Spatial and Cultural Studies

Spatial and cultural studies examines how physical places, urban environments, and imagined geographies shape—and are shaped by—identity, power, and social life. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, scholars analyze spaces that exist outside or in tension with dominant social orders, from colonial city plans to contemporary migrant enclaves, asking how space is never neutral but always saturated with meaning and contestation. The "spatial turn" across the humanities has pushed researchers to treat geography not as backdrop but as an active force in how literature, culture, and politics unfold, while globalization has intensified questions about whose spatial arrangements get normalized and whose get erased. Open directions include understanding how digital and hybrid spaces alter the production of place-based identity, and how postcolonial urban contexts generate new spatial imaginaries that resist inherited frameworks.

Works

19,873

Total citations

46,683

Keywords

HeterotopiaSpatial TurnGlobalizationSpaceIdentityLiterature