights into the human-nature complex that seek to move beyond Romantic analyses towards a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between (nature) sport, people and place. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the place attachment and homeland construction for refugees and their descendants in China. This study investigates the process by which the place attachment of Young Overseas Chinese Relatives is shaped in the context of resettlement sites. This qualitative research employed ethnographic fieldwork, and the author collected local literature and materials from February to December 2019 through participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and questionnaires. It is believed that the construction of a new homeland in the community, (...) the emotional experience of the Young in childhood, and the cultural logic of place attachment shape place attachment. The process by which place attachment is shaped is interwoven with homeland construction, which indicates that the living state and mentality of the Young are becoming increasingly stable. The Young developed different mentalities on the basis of traditional Confucian culture in responding to the socio-cultural environments. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

The biological brain creates a mind, and the mental mind creates a brain. Learn how the brain creates consciousness and how it generates momentaneous time moments. Discover how at each moment in Time, our body runs the whole program of Evolution. Neuroscience and Philosophy.

. Book Reviews. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 179-195.

In recent years, the debate on emotions has been influenced by postconstructionist research, particularly the use of performativity as a key concept. According to Judith Butler (1993, 1997) the construction of emotions is a process open to constant change and redefinition. The final result of emotionlanguage “natural” development is what is known as technoscience. New ways of naming emotions have emerged within technoscience. In our research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by cyber-café and call shop users, (...) we came to understand how these technologies are significant in those users’ daily life. The emphasis will be on analyzing emotions related to the use of ICT in the aforementioned settings. Using the concept of performance (Butler, 1990), we will explore how narratives create a need for particular emotions, which did not exist before they were performed. To understand this performance, we use an ad hoc tool called Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) as it is used by the Manchester School. Analysis has revealed the existence of a membership category in which velocity is salient as performance. This ‘velocity’ seems to follow the evolution of technoscience in the social sciences. We will observe velocity in the context created by two concepts, Donna Haraway’s (1990) cyborg and Alessandro Baricco’s (2007) mutant. (shrink)

This paper addresses some relations between the spatial politics of queer assemblies in spaces of protest and the constitution of collective political subjects. It does so by exploring the spatial politics of queer activism within the global Occupy movements, in the light of Judith Butler’s work on the performative power of assembly and the ambivalences of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. Specific challenges faced by queer activists in various encampments will be addressed in order to expose some tensions between the (...) constitutive exclusions inherent to the constitution of spaces of protest and the processes of coalition building needed to effectively overcome those very constitutive exclusions. (shrink)

Practice, Spatiality and Embodied Emotions: An Outline of a Geography of Practice The paper outlines an approach to social analysis/human geography taking off from a social ontology of practice. This means a focus of attention to embodied or practical knowledges and their formation in people's everyday lives, to the world of experiences and emotions, and to the infinitude of encounters through which we make the world and are made by it in turn. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, considering (...) the way in which subjectivity and identity are created in and through practices sets the ground. The two following sections are extensions from that discussing "embodiment and spatiality" and "affectivity and emotion" respectively. The purpose is threefold; to develop the sensuous character of practice, to consider the spatialities involved in that character, and to discuss possible developments including power and the social differentiation of bodies. The paper is concluded by a short discussion of the geographies following from the suggested account. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the conceptualisations of space which underlie debate of gentrification-related displacement. Using Derrida's concept of the spatial metaphor, the paper illuminates the Cartesian understandings of space that act as architecture for displacement debate. The paper corrects this through arguing that the philosophy of Heidegger and Lefebvre better serves to understand displacement. Emphasising the topology of Heidegger's Dasein and, following Elden, relating this to Lefebvre's understanding of space, the paper 'constructs' displacement in a way that avoids the (...) abstraction of displacement-as-out-migration and instead emphasises the lived experience of space. (shrink)

