Theories of Space and Place, 5 cr

In 1967, Michel Foucault famously proclaimed that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.” Half a century of lively debates about the pervasive role of space in human societies have proved him right: in what has become known as the spatial turn in the humanities, thinkers from a range of disciplines including cultural and political geography, literary studies, architecture, sociology and translation studies have developed new theories and models for thinking about space and place. They share a conviction that space is not the empty, abstract and measurable container of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, but rather shaped by a dynamic set of processes that are physical, social and cultural. As such, they explore the material, perceptual, ideological and affective dimensions of space and their interrelations. This interdisciplinary course consists of a series of lectures on theories of space and place taught by researchers from different departments of the university. Each lecture introduces a different theoretical approach to spatiality (e.g. geocriticism, phenomenology or popular geopolitics) in the context of a thematic area (e.g. detective fiction, action cinema or urban planning).