Space! A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?

In cooperation with the Faculty of Humanities (UvA)

Evenement

How do material environments affect our daily lives? Why do scholars fail to see the significance of the materiality of our daily surroundings? In this lecture Leif Jerram explores the significance of understanding and theorizing the materiality of the daily life, from the banal to the stately and from the private to the public.

Much fuss has been made of the “spatial turn” in recent years, across a range of disciplines. It is hard to know if the attention has been warranted. A confusion of terms has been used—such as space, place, spatiality, location—and each has signified a cluster of often contradictory and confusing meanings. This confusion is common to a range of disciplines in the humanities.

This means, first, that it is not always easy to recognize what (if anything) is being discussed under the rubric of space, and second, that over-extended uses of the cultural turn have stymied meaningful engagement with (or even a language of) materiality in discussions of space. This talk explores how materiality has been marginalized by scholars, and how the spatial turn has been too closely linked to the cultural turn to allow it to develop its fullest explanatory potential. It demonstrates how scholars might profitably define the significance of place and space in their work, and sets out some challenges for using space more effectively in explanatory systems.

The respondent for this lecture is Luiza Bialasiewicz, political geographer and Jean Monet professor of EU External Relations in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Moderators: Enno Maessen and Tymen Peverelli.

About the speakers  

Leif Jerram, senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester, has published extensively on the history of modern European cities. His research concentrates on the urban built environment and its influence on the lives of ordinary people. The recurring question in his work is how space has shaped human behaviours and experiences, from the cinema to the urinal, the council house to the department store, and the factory to the bedroom.

Luiza Bialasiewicz is Jean Monnet Professor of EU External Relations in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the political geographies of European integration and on European borders, with some of the most recent research looking specifically at the role of third states in the out-sourcing of EU border control in the Mediterranean, as well as wider strategies of securitization of the Mediterranean space. 

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