This article analyses the multimodal representations of public space in Chilean broadcast news reports on the figure of the hooded rioter and its alleged connections with the student movement. We seek to identify how space is constructed as a legitimation strategy in relation to the actors involved and the actions taking place across four different news broadcast pieces in the light of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results show that the multimodal representations of space are crucial to (...) identify and functionalize hooded rioters as belonging to the student movement. Actions are dependent on the spaces in which actors operate, restricting the occupation of certain spaces to specific actors. Thus, transgressive protest actions are to be contained to educational spaces and represented as naturalized vandalism, ignoring the students’/demonstrators’ motivations to recuperate/vindicate the public space. (shrink)

Brazil's health councils appear to offer inspiring examples of what Fung and Wright term “empowered participatory governance.” But what happens in practice? This article narrates an episode in the life of a municipal health council in northeast Brazil, in which democracy itself came under deliberation. It seeks to locate normative assumptions embedded in theories of deliberative democracy and participatory governance in everyday conduct in one of these institutions. It suggests that assessing the democratizing potential of the myriad new spaces that (...) now populate governance landscapes the world over calls for far closer attention to be paid to power, political culture, and politics. (shrink)

Technologies not only change “external reality” but also change our internal consciousness, shaping the way we experience the world. As the reality of intelligent environments is upon us—ushered along with the age of ubiquitous computing—we must be careful that the ideology these technologies embody is not blindly incorporated into the environment. As disciplines, engineering and computer science make implicit assumptions about the world that conflict with traditional modes of cultural production. For example, space is commonly understood to be the void (...) left behind when no objects are present. Unfortunately, once we see space in this way, we are unable to understand the role it plays in our everyday experience. In order to make computationally enhanced spaces that are meaningful at the level of the everyday, we must exorcise the notion of intelligence from their design and replace it with life. Henri Lefebvre’s discussions of the space of everyday life provide a framework to help conceive this transition. (shrink)

En este artículo se problematiza la relación entre espacio, tiempo y memoria, a partir de la puesta en diálogo de los desarrollos teóricos en torno al espacio relacional que ha realizado David Harvey y los estudios sobre rememoración de Walter Benjamin. Se tomará la obra de teatro de Juan Mayorga: _El cartógrafo. Varsovia, 1:400.000 _como disparadora de estas problemáticas.

Here it is shown that 'vacant nature' is deployed as sign in Anglo-American landscape representation of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to support a Cartesian imaginary of spatial extension. The referent of this imaginary is variously denoted as 'America' (John Locke), the 'north west' (Jefferson), the 'wilderness' (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the 'frontier' (Frederick Jackson Turner) but throughout it is essentially the same 'vacant' landscape; its function is to produce a site and space of appearance for an imperial self, an (...) isolate pursuing self-extension through commodity production and consumption. This spatial representation—the predecessor of the abstract space of shopping malls, interstates, commercial advertising, global markets, office buildings, and suburbs—is contrasted with 'place,' a space shaped by topography, collective memory, and ecological constraint. (shrink)

In 66 CE, the emperor Nero crowned the Parthian prince Tiridates I king of Armenia before the Roman people in the Forum Romanum. Much scholarship on Roman interactions with Parthia or Armenia focuses on histories of military conflict or diplomatic negotiation. Ritual and ceremonial evidence, however, is often taken for granted. This article uses the coronation to highlight a different way in which Rome articulated its relations with Parthia and Armenia to domestic and foreign audiences. It will show how Nero (...) and his regime used the art of public spectacle to project an image of Roman superiority over Parthia and Armenia in spite of Roman military losses in the recent Armenian war. Tiridates, a Parthian prince and a brother of the Parthian king of kings, traveled to Rome to be crowned the first king of Armenia from the Parthian royal family. To receive this title, Tiridates passed by several monuments to Augustan triumphs over Parthia and Armenia in the Forum. He was also surrounded by a group of Roman citizens, who watched him as they would have watched a defeated foreign leader in a triumph. At the culmination of the ceremony, Tiridates performed proskynesis before Nero at the rostra Augusti and was granted his crown. Through Augustus’ monuments, the collective viewing of Tiridates, and his acts of public submission and deference to Nero, the crowning intimated a new narrative about the state of Roman-Parthian/armenian relations. While Augustus had represented Parthian and Armenian defeat in art, Nero had compelled a representative of both Parthia and Armenia to come to Rome and kneel before the emperor. Both states were now subservient to Rome, which remained the dominant power in the East. (shrink)

Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters (...) shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space. (shrink)

What allows theories to evolve, to progress? A contentious notion, progress still haunts a number of contemporary theories. However, little research invites us to rethink progress in a comprehensive way. In this article, I contribute to this issue by considering the paradigmatic case of David Harvey’s Marxism. A pathbreaking thinker in geography, sociology, and urban studies, Harvey claims his theory intrinsically surpasses its inherent contradictions. However, numerous authors suggest otherwise, as it fails to engage with essential urban processes such as (...) those based on state, gendered, racial, or environmental dynamics. These aspects of social life challenge his dialectical ambition. I argue that Harvey’s attachment to an orthodox Marxism ultimately limits his claim to theoretical progress. Reviewing Harvey’s overall body of work, I focus on his metatheory regarding space and his examination of the Paris Commune. I argue that his ideas on the progress of theory follow from his dialectical assumptions, which in turn inhibit his portrayal of practical realities and a continuous dialogue with concrete cases. (shrink)

This article makes two arguments. First, that advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) have created multiple parallel flows of consumption that allow us to be productive continuously, in the sense of generating value for the economy. Second, the struggle over social time poses emergent challenges for planning and urban design. After introducing the relevant themes, this article explains how value is derived from labour and the process through which time is made economically productive. Next, it is posited that advanced ICTs, (...) especially mobile devices and associated services, create possibilities for multiple flows of time, freeing consumption from territorial and temporal restrictions, and opening up new forms of labour. This discussion elicits some concerns for those interested in communities and urban space. The article concludes with suggestions for adopting a socio-spatial-temporal outlook to urban planning and design, including designing ‘polyrhythmic’ places and planning for public time. (shrink)

In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) (...) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space. (shrink)

Given that one of the defining elements of capitalist society is the ubiquity of forms of abstraction through which social relations are mediated, it is not surprising that a generalised ‘reproach of abstraction’ has taken on a critical orthodoxy within social theory and the humanities. Many of these attacks against a pervasive culture of abstraction have an obvious resonance with longstanding critiques of the abstractions inherent in law. This article explores the critique of the power of abstraction that is a (...) central theme in Henri Lefebvre’s depiction of the ‘abstract space’ of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it will be emphasised that Lefebvre’s work is not primarily concerned with the rejection of abstraction per se, but with understanding the relationships between dominant forms of abstraction and concrete social practices. Of particular interest here is Lefebvre’s reformulation of the concept of concrete abstraction which extends his work beyond a polemical dismissal of the violence of abstraction into broader theoretical debates about the role of the abstract in the reproduction of social relations. Building on this aspect of Lefebvre’s work, I will argue that the concept of concrete abstraction can provide a means of understanding the relationships between the concrete and the abstract in existing juridico-political relations. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre speaks of space as a social product. Spatially, law operates as a social product when considering sites of imprisonment. Call them prisons, jails, or correctional facilities, people who violate the law go to these places for purposes of confinement, punishment, rehabilitation. However, with decades of increasing rates of incarceration, we can see that these places fail both the jailed and the external society to which they will return. Through overcrowding, exploitative private companies, and defunded social services, these places (...) continue to cause injustice as spaces in which the social product of rehabilitation is often lacking. However, on the Island of Hawai‘i, there is an alternative. In Hilo, the community-based organization ‘Ohana Ho‘opakele’ seeks to provide a Hawaiian holistic approach that will serve as an alternative to incarceration. Through wellness centers and the practice of traditional ho’oponopono, this group advocates for a spatially-oriented rehabilitative approach to restorative justice. A central feature is the land upon which the program will be situated and its organization as a self-supported ahupua‘a. This indigenous land division contains diverse and sustainable resources where the participants will be connected to Hawaiian culture and practices central to the concept of wellness for the person and the community. The group’s vision for this program is far-reaching as it will serve as a model for justice in the Restored Hawaiian Kingdom. In this paper, we will explore the vision of ‘Ohana Ho‘opakele against the backdrop of a politically westernized legislative-based response to the diasporic urgency of Hawaii’s incarcerated. (shrink)

