[Un]Grounding - Post-Foundational Geographies

Progress in Human Geography, 2023

The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers' engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radically uproots geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial realities. Grounded upon parameters of negativity, contingency, and antagonism, the article equips geographers to grapple with the crumbling foundations of an uncertain present, and unknown futures.

Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.

As social movements have become more complex, geographers are increasingly studying the spatial dynamics of collective resistance and sociologists and political scientists increasingly analysing the role of space, place and scale in contentious political activity. Occupying a position at the intersection of these disciplinary developments, this book brings together leading scholars to examine how social movements have employed spatial practices to respond to and shape changing social and political contexts. It is organized into three main sections: (1) Place, Space and Mobility: Sites of Mobilization and Regulation, (2) Scale and Territory: Structuring Collective Interests, Identities, and Resources, and (3) Networks: Connecting Actors and Resources across Space. It concludes by suggesting that different spatialities (place, scale, networks) interlink within one another in particular instances of collective action, playing distinctive yet complementary roles in shaping how these actions unfold in the political arena. By mapping state of the art conceptual and empirical terrain across Geography, Sociology, and Political Science, Spaces of Contention provides readers with a much needed guide to innovative research on the spatial constitution of social movements and how social movements tactically and strategically approach and produce space.

2014

Landau F, Pohl L, Roskamm N (eds):[Un]Grounding. Post-Foundational Geographies, Bielefeld., 2021

Post-foundational thinking claims that – within the realm of the social – absolute reasons are not possible. This assumption further entails that no ultimate foundation really exists, on which social and historical entities are built: no God, no biological law or genetic code, no market, no anthropological essence, no relations of production. Nothing, this is the post-foundational credo, determines the final course of history with certainty or necessity. In addition, post-foundational theory states that precisely this impossibility constitutes the (absent) ground for all social, political and historical events. The aim of this introduction and this volume is to bring together post-foundational thinking and the field of knowledge and practice that constitutes and is constituted by spatial and urban matters, such as human geography, urban studies, urban planning, or architecture.

Journal of Design for Resilience in Architecture and Planning

The common thread to urban movements happening worldwide in recent years is the fact that urban public space is used as a significant setting by city dwellers for expressing their “objections”. What has been experienced throughout urban movements when public spaces have been occupied enables us to grasp the meaning of occupied spaces in the city thus allowing us to get to know societies and cities. Therefore, this research has investigated the impact of urban public space on the consciousness, interaction and gathering of city dwellers as well as urban movements. Within the scope of the research, eight “rebel cities” have been analyzed, and have interviews with participants of urban movements from these cities. These are Tunis, Cairo, Barcelona, London, New York, Dublin, Paris, and Hamburg, respectively. The places where urban movements were visible in urban space and their surroundings have been analyzed using the Space Syntax method, and the gathering/unification/integration poten...

JTAS 2012

2020

In the search for connections between lived space, everyday life and ‘the political,’ this chapter revisits three key concepts of urban studies: public space, urban resistance, and urban emancipation. In public space, ‘the political’ may eventually become enacted through the everyday spatial practices of publics producing space. Through an exploration of practices of resistance and emancipation in public spaces facing post-political conditions, this chapter argues that publics need to be revisited as ever-changing and contingent foundations. A lack of egalitarian politics and social justice which manifests itself when our conceptual repertoire in public space research becomes fixed and static is thus part of the problem that the concept of urban emancipation describes. Much of the contemporary debate in political theory tends to refrain from spatializing emancipatory praxis while attempts at transferring post-political thought to the fields of urban studies and planning theory tend to conceptually circumvent emancipation. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on a needed dialectical study of emancipatory spatial praxis in public space and changing aspects of everyday life as the spatial dimension of emancipatory action and of egalitarian politics cannot be separated from everyday life.

Organisational Space and Beyond: The Significance of Henri Lefebvre for Organisation, 2018