Among the avant-garde organizations in Europe during the middle of the twentieth century, a few of them combined in 1957 to form the Situationist International (SI). This article locates relevant aspects of their theory in the increasingly visible constellation of Critical Geography and educational scholarship, both in the foundations of education and curriculum theory. After a brief introduction to the SI, a situated pedaogy is presented in past and present educational literature and is complemented with various theoretical constructs of the (...) SI. These considerations are presented to address and, perhaps, remedy a pedagogy of placelessness that appears to be prevalent in public schools today. A situated pedagogy connects the curriculum to the everyday lives of students and is interested in identity and self-formation, but also social-formation and the relationships between the two, and asks students to pay attention to their environment, and listening to what places have to tell us. It also asks students to read the world and to decode it politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically. A situated pedagogy attends to place, not only as the focus of student inquiry or academic study, but as the spaces for performative action, intervention, and perhaps transformation. As such, education moves beyond schools to their communities as students participate in remapping their material and curricular landscapes. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, social theorists have increasingly emphasized the importance of space. However, in empirical research, the dialectical relationship between social interaction and the physical environment is still a largely neglected issue. Using the theory of structuration, I provide a concrete example of why and how space matters in the cultural analysis of an urban social world. I argue that bike messengers—individuals who deliver time-sensitive materials in downtown cores of major cities—cannot be understood outside an analysis of space. (...) Specifically, I connect the cultural significance of messenger practices to the emplacement of those practices inside the urban environment. (shrink)

The fallacy of premature designations such as “Iran's Twitter Revolution” can be attributed to the empirical gap in our knowledge about such sociotechnical phenomena in non-Western societies. To fill this gap, we need in-depth analyses of social media use in those contexts and to create detailed maps of online public environments in such societies. This paper aims to present such cartography of the political landscape of Persian Twitter by studying the case of Iran's 2013 presidential election. The objective of this (...) study is twofold: first, to fill the empirical gap in our knowledge about Twitter use in Iran, and second, to develop computational methods for studying Persian Twitter and identify the best methods for addressing different issues. During Iran's 2013 presidential election, three million tweets were collected and analyzed using social network analysis and machine learning. The findings provide a more nuanced view of the political landscape of Persian Twitter and identify patterns in accordance with or in contrast to those identified in the English-speaking Twittersphere around the 2013 presidential election. Persian Twitter was dominated by micro-celebrities, whereas institutional elites dominated English discourse about Iran on Twitter. The results also illustrate that Persian Twitter in 2013 was predominantly in favor of reformists. Finally, this study demonstrates that sentiment analysis toward political name entities can be used efficiently for mapping the political landscape of conversation on Twitter. (shrink)

The development of both the modern state and modern scientific discourses in the non-Western world are closely linked together, both being the outcome of the colonial encounter. Using a Foucauldian framework of power/knowledge and his notions of ‘episteme’ and ‘governmentality’, this article explores how colonial governmentality in India produced statistical knowledge of the country thus ushering in a new social scientific discourse of ‘progress’, ‘history’, ‘economy’ and ‘society’.

The end of ideology has been declared for several times by different writers like Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama. However, ideology still has an important role in the social order e...