This article focuses on the link between borders and creativity that has come to light over the last two decades thanks to new interdisciplinary theoretical approaches proposing a systemic-processual shift within border studies. Following this, it is worth considering the creative interplay caused by the triad, bordering-ordering- othering, that conceives borders not only as demarcation lines, but also as dynamic, processual social practices. Borders are paradoxical structures that, created in order to separate and distinguish, signify created and creative spaces for (...) studying the contemporary world-system by adopting a pluri-versal perspective and moving toward a new border epistemology. (shrink)

A classic epistemological problem in the social sciences is how to analyse and understand social change. In media and communication studies, for example, the concept of mediatisation has sparked off such a debate, since one of the main criticisms against the approach is that researchers rather take change for granted without being able to empirically establish if and how change has occurred. In this article is suggested a model for analysing social change through an analysis of how generational identity as (...) “we-sense” is produced in narratives about media use. The empirical basis for the discussion is picked from a recently finished project on media generations in Sweden and Estonia, building on foremost qualitative material. The article concludes with accounting for the merits of using a generational perspective for analysing social change. (shrink)

Given that the Obama administration still relies on many strategies we would think of as sitting on the side of secrecy, it seems that the only lasting transparency legacy of the Obama administration will be data-driven or e-transparency as exemplified by the web interface ‘data.gov’. As the data-driven transparency model is exported and assumes an ascendant position around the globe, it is imperative that we ask what kind of publics, subjects, and indeed, politics it will produce. Open government data is (...) not just a matter concerning accountability but is seen as a necessary component of the new ‘data economy’. To participate and benefit from this info-capitalist-democracy, the data subject is called upon to be both auditor and entrepreneur. This article explores the implications of responsibilization, outsourcing, and commodification on the contract of representational democracy and asks if there are other forms of transparency that might better resist neoliberal formations and re-politicize the public sphere. (shrink)

Recognizing the centrality of representation in philosophy and social sciences as constitutive of knowledge concerning the interpretation of social reality, this article highlights on the need to e...

Sociological theories of space have so far not provided an in-depth analysis of online spaces. The paper addresses this issue by means of Löw’s relational theory of space. As this theory mainly focuses on material spaces, it is necessary to embrace the phenomenological perspective in order to apply it to the virtual realm. More recent phenomenological research has highlighted the ongoing mediatization or virtualization of the life-world. These theories, and presence research more generally, are useful for examining the layers of (...) virtual presence. This paper focuses on two emblematic types of spaces: multiplayer online role-playing games and Skype video chats. The first represents an online version of a Schutzian finite province of meaning, while Skyping is an example of how the paramount reality of everyday life expands into the virtual realm. Albeit differently, actors in both cases constitute hybrid, virtual-material spaces with various forms and degrees of virtual presence. User experiences in these spaces are in line with contemporary sociological diagnoses indicating the vanishing experience of living in space and the general tendency of late modernity to question previous social forms of modernity. (shrink)

Lefebvre’s triadic conception of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces provides the theoretical framework of this article, which recognises a productive relationship between space and social relations. Its writing stems from a current and ongoing qualitative study of innovative teaching and learning practices in new technology-rich flexible learning spaces, characterised by large open spaces, permeable boundaries and diverse furnishings emphasising student comfort, health and flexibility. Schooling in the twenty-first century, certainly in the developed world, is required to ensure (...) that children and school-leavers have appropriate life-long skills in preparation for participation in the twenty-first century knowledge economy. This world is characterised as complex and dynamic, deeply influenced by globalisation and the revolution in digital technology. Developing these skills calls into question ‘outmoded’ transmission models of teaching and requires teachers and school leaders to approach their work in radically new ways. Open school design encourages flexibility in learning and teaching, and allows collaborative, team teaching, with designers claiming significant educational benefits. This arrangement of multiple classes using innovatively designed, technology-enriched common space, facilitated by multiple teachers, working in collaborative teams, is far-reaching in its likely implications for community expectations and responses, relationship-building, assessment, student learning, teachers’ work and initial teacher education. (shrink)

