The Spatial Dimension of Culture
How does spatial knowledge come about? How is it visualised and with what effects does it have on spatial imaginations and power relations? The spatial dimension of culture employs many different disciplines. Nevertheless the history of knowledge of space is, except for its representations, hardly investigated. This edited volume focuses on the current as well as historical practices and media of spatial research and their relations to social and technical developments.
Media that produce the spatial thinking of a discipline are the expression of power relations, for example in colonial contexts or in the study of nature and historical heritage. They develop forces that affect both the object of investigation and the relationships to other systems of knowledge. As instruments of demarcation, they legitimise academic styles of thinking over other forms of world-knowledge. Thinking in media techniques and formats promises evidence by means of popularising visualisations. The contributions of this volume focus on such epistemics of the terrain. They ask for old and new forms of spatial knowledge and discuss the influence of medial and sensual practices in science and in the public realm.
Contribution by Prof. Huib Ernste: City as Medium and Stage for Encounters
“Wissensmedien des Raums” is the second book published by the French and German-speaking network “Saisir le terrain / Terrain und Kultur” by researchers from ethnological disciplines and neighbouring fields.
Jean Louis Georget
Professor German Cultural History at the university of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3).
Christine Hämmerling
Associate Professor at Dept. of Popular Cultures at the University Zurich.
Richard Kuba
Scientific Staff and Curator at Frobenius-Institute of the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main.
Bernhard Tschofen
Professor for Popular Cultures at the University Zurich.
to find one’s place or we feels at home in many different places, and, therefore, feel a bit place-less. It is not always given that we are accepted at a place. Sometimes we are explicitly excluded from certain places. We also cannot always ‘make’ or ‘create’ our own place, or are ‘outplaced’ by others. There is a politics of place.
This, in a certain way, was also the main topic of a recent PhD thesis by Dr. Emiel Maliepaard in our group under the supervision of Dr. Roos Pijpers, and Prof. Huib Ernste on the ‘Bisexual Rhapsody: On the everyday sexual identity negotiations of bisexual people in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and the productions of bisexual spaces. The first PhD-thesis addressing this issue in the Netherlands and as such a path-breaking work.