A contribution to management philosophy is made here by the development of a postcolonial-storytelling theory, created by drawing together parallel developments in quantum physics and tribal peoples’ storytelling. We argue that these developments resituate the hegemonic relationship of discursive representationalism over material storytelling practices. Implications are two-fold. First, this dissolves inherent dualisms presumed in the concept of interactionamong entities like actor–structure, subject–object and discursive–nondiscursive in favour of a profound ontology of entanglement and intra-action of materiality and discourse, where storytelling is (...) a domain of this discourse. Second, postcolonial phenomena are understood as results of entangled genealogies in which plural voices are present. This implies an understanding and awareness of the intra-action of imperial narratives and material storytelling and antenarrative resistance, and thus the resistance and contestation to imperial and colonising monologic narratives of spatial and temporal alignment. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new organizational metaphor, the ‘Biophilic Organization’, which aims to counter the bio-cultural disconnection of many organizations despite their espoused commitment to sustainability. This conceptual research draws on multiple disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and architecture to not only develop a diverse bio-cultural connection but to show how this connection tackles sustainability, in a holistic and systemic sense. Moreover, the paper takes an integrative view of sustainability, which effectively means that it embraces the different emergent tensions. Three (...) specific tensions are explored: efficiency versus resilience, organizational versus personal agendas and isomorphism versus institutional change. In order to illustrate how the Biophilic Organization could potentially provide a synthesis strategy for such tensions, healthcare examples are drawn from the emerging fields of Biophilic Design in Singapore and Generative Design in the U.S.A. Finally, an example is provided which highlights how a Taoist cultural context has impacted on a business leader in China, to illustrative the significance of a transcendent belief system to such a bio-cultural narrative. (shrink)

Although it is widely acknowledged that Foucault’s accounts of the concept of heterotopia remain briefly sketched and somewhat confusing, the notion has provoked many interpretations and applications across a range of disciplines. In particular, it has been coupled with different stages or processes of modernity and persistently linked to forms of resistance. This article re-examines Foucault’s concept through a close textual analysis. It contrasts heterotopia with Lefebvre’s conceptualization of heterotopy and wider formulations of utopia. Drawing on Foucault’s study of the (...) spaces of literature of Borges, and particularly Blanchot, the article argues that heterotopia refers to varied spatial and temporal disruptions that imaginatively interrogate and undermine certain formulations of utopia. It concludes by outlining how heterotopia contests the space in which we live. (shrink)

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve "political society" into "civil society" and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space (...) as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society. (shrink)

Adam Tooze’sWages of Destructionargues for the fundamental economic reasoning that brought Hitler and the Nazi elite to the conclusion that war and genocide were the twin means of achieving their ends. But what happens if we introduce culture into this equation, a term of clear importance to Hitler and to many of the individuals Tooze has identified as key to understanding the economic developments, not least of whom was Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer? Culture is a field of activity of (...) relatively little interest to Tooze. Conversely, such comprehensive views of Nazi Germany as Tooze’s that emphasise a deep political and economic analysis have equally been of little interest to cultural historians of the period, with few exceptions. How might Tooze’s fundamental arguments about the economic drive of the state help to explain specific kinds of architectural developments and sharpen a critical art-historical analysis? Conversely, how does the profoundly spatial nature of the implementation of policies he isolates demand an architectural or urban analysis from political and economic historians? By bringing Tooze’s argument to bear on culture, and architecture’s function to bear on Tooze, this article affirms his fundamental conclusions and yet complicates their implications for other disciplinary questions. In both cases, a comprehensive approach to Hitler’s Germany is called for, one that makes a critical intervention particularly in fields of cultural study that have avoided such a broad strategy. (shrink)

Space is a product of semiosis. It is a condition pertinent to an organism’s semiotic freedom, which is articulated by the organism as a consequence of its capacity to manipulate the world in the course of its unfolding interaction with its environment. Spatial configuration is thus the result of agency inherent in the organism-in-its-environment. Space, a consequence of social cohesion, is effected through constraints and processes of enaction which are semiotic. These processes are productive and offer architects a novel means (...) by which to configure space, which they should embrace to articulate the nature of inhabitation. The model presented identifies activity as the essential building block to the generation of form. Modelled as a form of artificial life, swarm-like components, referred to as ‘actants’, represent discrete activities and self-configure according to differences in the environment they detect, to form a body-of-swarms. Thus, depicting the spatiality of being. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to construct Karl Marx's concept of social space by examining a few fragments of his works with relevant terminology (space, spatial). The main result of this interpretation is the definition of social space as a suprasensible form of division between necessary labour and surplus labour, which due to private property on all means of production creates the appearance of the absence of exploitation. While in slave-holding mode of production slave is socially naturalized labour instrument, thus the (...) division of forms of labour have only formal meaning to him/her, and in feudal mode of production the labour instrument is a nature itself, namely cropland, the division of forms of labour acquires a social character per se (social relation of labourer to means of production via wages, and socialized means of production, namely, nature (and everything else except wage labourer) subsumed under private property) only under capitalism. Unlike the established in philosophical literature concepts of social space based on Marx's theory, the definition introduced in this article is characterized by sensible-suprasensible, extraterritorial-territorial dialectics. RESUMEN Este artículo tiene como objetivo construir el concepto de espacio social de Karl Marx mediante el examen de algunos pasajes de sus obras con una terminología relevante (espacio, espacial). El resultado principal de esta interpretación es la definición del espacio social como una forma suprasensible de división entre el trabajo necesario y el trabajo excedente debido a la propiedad privada en todos los medios de producción, lo que crea la apariencia de la ausencia de explotación. Por lo tanto, el espacio social no se define como un contenedor, un lugar de producción, sino como una relación social. El espacio social es un fenómeno puramente capitalista, que crea una forma especial de apariencia, que esconde su propia socialidad en contraste con los modos de producción esclavo y feudal, donde las relaciones sociales particulares se manifiestan de manera sensual y material. (shrink)