The paper presents a biosemiotic approach to the study of the built environment, its representations and practices in social media. First, it outlines the main developments that make semiotics hold a significant position in the study of urban space and the built environment. It then goes on to overcome the limitations of the binary opposition paradigm: in particular, nature/culture is reconsidered as a category in which the two terms are in a relation of mutual participation rather than being exclusive to (...) each other. Following this, the paper explores three participatory categories that can be useful for the study of the built environment and its social media representations and practices: life/semiosis, natural environment/built environment, text/practice. Finally, it identifies five main topics representing the interplay between the natural and built environment: the interaction of nature and architecture, urban parks, urban agriculture, digital environmentalism and ecotourism. (shrink)

The use of virtual environments for the provision of health‐care is on the increase, and with each new development brings debates about their impact on care, nursing and nursing practice. Such environments offer opportunities for extending care and improvements in communication. Others believe these developments threaten aspects of nursing they hold sacrosanct. This paper explores the development of an assemblage of computer networks, databases, information systems, software programs and management systems that together work to manage health‐care in Australia, namely casemix. (...) We contend that spatial theories on network society show how this assemblage co‐ordinates and operates to manage care. We discuss how this assemblage affects care and suggest that changes in organisation may be a part of the shift in how bodily organisation occurs more generally, but more specifically in health‐care. We also suggest how nurses are enrolled in and by such networks, leading to transformation in nurses’ practices. Finally, we argue that using spatial forms of analysis allows an interpretation of such assemblages that may account for their strengths and their shortcomings. (shrink)

The social production of an enterprise clinic: nurses, clinical pathway guidelines and contemporary healthcare practicesIn this paper I critically engage with the forming of contemporary nursing practice with/in an ‘enterprise clinic’ in order to discuss the practical potential of developing a mode of reflective practice that is a critical ontology of self. Critical engagement in the paper is secured through a ‘troubling’ of the relationship between the contemporary practices of both the self and governance, without the reduction of one to (...) the other. The paper draws on my doctoral study in which I combined the techniques of ethnography and discourse analysis in order to critically examine registered nurses’ employment of clinical pathway guidelines through an analysis of the political technologies through which that engagement was constituted. This critical purchase was applied because of the influence of the contemporary ‘problematisation’ of healthcare provision in western society on the formation and deployment of the professional identities of nurses. (shrink)

This paper examines the meaning of space and its relationship to value. In this paper, I draw on Henri Lefebvre to suggest that our ethics produce and are produced by spaces. Space is not simply a passive material container or neutral geographic location. Space includes the ideas on which buildings are modeled, the ordering of objects and movement patterns within the space, and the symbolic meaning of the space and its objects. Although often unrecognized, space itself is value-laden, and its (...) values are suggested as people interact within that space. By reflecting on the spaces of health care, we will see that we not only must attend to the quandaries caused by the delivery of health care in non-acute places, but also to the values that produce and are produced by spaces. These values influence our moral imagination and shape us as people. (shrink)

The city has featured as a central image in utopian thought. In planning the foundation of the new and ideal city there is a close interconnection between ideas about urban form and the vision of the moral good. The spatial structure of the ideal city in these visions is a framing device that embodies and articulates not only political philosophy but is itself an articulation of moral and cosmological systems. This paper analyses three different utopian moments in three different historical (...) epochs – Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), the Choson dynasty foundation of the city of Seoul (1395) and the modernist utopian urbanism of the controversial Le Corbusier (1887–1965). In this analysis attention is drawn to the cosmological and moral visions articulated in these three ‘images of the city’ (Lynch). The opposition between rationalistic/mechanistic and religious/traditional urban design can prove to be an oversimplification that obscures the complex interrelations between the moral geometry and the natural alignments of the ideal urban form. (shrink)

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and the (...) Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation. (shrink)

