Workshop 'Concepts of Space and Ordering in the Area Studies'

Monday, 17 February 2014 (9.00-17.00), Geozentrum Bonn

Workshop 'Concepts of Space and Ordering in the Area Studies', February 17, 2014 (9.00 -17.00), Geozentrum, Meckenheimer Alle 176

Space does - of course! - matter in the Area Studies. The question is: how? After the ‘spatial turn’, many disciplines in the humanities participated in debates about the relevance of space. Against this backdrop, the workshop will explore new approaches in spatial theory and apply them to the empirical research of the participants. The initiative for this workshop comes from DFG Priority Program 1448 “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa”. It is organized in cooperation with the BMBF financed competence network “Crossroads Asia”.

More specifically, the workshop will address the following questions: What is the role of space in practices of ordering and signifying? What is the relevance of territoriality for establishing sovereignty (Agnew 2005)? How can we study the intertwined relationships between social conditions and their allocation in space, or so-called ‘sociospatial relations’  (Jessop et al 2008), and their expressions in places, scales, networks, and  territories (Mbembe 2002)? How can we ‘place’ processes and interactions across scales in local-to-global contexts, and to what extent may cross-scalar interactions be explained in terms of ‘scale-jumping’ (Cox 1998)? And finally, what can we learn from these new concepts of space for a critical rethinking of the Area Studies.

After an introductory lecture the workshop will focus on discussing selected articles. The idea is to scrutinize the arguments of these articles on the basis of the empirical research work of the participants. The workshop is jointly organized by Ulf Engel, (Political Science, Leipzig) and Detlef Müller-Mahn (Development Geography, Bonn).

Researchers interested in “New Area Studies” are invited to send an e-mail and to register under:

shk-gef(at)giub.uni-bonn.de

Upon registration you will receive the selected articles.

Program 

·         9:00           Welcome (Ulf Engel, Detlef Müller-Mahn)

·         9:15           Introduction (Detlef Müller-Mahn): Concepts of space and ordering

·         9:30           Input paper (Anna-Katharina Hornidge & Katja Mielke): From Spatial Containers to Interactions in Differentiated Spatialities

·         10:30          - coffee break –

·         11:00        Space and territoriality: Brief summary and discussion of the papers of Agnew 2005, Jessop et al 2008, Mbembe 2002.

·         13:00        Lunch break (finger food)

·         14:00        Scale: Brief summary and discussion of the paper of Cox  1998

·         15:30        - coffee break –

·         16:00        Discussion: Conclusions for the area studies