Reforms associated with New Public Management have led to changes in the management of work and organization that challenge the stability, durability and linearity of the managerial hierarchy in contemporary public sector workplaces. Against this background, this article considers the ways in which two clinician-managers who work in a large metropolitan teaching hospital speak about their organizational roles. Reflecting the complexity of their part of the organization, the emergency department, the interviewees position themselves as operating at the interstice between the (...) competing and contradictory spatial logics of locality and mobility. With their identities strongly anchored in emergency as locality, the clinician-managers intervene in the flows of meanings and resources that affect its processes in ways that require intra- and inter-organizational mobility and which are incommensurate with traditional perceptions of middle managers. In regarding the interviews as `practical authoring', we note our own spatial ambiguity as academic researchers interested in organizations other than our own and suggest that our insider-outsider positionings are reflected in the interviews' complex spatialities. We conclude that the interviewees' boundary-spanning and cross-spatial self-positionings are indicative of the hybrid roles that workers under NPM increasingly embody and are in contrast to traditional perceptions of how the provision and management of public service work is carried out. (shrink)

Kemalism has been the guiding and justifying ideology of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. That Kemalism is exclusive to Turkey is a mainstay of Kemalist self-perception. But was (or is) Kemalism as political practice pursued by other regimes in the region? This paper argues that Kemalism should also be understood as a project of urbanism, and that urban interventions into Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad in the 20th century transformed all three into Kemalist cities. To illustrate, I describe (...) certain features of their spatial, symbolic and sensory re-organization. My concluding remarks address the radically divergent fate of Kemalist urbanism in the contemporary cities of Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the problem of embodied subjectivity, viewed from the perspective of spatiality. The questions I address arise from my ethnographic study on chronic pain. My main argument is that, in contrast to philosophical understanding of space as an a priori, or as a container, space and spatiality are shaped and reshaped through the body in pain. What characterizes most patients' experiences of space is movement. This can be understood through Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of the lived body (...) but needs in addition a cultural contextualization. Because of biomedical thinking, in Western settings chronic pain is liminal. It does not fit the biomedical categories of disease or space. This profoundly shapes patients' understanding of their subjectivity as homeless, and their experience of spatiality as estranged and exiled. (shrink)

While there is an extensive body of literature about the impact of sharing physical space on ethical consumption, and a growing body of literature that addresses the impact of digital technologies on ethical consumption, there is little research on the increasing intersections between the physical and digital realms. This study explores the distinct affordances of physical and digital spaces and how they may work in both complementary and synergistic fashions. Drawing on an ethnographic study of two ethical consumption communities in (...) North London, UK, we explore how ethical consumers navigate and negotiate both physical and digital spaces, taking advantage of such affordances. We develop the notion of chorophilia, or love for physical space, explore digital commitments and synergistic affordances of scaling up, and advance polytopes, which focus on the relationality of digital-physical spaces. Implications and avenues for future research are also discussed. (shrink)

