In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.
In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.
Where we come from, where we are, where we have been, and where we are going all have a huge impact on who we are. Theories of space and place also hold that the converse is equally true—that we have an impact on those spaces and places we inhabit or dwell within. We make space: our agencies, our cultures, our beliefs and values and understandings shape the macro- and micro-environments around us. Just as much, however, those places we inhabit shape us, causing us to adapt ourselves to them. Children exist in spaces that are crafted for them by adults—by parents, by school administrators and teachers—and, as such, their impact on space can be somewhat limited. Space is made for them, but certainly not to their own specifications or liking. In children’s literature, spaces are often seen as noteworthy markers of a child’s progression toward adulthood, whether the space is Laura Ingalls’ little house or Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. For these characters, movement through space is about growth and change, about accepting the inevitability of growing up and the responsibility of the adulthood, whether that be marriage and motherhood or vanquishing the most evil wizard of all time. However, what about juvenile series books, whose central protagonists generally never grow or change? The central character of these series—usually a flat, unchanging trope more than a fully realized, fleshed-out, dynamic figure—is a static creation. Though characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys frequently move through different geographies, they never change as characters. In fact, one could argue that the only dynamic that ever experiences any alteration in a series like Nancy Drew is setting. Surely there is something significant about the relationship of series books to those spaces their protagonists inhabit? This collection explores that relationship, the dynamics between the controlled spaces of childhood and the variable spaces of juvenile series literature. It shows that the unchanging series book characters demonstrate that their impact on space is far greater than its impact ever is on them, reflecting an exercise in spatial authority that most children and even children’s book heroes never quite experience.
This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the causes and impacts of COVID-19 on populations, economies, politics, institutions and environments from all world regions. The book maps the causes, effects and impacts of the virus and describes the impact of the virus on among others health care, teaching and learning, travel, tourism, daily life, local and regional economies, media impacts, elections, and indigenous populations and much more. Contributions to this book come from the humanities, social and policy science disciplines as well as from emerging transdisciplinary fields including climate change, sustainability, health care and epidemiology, security, art, visualization, economic and social well-being, law and borderland studies. As such, this book will be a rich source of information to all those geographers, social scientists and urban and regional planners working in this field.
Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes’ work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.
This book explores a wide range of methodological approaches to examining various forms of workplace physical environments. It focuses on pressing questions regarding the relationship between the spatial component of the workplace, including its progressive hybridisation with other physical and virtual places, and its users, be they public organisations, private companies, or start-up businesses and solopreneurs. International contributors address a range of methods that are applicable both in research and practice to confront the most cutting-edge workplace-related issues. The assumption is that work has been changing, thanks to the virtualisation of many activities, and that homeworking and hybrid working modes are expected to increase significantly after Covid-19. Thus, spaces hosting work need to adapt accordingly. Researchers and practitioners have been struggling to determine how much space will be needed by companies, what kind of space will better host different work activities, which workers are more suited for working from home, and which instead are more productive if they have an office-based working arrangement. The necessary evolution of the office should follow evidence-based decisions on the abovementioned matters, which are only possible through rigorous investigations. This volume aims to support these investigations, which call for inventive applications of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. By doing so the book will encourage solid practices and thorough research agendas in workplace design, management, and use. Contributions come from different disciplines, including facilities management, real estate management, psychology, design, architecture, sociology, and organisation studies. Chapters highlight the importance of appropriate methodologies, borrowed from different fields, in addressing contemporary questions and developments in workplaces. By analysing the challenges and opportunities for conducting rigorous research in different workplace settings, this book will be critical reading for both academics and students, as well as for decision-makers and professionals who deal with workplace design and management.
Spaces of Longing and Belonging offers the reader theoretical and interpretative studies of spatiality centered on a variety of literary and cultural contexts. It brings new and complementary insights to bear on creative uses of spatiality in artistic texts and generally into the field of spatiality as a cultural phenomenon, especially, although not exclusively, in terms of literary space. Ranging over questions of aesthetics, politics, sociohistorical concerns, issues of postcoloniality, transculturality, ecology and features of interpersonal spaces, among others, the essays provide a considerable collection of innovative pieces of scholarship on important questions relating to literary spatiality generally, as well as detailed analyses of particular works and authors. The volume includes ground-breaking theoretical investigations of crucial dimensions of spatiality in a context of increased global awareness.
Severo Sarduy was among the most important figures in twentieth-century Latin American fiction and a major representative of the literary tendency to which he gave the name Neobaroque. While most of Sarduy's literary work is available in English, his theoretical writings have largely remained untranslated. This volume—presenting Sarduy's central theoretical contribution, Barroco (1974), alongside other related works—remedies that oversight. Barroco marks a watershed in postwar thought on the Baroque, both in French post-structuralism and in the Latin American context. Sarduy traces a double history, reading events in the history of science alongside developments in the history of art, architecture, and literature. What emerges is a theory of the Baroque as decentering and displacement, as supplement and excess, a theory capacious enough to account for the old European Baroque as well as its queer, Latin American and global futures. In addition to Barroco, this volume includes texts spanning Sarduy's career, from 1960s essays published originally in Tel Quel to late works from the 1980s and '90s. It thus offers a complete picture of Sarduy's thinking on the Baroque.
The production of urban space in scarcely studied by scholars in historical and urban studies, the city being still predominantly seen as a frame in which activities and social relationship develop, not a produce in itself. The scope of the book is the comprehension of this production. This implies an adequate conceptualisation of the way urban space can be measured and broken down in units which can be put in relation with social processes and agents. A first part examines the concepts and their implications. The second part deals with the anthropology and typology of architectural production considered in relation to demography. The third part develops on the rhythms of the space production at Lyon from the late 15th century to the 19th. The temporalities and spatialities of the production are determined and examined. The agents of the production are studied all along the period, in parallel to the market aimed at: investors in real estate, tenants, activities. Each phenomenon identified can be described and understood as in the meantime a temporal, spatial and social unit.
Space in the Hebrew Bible is increasingly studied from the perspective of critical spatiality, emphasizing the social and cultural dimension of space, how people experience space, and their creativity in constructing space. Zhenshuai Jiang investigates the discourses on space in Gen 1-11 and discusses the connection between social space and spatial narrative. He deals with various questions in different spatial terms, with a detailed textual analysis of Gen 1-11. How is space constructed in Gen 1-11? To what extent and how is this construction influenced by social and cultural elements? The author describes specifically how space in Gen 1-11 is constructed rhetorically, taking into account historical and social circumstances in which the texts were written.