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows has made it possible to instantly connect location-dependent information with physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based applications, or, in other words, “locative media” provide an interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our understanding of space (...) and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with people's sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal Accessible, Bio Mapping, Disappearing Places, and Coffee Deposits. We contend that locative media artworks act upon distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current place-making practices. (shrink)

Smart cities build on the idea of collecting data about the city in order for city administration to be operated more efficiently. Within a research project gathering an interdisciplinary team of researchers – engineers, designers, gender scholars and human geographers – we have been working together using participatory design approaches to explore how paying attention to the diversity of human needs may contribute to making urban spaces comfortable and safe for more people. The project team has deployed sensors collecting data (...) on air quality, sound and mobility in a smart city testbed in Norrköping, Sweden. While these sensors are meant to capture an accurate ‘map’ of the street and what is going on along it, our interdisciplinary conversations around the sensors have revealed the heterogeneity both of smart city planning and spatial formulations of the city. The discussions have given rise to questions regarding the work that goes into constructing the sensor box itself, as well as the work of deploying it, and how these influence the ‘map’ that the sensors produce. In this paper, we draw on Lefebvre to explore how the sensors themselves produce smart spaces. We analyze how the box depends on perceived space to function (e.g. requiring electricity), and simultaneously it produces conceptualizations of space that are influenced by the materiality of the box itself (e.g. sensors being affected by heat and noise). Further, we explore how the (in)visibility of sensor technology influences lived space. (shrink)

Space—an essential dimension of our life—is analyzable from different viewpoints, which often gives rise to contrasting conceptualizations. Perceptual analyses shed light on the intrinsic anisotropy and deformations of perceived space, raising the issue of which geometry may be able to represent perceptual space. Pictorial drawings and painting have been relevant sources of information about the nature of living and perceived space. Although the geometry of perceptual space is still in its infancy, contributions are beginning to appear. This special issue contributes (...) to the development of the geometry of perceptual space. (shrink)

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overcome spatial obstacles that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our democratic capacities and created complex crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers via enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today’s crises.

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I (...) show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human. (shrink)

Pedagogy is an inherently spatial practice. Implicit in much of the rhetoric of physical space designed for teaching and learning is an ontological position that assumes material space as distinct from human practice, often conceptualising space as causally impacting upon people’s behaviours. An alternative, and growing, perspective instead theorises infrastructure as a sociomaterial assemblage, an entanglement, with scholarly learning, teaching, institutional agendas, architectural intent, technology, staff, students, pedagogic outcomes, and built form all participants in an active symbiosis of becoming. This (...) article synthesises and works with spatial theories to elaborate on the emergent literature and illustrates a sociomaterial understanding through narratives of self and staff, teaching and learning in a university context. The terms sociomaterial, assemblage and entanglement allude to a relational ontology underlying spatial-social being-becoming. This understanding can support the realisation of the intent underlying transformations of material spaces to create collaborative and inclusive university environments, where staff and students can learn, belong, and become as part of a scholarly community. I argue that sociomaterial theory is valuable to make meaning of the inseparable mélange of people, place, technologies, interaction, discourse, feeling, value and power that is teaching and learning. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss how the space of the classroom is a contested object that is constituted by historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, and discursive practices (Lefebvre in The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1991). I then employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” to characterize the ways in which educational spaces cohere “content and affect” quoted in Puar (Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, 193) into discursive figures of the heteronormative and racialized (...) national “family.” Finally, I argue that in order to advance contemporary theorizing on safe space we might consider shifting the metaphor of the classroom (and/or schooling) as a situation of home (in loco parentis) to that of a metaphor of camp. As a discursive practice, “camp” is like “home” in that it has multiple associations of past histories. However, the advantage of the metaphor of classroom as camp allows for a more capacious range of past histories of association, from recreation to temporary inhabitation to forced relocation, thus foregrounding the innate political implications of theorizing space. Moreover, the metaphor of camp implies transience (whether real or imaginary) while keeping in mind the partial and situated nature of particular places and spaces. Foregrounding the transient component/feature of safe space allows us to make visible and explore the possibilities and limitations of conceptualizing relations of power as circuitous, contested and performative through competing claims to particular places as objects of safety. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)