Drive en Mille Sons (Drifting in a Thousand Sounds)is a musical work that uses mobile media technology to artistically examine the relationship between music and the listener. Contemporary media technologies, be they at work, home or in your pocket, emphasize playback. These devices are designed to facilitate the storage and retrieval of pre-made media assets. This work leverages the processing capabilities that rest dormant within these technologies. Drawing from the writings of Guy Debord and the situationist/surrealist practice of the drive, (...) drifting becomes a metaphor for instrumental performance in which the openness and emergence of interactivity is articulated through sound, as music. (shrink)

Australia is currently experiencing a prolonged period of water scarcity that is challenging a diverse range of water-dependent activities ranging from household gardening to horticultural production to the viability of riverine ecosystems. The political and ecological importance of water in Australia is not, however, only a recent phenomenon. For the majority of Australia’s settled history, water politics, economics, culture and engineering have reflected and embodied a dynamic relationship between Australian hydrology and Australian society. This essay examines that relationship by first (...) reviewing the work of the Australian historical geographer, Emeritus Professor J. M. Powell. For 40 years Powell has been writing about the process of natural resource appraisal and management in Australia and he has been Australia’s leading authority on the role of water in that process for most of that time. The essay then argues for an extension of Powell’s work by applying the insights provided by the scholars Karl Wittfogel, Donald Worster and Eric Swyngedouw. Their work, it is argued, suggests the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of water in Australia than that currently offered by the majority of the Australian literature, and ultimately provides some tools for thinking ourselves out of the current water crisis. (shrink)

Guattari's ecosophy has implications for many types of pedagogy practiced in the school. While Guattari never explicitly advocated the educational use of ecosophy, I explore in this article how it can be used as a lens to ‘read’ pedagogy in nuanced ways, highlighting oppressive premises and practices. I first discuss Guattari's ecosophy, defining key terms and advocating ecosophy as a philosophy that calls attention to the interactions and ‘parts’ of assemblages of existence—a philosophy radical and encompassing enough to make intelligible (...) the dynamic connections between various fields of existence, trajectories into the new, and trajectories more destructive in nature. I then offer a ‘reading’ of two different pedagogical strategies that have achieved a wide following in the last few decades: direct instruction, and critical pedagogy. Reading these pedagogies through ecosophy allows us to name more fully the troubling assumptions and lacunae to be found within them. (shrink)

RESUMO Durante o processo da Perestroika soviética, Iuri Lotman escreveu reflexões sobre o conceito de fronteira. Como testemunhou migrações em massa, expulsões forçadas e reconfigurações etnogeográficas sem precedentes, sabia o quanto uma fronteira pode ser carregada de significado cultural que transcende sua dimensão espacial. Ter esse tipo de consciência era ainda mais urgente tendo em vista ser esse um período histórico de transição, reconstrução e abertura, quando as políticas linguístico-culturais poderiam ser um meio de promover integração e aceitação do "estrangeiro". (...) Esta contribuição parte desse quadro histórico-conceitual e busca analisar um fenômeno cultural de grande interesse na literatura italiana contemporânea: a presença "intrusa" crescente de escritoras das antigas colônias que escolheram escrever suas obras em uma língua estrangeira, o italiano, usando a escrita como um campo de experimentação, hibridismo cultural e criação de um espaço discursivo público que traz o olhar da mulher migrante.ABSTRACT In the midst of the Soviet Perestroika process, Yuri Lotman wrote his reflections on the concept of boundary. Having witnessed massive migrations, forced expulsions and unprecedented ethno-geographical reconfigurations, he knew how much a border can be loaded with a cultural meaning that transcends its spatial dimensions. To be aware of this was all the more urgent at a historic time of transition, rebuilding and opening, when linguistic-cultural policies could be a means of promoting integration and accepting the "foreigner." This contribution takes this historical and conceptual framework as its starting point and aims to analyze a cultural phenomenon of great current interest in contemporary Italian literature: the increasingly "intrusive" presence of women writers from the former colonies who choose to produce their works in a "foreign" language, using writing as a field of experimentation, cultural hybridization, and generation of a public discursive space, bearer of the female migrant gaze. (shrink)

