Crossing Borders Activating Space

The challenges of spatial development in Europe can only be met through transdisciplinary cooperation. In a continent that is dynamically changing and undergoing complex processes of transformation, new and integrated methods for planning and design are needed to strengthen cohesion between Europe's countries and regions. This book focuses on current issues of landscape and residential development, mobility, demography, energy, and climate, as well as on material flows--and on the spatial manifestation of all these phenomena. The contributions deal with topics such as the labor and housing markets and their increased integration, or concepts of infrastructure and landscape planning in border regions. Under the guiding theme of Crossing Borders--Activating Spaces, the book explores possibilities of cross-border concepts and strategies, while also testing tools and procedures apt for this task.

The early twenty-first century is witnessing a paradigm shift across the humanities away from an obsession with language and towards an engagement with the way in which physical space is imagined. This book showcases the impact of that shift upon the work of diverse disciplines. Applying insights from architecture and geography, which have long addressed space, to disciplines that have traditionally focused upon images and language, the contributors demonstrate how integral space is to literary as well as artistic imagining and identity at the same time that they propose novel ways of capturing and documenting spatial experience. The thirteen contributors to the book, most of whom live and work in Ireland and are associated with a range of different disciplines in Irish universities, show how the construction and representation of space, both real and imagined, contributes to the exploration of contemporary concerns such as identity, belonging and memory. The result is a snapshot of the ways in which contemporary Irish academia is addressing one of the most important new directions in interdisciplinary research.

Spatial Citizenship Education is an innovative exploration of ways to engage and promote citizenship through a deeper understanding of spatial and geographic perspectives. The authors propose that recognizing the relationship between space and citizenry enables productive and positive engagement with important societal issues such as equity, justice, and environmental stewardship. By providing a historical overview of geography’s contribution to citizenship education, including progress made and challenges faced by educational reform movements, this collection shows how geography can contribute to a new type of citizen—one with an enhanced understanding of the world as seen through the key concepts of geography: space, place, scale, power, and human-environment relationships. Through a theoretical explanation of key citizenship ideas, and by providing practical, classroom-based teaching tools, this volume will be essential for geography education researchers and social studies educators alike.

These inter-disciplinary essays explore the foundational ambiguity of borders, their roles, functions and place in the Anglophone world, whether it be in history, politics, literature, art or music or, theoretically, in the critical relations between space, discourse and representation.

Spatial and identity research operates with differentiations and relations. These are particularly useful heuristic tools when examining border regions where social and geopolitical demarcations diverge. Applying this approach, the authors of this volume investigate spatial and identity constructions in cross-border contexts as they appear in everyday, institutional and media practices. The results are discussed with a keen eye for obliquely aligned spaces and identities and relinked to governmental issues of normalization and subjectivation. The studies base upon empirical surveys conducted in Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

This book examines the effects of the transnational social and environmental advocacy of foreign NGOs in China. Based on three case studies, including China’s first participatory development project, its first successful case of transnational anti-dam activism, and its first national park project, the book challenges our typical understanding that global forces shape local outcomes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in China and archival work in the United States, Matsuzawa sheds light on the entrepreneurial behaviors of Chinese activists, researchers, and government officials. She shows that global projects are often substantially transformed by local actors, despite the original intentions of their foreign collaborators and even China’s central government. Thus, it is argued that foreign NGOs are not as hegemonic or culturally imperialistic as is commonly viewed. Matsuzawa reveals that their goals may change profoundly as a result of their engagements with local actors on the ground. She offers a new theory of transnational advocacy together with an account of the Chinese party-state’s rising concerns over the influence of foreign NGOs. Activating China will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists working in the fields of social movement studies and activism in China.

This book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja’s writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells’ space of flows, and Michel de Certeau’s theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic borderlands and migrational U.S. cities. The authors argue for the necessity of an alternative poetics of place that makes room for those who move beyond the spaces of traditional visibility—displaced and homeless people, undocumented workers, hybrid and/or marginalized populations rendered invisible by the cultural elite, yet often disciplined by agents of surveillance. Building upon Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of liminal space as a sphere in which narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate, this study recasts spatial paradigms to insert an array of emergent geographies of invisibility that the volume traverses via the analysis of works by Chuck Palahniuk, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alejandro Morales, and Li-Young Lee, among others, and films such as Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Babel.

This study of contemporary literature from the former Yugoslavia (Post-Yugoslavia) follows the ways in which the feminist writing of gender, body, sexuality, and social and cultural hierarchies brings to light the past of socialist Yugoslavia, its cultural and literary itineraries and its dissolution in the Yugoslav wars. The analysis also focuses on the particularities of different feminist writings, together with their picturing of possible futures. The title of the book suggests an attempt to interpret post-Yugoslav literature as feminist writing, but also a process of conceptualizing a post-Yugoslav literary field, in this study represented by contemporary fiction from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia.