Against the fantasy of space as a neutral setting around which history unfolds, Katherine McKittrick argues that “Geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space “just is,” and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations, is terribly seductive”.  Sara Ahmed extends this critique by applying the concept of “orientation” to argue that space acquires coherence insofar as bodies are repeatedly directed towards certain objects, relations, and futures. She demonstrates how bodies become aligned with normative spatial orders, making some spaces feel familiar and inhabitable while rendering others inaccessible and violent. 

This panel is grounded in the premise that the apparent coherence of space is itself a political and ideological effect. If spatial coherence is produced through historically sedimented ideas around race, class, sexuality, gender, nationhood, then moments of disorientation and spatial disobedience expose the contingency of those arrangements. We are interested in what these moments of spatial instability reveal about the organization of bodies and spaces and under what conditions these instabilities become perceptible. That is, how can transnational interrogations of space reveal it as a dynamic and contentious, rather than static and impartial, concept? 

Moreover, we are interested in engaging the ongoing deliberations regarding space and place. Whether space is deemed as an organizing concept, a temporal ordering, or an abstracted backdrop, and place is deemed as a material location, an experiential environment, or a relative area, there remains a slipperiness between them due to their multiplicity. This panel is invested in the ways these terms blur, hinge, or push against each other instead of attempting or embracing strict definitions. How do texts make visible the political logics that organize space and place? How do they imagine spaces that exceed the fixity of colonial, national, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal cartographies? What alternative modes of intimacy, relationality, embodiment, and belonging can become conceivable when institutionalized and hegemonic spatial orders begin to fracture? How do communities resist and survive ecological precarity and exploitation? What elements in literary, visual, cinematic, and cultural texts trace such movements across scales of spatial experience? 

We welcome work in various forms addressing concerns about space and place that are not limited to the ones discussed above. We invite intersectional and interdisciplinary inquiries into the various iterations and re-iterations of spatial politics and practices across diverse historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. 

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