This article presents Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian social thinker and a source of the theory of emotional contagion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is examined as Durkheim’s paradigm case of Neo-Kantianism. He is first considered among the intellectual context of French Neo-Kantianism and its figures Charles Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, and Octave Hamelin, all whom were influential in his formative years. Durkheim’s Neo-Kantianism in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is then juxtaposed to the Neo-Kantian legal philosophy of Emil Lask (...) and Hans Kelsen. Agued is that Durkheim’s notions of distortion and emotional contagion are his leading contributions to Neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to put Ricœur’s philosophy in dialogue with human geography. There are at least two good reasons to do so. The first concerns the epistemological foundation of geography: Whereas humanistic or phenomenological geographers inspired by Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, by Merleau-Ponty have sometimes taken on an anti-scientific approach, the Ricœurian articulation of understanding and explanation may contribute to building a bridge between the experiential side of place-meanings and the scientific explanations of spatial elements (...) and their relationships. The second reason has to do with the application of the Ricœurian “model of the text” to landscape: It is a direction that Ricœur never explicitly took, but it is worth exploring, especially considering that “landscape as a text” was quite a popular metaphor among human geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper I will discuss both issues in order to outline a “Ricœurian path to geography,” which, while never explicitly developed by the philosopher, may represent an innovative and fruitful actualization of his thought. (shrink)

In Western society bicycling is commonly perceived as either a sport, a form of leisure, an activity for children, or at best, a utilitarian transportation technology. In this paper, I contest these assumptions by discussing ways in which both bicycling and bicycle technologies are politicized as a response to the cultural, social and political norms of Western society. Through historical examples that include 19th century Socialists, 'first wave' feminists, and 1960's Dutch Anarchists, I provide a theoretical context in which one (...) can understand how present day activists appropriate the bicycle through a dialectic of action and communication. In short, I demonstrate how a seemingly neutral technology (the bicycle) and an everyday activity (bicycling can be utilized as tools for dissent, protest, and cultural critique. (shrink)

This article discusses Everyday Aesthetics seen from philosophical hermeneutics where aesthetics is understood as a form of knowledge. Two approaches are made, one concerning content, i.e. the knowledge made apparent to us in the aesthetic situation which is usually, but not exclusively, an exception to the everyday; another concerning the appearance of knowledge in form which, likewise, is also in danger of becoming isolated from the everyday. Everyday Aesthetics is reviewed through the same two approaches to understand how it differs (...) from hermeneutics and where possible exchanges between them appear. (shrink)

Focusing on the multi-dimensionality of interactional settings, this study analyzes how the material world is a significant factor in the sequential co-production of the video-taped doctor—patient interactions. The analysis shows how a material artifact, the patient's file, is relevant in two ways: a) as a device which is employed in the sequential organization of the interaction. The patient's file is being used in the contexts of topic development and topic change. b) The file with its specific physical and symbolic features (...) is being co-produced and contested by both actors as a knowledge reservoir. Further inspection of the interactions in concert with theoretical reflections of the role of space and materiality suggests that interactions should be interpreted as happening in spatially arranged constellations of material objects and actors. In these both rigid and flexible constellations boundaries are established, access is distributed, and meaning is solidified. (shrink)

The contemporary international regime of law and politics regarding human migration largely follows Immanuel Kant’s contradictory approach, supporting the cosmopolitical rights of humans to move and expect hospitality while privileging the rights of sovereign states to assert territorial security against movement. International Relations scholars informed by Jacques Derrida’s ethical theory argue that one may press this tension to positive dynamics through affirmation of the aporia that a secured home is a requirement for the possibility of the hospitality that might undo (...) conflict between migrants and emplaced citizens. Yet, the attraction of Derrida’s critical Kantianism and this revival of hospitality depends on asserting the primacy of habitation to how citizen subjects stand with respect to foreigners who move. It depends on neglecting how any assumption of home is not based on a given home but, rather, on movements to impose the boundaries and bounty of a home. No one faces the movement of others who seek to make home from the position of home but only also in movements of homemaking. Both the citizen and the migrant move in forms of imposition. And it is only in a politics of imposition that rights to move can be affirmed and gain respect. (shrink)

We now live in a world where digital technology is no longer ‘separate, virtual, [or] “other” to a ‘natural’ human and social life’ (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 893). Contemporary information and comm...

