Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of a spatial perspective in critical communication studies. It suggests that a focus on spatial relations of power enables scholars of communication and culture to understand and theorize the complex ways in which identities are being reproduced in our current moment of globalization. The article suggests that, instead of theorizing cultural power only through the category of identity, we need to adopt a spatial perspective on power that may better enable us to theorize various relations of identity and culture.

Polish ‘Pawns’ between nationalism and neoliberalism in British newspaper coverage of post-European Union enlargement polish immigration

“…However, the Daily Mail gathered that number together in West London within 24 hours with one card in a newsagent's window and three phone calls' (Doughty, 2006). While prior research has argued that immigrants are scapegoated (Bailey, 2005;Demo, 2005), criminalized (Flores, 2003), and marginalized (Shome, 2003), our findings reveal that Poles are also positioned as pawns to be played by powerful actors: politicians, unions, and media.…”

You Are Not a Friend

“…Although more than 150 years have passed since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally established the modern boundary between the United States of America and Mexico, the USÁMexico border remains a crucial space where US and Mexican national identities are discursively produced, reproduced, contested, and renegotiated (Shome, 2003). While scholars generally agree that national identity is a fluid yet powerful social construct in which membership is dependent upon notions of shared history, culture, economy, polity, and territory (Smith, 1991), communication theorists focus on mass media's role in the discursive construction of national identity.…”

Constructing the Forced Migrant and the Politics of Space and Place-making

“…People talked to me about how they felt “arrested,”“stuck,” and “isolated.” Asylum seekers referred to a state of stasis after long and hard journeys, a state of being related to the requirement of living in collective accommodations 3 and with social immobility. The perceived stasis during the asylum process is different from the mobility notions usually associated with globalization processes and its beneficiaries, such as political, cultural, and economic elites and multiple passport holders and the optimistic discourse about the upwardly mobile (see Ong, 1999 and Shome, 2003 for a critique). On the one hand, mobility and flexibility are the mantras of globalization discourses (Harvey, 1990).…”

“…In a world which is spatially connected, Gupta and Ferguson argue, practices like immigration law exemplify the link between “politics of space and the politics of otherness” (p. 17), that is, the production of difference for political, economic, and ideological purposes. The production of difference has implications especially for forced migrants who are positioned in and through spatial relations that are infused with sociopolitical, legal, and economic frames and interests (e.g., Drzewiecka & Halualani, 2002; Georgiou, 2006; Gillespie, 1995; Hegde, 1998; Shome, 2003; Witteborn, 2007a,b, 2008, 2011).…”