Spatializing Culture

Spatializing Culture
Author: Setha Low
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317369637

This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.

Theorizing the City

Theorizing the City
Author: Setha M. Low
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780813527208

Anthropological perspective are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologist have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthropology, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five images of the city-the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city-serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production of urban spaces.

Spatializing Justice

Spatializing Justice
Author: Teddy Cruz
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 377575279X

Spatializing Justice calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture— Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions. These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture, one not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, "the questions must be different questions if we want different answers." Cruz and Forman are principals in ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. The work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world.

Spaces of Security

Spaces of Security
Author: Setha Low
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479870064

An ethnographic investigation into the dynamics between space and security in countries around the world It is difficult to imagine two contexts as different as a soccer stadium and a panic room. Yet, they both demonstrate dynamics of the interplay between security and space. This book focuses on the infrastructures of security, considering locations as varied as public entertainment venues to border walls to blast-proof bedrooms. Around the world, experts, organizations, and governments are managing societies in the name of security, while scholars and commentators are writing about surveillance, state violence, and new technologies. Yet in spite of the growing emphasis on security, few truly consider the spatial dimensions of security, and particularly how the relationship between space and security varies across cultures. This volume explores spaces of security not only by attending to how security is produced by and in spaces, but also by emphasizing the ways in which it is constructed in the contemporary landscape. The book explores diverse contexts ranging from biometrics in India to counterterrorism in East Africa to border security in Argentina. The ethnographic studies demonstrate the power of a spatial lens to highlight aspects of security that otherwise remain hidden, while also adding clarity to an elusive and dangerous way of managing the world.

Spatializing Blackness

Spatializing Blackness
Author: Rashad Shabazz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2015-08-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252097734

Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

Spatializing Politics

Spatializing Politics
Author: Delia Duong Ba Wendel
Publisher: Harvard Graduate School of Design
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Landscapes
ISBN: 9781934510469

Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. Essays illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority.

Spatializing Social Justice

Spatializing Social Justice
Author: Maryann P. DiEdwardo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2019-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 076187111X

In Spatializing Social Justice: Literary Critiques Maryann P. DiEdwardo uses seven literary critiques and seven reflections to share her newest research about the healing power of literature. DiEdwardo argues that literacy is the lifelong intellectual process of gaining meaning from a critical interpretation of written or printed text. Literary critiques explore the writer’s mind for symbolism hidden within the words, and writers of literary critiques listen to their own voices first. In this book, DiEdwardo touches upon different types of writing and writers who aim to explore the healing process through words.

Doing Spatial History

Doing Spatial History
Author: Riccardo Bavaj
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000518825

This volume provides a practical introduction to spatial history through the lens of the different primary sources that historians use. It is informed by a range of analytical perspectives and conveys a sense of the various facets of spatial history in a tangible, case-study based manner. The chapter authors hail from a variety of fields, including early modern and modern history, architectural history, historical anthropology, economic and social history, as well as historical and human geography, highlighting the way in which spatial history provides a common forum that facilitates discussion across disciplines. The geographical scope of the volume takes readers on a journey through central, western, and east central Europe, to Russia, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, and East Asia, as well as North and South America, and New Zealand. Divided into three parts, the book covers particular types of sources, different kinds of space, and specific concepts, tools and approaches, offering the reader a thorough understanding of how sources can be used within spatial history specifically but also the different ways of looking at history more broadly. Very much focusing on doing spatial history, this is an accessible guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students within modern history and its related fields.

Spatializing Language Studies

Spatializing Language Studies
Author: Sébastien Dubreil
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2023-10-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031395786

This open access volume offers valuable new perspectives on the question of how mobility, locatedness and immersion in the physical world can enhance second language teaching and learning. It does so through a diverse array of empirical studies of language, literacy, and culture learning in the linguistic landscape of visible and audible public discourse. Written from conceptually rich and disciplinarily varied perspectives, its ten chapters address methodological and practical problems of relating language learning to the lived and rapidly changing places of the late modern world. Whether it is within the four walls of a school, in a nearby multilingual neighborhood, in a virtual telecollaborative space, or in any other location where languages may be learned, this volume highlights different configurations of learning spaces, the leveraging of real-world places for critical learning, and ways to productively ‘dislocate’ language learners from preconceived notions and standardized experiences. Together, these elements create conditions for a language and literacy pedagogy that can be said to be robustly spatialized: linguistically and culturally complex, geographically situated, historically informed, dialogically realized, and socially engaged.