The Spatial (Re-)Turn(s)
In the latter half of the twentieth century, several disciplines underwent what is now known as the spatial turn. This turn is difficult to summarize, in part because there is no concrete consensus about when and how exactly it occurred, or even how many turns took place. Historically, we can point to several moments of major paradigm shifts that placed an emphasis on space and place, from the Enlightenment era’s shift toward surveying and maps as spatial tools of “discovery” to the quantitative measuring and modelling of space in the 1950s-60s to the poststructural and feminist engagements with space as fluid, dynamic, and always under construction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Despite the difficulty in pinpointing exactly when and how the spatial turn occurred in academic settings, these layered histories show that the spatial turn(s) did not emerge out of thin air. Perhaps it is best to consider the reinvigoration of space in academic knowledge production as a re–turn to (or reinsertion of) place and space as central conceptual tools in the humanities and social sciences.
Scholarship in these fields became increasingly attentive to how social processes and uneven power relations were placed, located, spatialized, or situated. In the 1970s, human geographers moved away from thinking about space as predominantly physical, Cartesian, bounded, measurable, and/or quantifiable, to space as socially constructed, open, and dynamic. Over the next few decades, scholars working with critical and social theory began to foreground place and space (including spatial relationships included in a broad notion of spatiality) in discussions about both complex and everyday phenomena. Although different traditions (e.g., phenomenology, Marxism, post-structuralism) approach spatialityin varying ways, most overlap through the argument that space and society cannot be separated: space is social and social processes are spatial.
The 1990s seem to be another major turning point, particularly through the rise in critical geographies. This shift was largely informed by feminist, Marxist, and post- or anti-colonial scholars who theorized relationships between space and power, including how identities are politicized across space. These geographical questions considered how identities are enacted and contested through space and – recognizing space, identity, and power as co-constitutive – how these processes also make space. As Peta Mitchell writes in her Oxford Research Encyclopedia entry on geo-locations, “it has become commonplace to recognize space as political and as having a particular affective and effective power” (2020). Indeed, new approaches and subfields continue to emerge that foreground the geo- in understanding the world, including geohumanities, spatial history, and geovisual methods.
Along these socio-political lines, Santa Arias (2010) writes that the “when and where” is important not only to the meanings attached to social life but also “central to its manufacture.” Arias continues:
“In this light, human subjectivity and consciousness can never be understood independently of their historical and geographical circumstances: the world of ideas, identity, discourses, language, and meaning—in short, the domain of the humanities—has thus become drenched in understandings of place and location.”
Historians, too, have taken a spatial turn. In Historical GIS Research in Canada, Bonnell and Fortin (2014) describe the spatial turn in the discipline of history:
“In recent years, there has been a discernible “spatial turn” in the practice of history. Historians of diverse fields and periods have given greater emphasis to the geographical context of their investigations, drawing upon a range of spatial methods and technologies to interpret source materials in new ways.” (xii)
Through the spatial turn of the 1990s-2000s in history, the term “spatial history emerged, “com[ing] to describe a range of approaches, including historical GIS, spatial statistics, and data visualization.” (xii)
In Edward Ayers’s (2010) account of the turns across the humanities, geography (including maps) and history are interlinked, both seeking to provide frames of reference for complex places, times, and processes. Following historical geographer Don Meinig’s assertion, Ayers notes that both are less about studying a particular phenomenon, and rather are ways of studying almost anything. Through the spatial turn, historians, he writes, were particularly interested in the specifics of place, and to a lesser degree the spatial relationships that shaped historical phenomena; however, this preference for studying place as a more bounded frame of reference has also changed with increasing engagement with geospatial technologies.
Historical geographers merged these intersections between history and geography, seeking to push the conceptual boundaries of place in both disciplines. Historical geographer, Felix Driver, and historian, Raphael Samuel, for example, pressed fellow scholars to move beyond places as singular points but rather as constellations:
Can we understand the identity of places in less bounded, more open-ended ways? Can we write local histories which acknowledge that places are not so much singular points as constellations, the product of all sorts of social relations which cut across particular locations in a multiplicity of ways? What ways of telling the story of places might be appropriate to such a perspective? (Driver and Samuel, 1995)
The different ways in which space and place have been theorized, mobilized, and embodied contribute to what has been called a geographical imagination(Cosgrove, 2005; Daniels, 2011). This term has been taken up in many ways, but tends to be used to refer to geographical or place-informed ways of thinking, knowing, and being. A geographical imagination challenges conceptual boundaries like discursive/material, real/representational, natural/cultural, presence/absence, and physical/digital… of course, there are many more. As that last example of “blurring” suggests, geographical imaginations are further stretched and sparked with the growing presence of digital media in our everyday lives. Consider, for example, how online learning has re-spatialized your geographical imagination as it pertains to the landscapes of education.
A geographical imagination has also included thinking about “deep space” as fluid, multi-layered, and quintessentially social (Neil Smith, 1990). These changing conceptualizations of space have had connections to (and implications for) what has become known as deep mapping, an approach that emerged in France in the 1950s that combined historical and contemporary contexts and was intended to highlight intersections between the political, poetic, discursive and sensual (Bodenhamer, Harris, and Corrigan, 2010). As Bodenhamer et al. explain:
They are meant to be visual, time- based, and structurally open. They are genuinely multi-media and multilayered. They do not seek authority or objectivity, but involve negotiation between insiders and outsiders, experts and contributors, over what is represented and how. Framed as a conversation and not a statement, deep maps are inherently unstable, continually unfolding and changing in response to new data, new perspectives, and new insights. (Bodenhamer, Harris, and Corrigan, 2010: 27; see also 2013).
We will discuss how these deep mapping approaches have carried into the present in more detail in later modules on GIS and historians’ engagement with deep mapping through historical GIS and other forms of digital spatial storytelling. The spatial turn was driven in large part by technological change, which intensified further along with the proliferation of digital media. In the next session, we address the digital turn more explicitly; as we do so, we offer the reminder that while these turns are distinct and worthy of their own in-depth analysis, they overlapped in many ways.