Author : Michael Kuhn
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 35,71 MB
Release : 2014-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 3838265262
This volume presents perspectives on spatially construed knowledge systems and their struggle to interrelate. Western social sciences tend to be wrapped up in very specific, exclusionary discourses, and Northern and Southern knowledge systems are sidelined. Spatial Social Thought reimagines the social sciences as a place of encounter between all spatially bound, parochial knowledge systems.
Author : Thomas W. Schubert
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 19,66 MB
Release : 2011-10-28
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 311025431X
Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.
Author : Rob Shields
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 50,69 MB
Release : 2013-07-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1446286738
"Rob Shields provides here an immensely sophisticated and detailed examination of the topological turn. He has been examining these issues for some decades and this book will surely become the standard work on cultural and spatial topology" - John Urry, Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University Our understanding of space is crucial to the way in which we understand major social problems and issues and the way we develop and maintain our worldviews. Building from a history of philosophical and geographical theories of space, Shields presents the importance of spatialisation and cultural topology in social theory and the possibilities that lie within these theoretical tools. Innovative and thought-provoking, this book goes beyond traditional ideas of spatiality and temporality to understand the multiplicity of spatialisations and relates them to everyday life.
Author : Robert Nash Parker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 46,71 MB
Release : 2009-09-10
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1135857598
This is the first book to provide sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, and other social scientists with the methodological logic and techniques for doing spatial analysis in their chosen fields of inquiry. The book contains a wealth of examples as to why these techniques are worth doing, over and above conventional statistical techniques using SPSS or other statistical packages. GIS is a methodological and conceptual approach that allows for the linking together of spatial data, or data that is based on a physical space, with non-spatial data, which can be thought of as any data that contains no direct reference to physical locations.
Author : Chris Butler
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 37,16 MB
Release : 2012-10-12
Category : Law
ISBN : 1134045883
While certain aspects of Henri Lefebvre’s writings have been examined extensively within the disciplines of geography, social theory, urban planning and cultural studies, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first serious analysis of the relevance and importance of this significant thinker for the study of law and state power. Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book identifies the central themes that run through his work, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological contributions to the study of everyday life and his theory of the production of space. These elements of Lefebvre’s thought are explored through detailed investigations of the relationships between law, legal form and processes of abstraction; the spatial dimensions of neoliberal configurations of state power; the political and aesthetic aspects of the administrative ordering of everyday life; and the ‘right to the city’ as the basis for asserting new forms of spatial citizenship. Chris Butler argues that Lefebvre’s theoretical categories suggest a way for critical legal scholars to conceptualise law and state power as continually shaped by political struggles over the inhabitance of space. This book is a vital resource for students and researchers in law, sociology, geography and politics, and all readers interested in the application of Lefebvre’s social theory to specific legal and political contexts.
Author : Henri Lefebvre
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 37,21 MB
Release : 1992-04-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780631181774
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.
Author : Edward W. Soja
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 36,76 MB
Release : 2013-11-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1452915288
In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.
Author : Helen Liggett
Publisher : SAGE Publications, Incorporated
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 45,91 MB
Release : 1995-01-23
Category : Architecture
ISBN :
Spatial Practices makes a timely and significant contribution to the growing literature on social/spatial theory. In it the notion of spacial practice takes on a rich and layered meaning for some of America's leading scholars as they critically link the theoretical practices of the space of their disciplines to the practical social space of everyday political and economic urban life. Original essays provide compelling insights into the space of racial politics, the unavoidability of recognizing a radical planning practice, and the imagistic face of the contemporary "figured" city. The reader will find rich conceptual tools presented in discussions that grapple with issues raised by the production of reduced public space in common interest developments and the ubiquitous mall, the ideologies of economic restructuring, the rhetorical politics of urban revitalization, and the analytic potential of the photo/text. Students and scholars interested in how spatial theory has enriched and renewed urban theory will find Spatial Practices invaluable. It will be useful in a wide range of classes across disciplines including urban studies, urban planning, architecture, political science, sociology, geography, economics, and policy studies. "This collection explores the exciting analytical edge where investigations of urban political economy converge with cultural studies. In their exploration of theory and practice as they relate to the production of space, the authors cover a dazzling range of topics. Yet despite their varying preoccupations, the essays merge into a unified inquiry that reveals the functions and meanings of contemporary spatial forms. All those who are interested in the forces shaping urban and regional development, as well as in the impact of space on social relations, must read this book.
Author : Barbara Tversky
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 35,87 MB
Release : 2019-05-21
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0465093078
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.
Author : Nikolaus Fogle
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 37,88 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Outer space
ISBN : 9780739149270
This is the first work to explicitly target Bourdieu's philosophy of space as a basic organizing force for his social theory. It draws together his work on both social space and physical space, and it applies the logic that binds them together to problems of architecture and urban development.