When philosophers talk about perfectionism, it is usually as a view of well-being, of developing characteristically human capacities. Yet perfectionism can also be a normative account of what we ow...

Transparency’s importance as an administrative norm seems self-evident. Prevailing ideals of political theory stipulate that the more visible government is, the more democratic, accountable, and legitimate it appears. The disclosure of state information consistently disappoints, however: there is never enough of it, while it often seems not to produce a truer democracy, a more accountable state, better policies, and a more contented populace. This gap between theory and practice suggests that the theoretical assumptions that provide the basis for transparency are (...) wrong. This article argues that transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public. Taking them fully into account, the article argues, should lead us to question the state’s ability to control information, which in turn should make us question not only the improbability of the state making itself visible, but also the improbability of the state keeping itself secret. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using RFID tags, was analysed in detail. The results of the study indicated that the sociotechnical imaginary of RFID tagging gravitates around the core value of perfect sociotechnical efficiency. (...) This demands a high degree of readiness to engage in standardization efforts, which performs a specific materialized understanding of ethics by other means. Furthermore, the analysis points to the importance of considering the spatiotemporal dimensions in which RFID tags work when reflecting on how this technology matters to society. Finally, the analysis shows a tacit effort to keep RFID technology and thus any questions of responsible innovation confined to the shop floor. However, given the spreading of the use of RFIDs, much wider-ranging considerations are called for. (shrink)

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are unique spaces that defy materialist interpretations of space and place. In drawing upon Edward Soja’s work of spatiality, CVEs can be considered as thirdspace, a space that has as much relevance as that typified by our physical, or ‘real,’ existence. Virtual space undermines the rigid polemic of the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ by revealing lived experience as a combination of both real and imagined experience. The virtual illuminates experience as a relativist combination of perception and interpretation (...) that inhabits both the corporeal and the virtual realms. Using the example of Second Life’s Lost Gardens of Apollo this article will illuminate the fluidity of real and imagined place through an environment of rich visual experience. Inaddition, such spaces will be discussed as places of potential social and political reconfiguration by challenging the traditional socio-cultural and historical aspects of space. (shrink)

A ‘spatial turn’ is observed as taking place across a range of disciplines. This article discusses the relevance of this ‘spatial turn’ to the issue of early school leaving prevention and engagement of marginalised students and their parents within the educational system and other support services. Building on reconceptualisation of an aspect of structural anthropology a specific dynamic spatial interaction between diametric and concentric structures of relation is proposed. Reification is interpreted as involving a diametric space of assumed separation, closure (...) and mirror image inversions. Concentric relational space as assumed connection and relative openness is a precondition for trust, care and voice. Diametric and concentric spatial features of school and related systems are interrogated for early school leaving issues, such as the importance of relational supports to keep students in the system; the precondition of trust for parental involvement of more marginalised parents, including a lifelong learning and family support aspect; the need to challenge the school as a closed system with reified hierarchies. (shrink)

This article adapts the ethnographic medium of the diary to develop a method for studying data and related data practices. The article focuses on the creation of one data diary, developed iteratively over three years in the context of a national centre for monitoring disasters and natural hazards in Brazil. We describe four points of focus involved in the creation of a data diary – spaces, interfaces, types and situations – before reflecting on the value of this method. We suggest (...) data diaries are able to capture the informal dimension of data-intensive organisations; enable empirical analysis of the specific ways that data intervene in the unfolding of situations; and as a document, data diaries can foster interdisciplinary and inter-expert dialogue by bridging different ways of knowing data. (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)