Spatial and Cultural Studies

Spatial and cultural studies examines how physical places, urban environments, and imagined geographies shape—and are shaped by—social life, power, and identity. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopia, scholars analyze sites that exist outside or in tension with dominant spatial orders, from colonial cities to literary landscapes, asking how space encodes inclusion, exclusion, and resistance. Globalization has intensified these questions by reordering urban hierarchies and unsettling fixed notions of place and belonging across postcolonial contexts. Researchers are currently pressing on how digital and hybrid spaces fit existing spatial theory, and whether frameworks developed in Western urbanism can adequately account for the diverse ways communities produce and contest meaning in place.

Works

21,251

Total citations

47,237

Keywords

HeterotopiaSpatial TurnGlobalizationSpaceIdentityLiterature