Spatial and Cultural Studies

Spatial and cultural studies examines how physical places, built environments, and imagined geographies shape — and are shaped by — human identity, power, and social life. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia and the broader "spatial turn" in the humanities, researchers ask how spaces like prisons, museums, borders, and informal urban settlements function as sites where dominant social orders are simultaneously reflected and contested. Globalization has intensified these questions by accelerating the movement of people, capital, and cultural forms across cities and postcolonial landscapes, unsettling older assumptions about who belongs where and why. Active lines of inquiry include how literary and artistic representations produce or challenge spatial meaning, and how urban planning decisions quietly encode particular visions of identity and exclusion.

Works

20,355

Total citations

46,901

Keywords

HeterotopiaSpatial TurnGlobalizationSpaceIdentityLiterature