Space

Abstract

There are many shades and intensities of space, beginning with the most obvious: how we know where we are, transiting to how we experience space as a sensory realm: how we feel where we are. The where and the how are being transformed as we move into a period in which our infrastructures are being inscribed on the planet as a new era, known as the Anthropocene. Space is stabilized and parceled out as though it were ours to own by the forces of the state and the economy.

PISA for Schools: Topological Rationality and New Spaces of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance

“…Some theorists have drawn attention to new geographic scales and multiscalar relations (see Brenner 2004;Sassen 2006;Jessop 2008), such as the emergence of supranational governance (e.g., the European Union), new regionalisms (e.g., NAFTA and ASEAN), and governance by international and intergovernmental organizations that overlay the national scale. At the same time, others (see Massey 1994;Agnew 1999;Thrift 2006) have emphasized the constitution of new topological spaces "marked by overlapping near-far relations and organizational connections that are not reducible to scalar spaces" (Amin 2002, 386) and the embedding of the global in the local and national. The latter position need not exclude a scalar analysis of new governance relations in the context of globalization but rather draws our attention to a different set of issues.…”