SSJ20170 Space, Place & Social Change

Academic Year 2023/2024

‘Since we have bodies we must be someplace’ (Hubbard et al: 2005, p97)

Does it matter where we live, work, think, socialise? Where do we feel safe, joyful, fearful, agentic, hopeful? How might these questions resonate politically? How are these questions impacted by our social identifications and temporalities? How might these questions matter to how we conceive and achieve social change?

These are some of the questions that have shaped the design of this module. Reflecting this our thinking throughout the trimester will be focused on how our engagement with the concepts of space and place can deepen understandings of our social worlds and relatedly how we think about social change both individually and by building collective solidarities. We will think about how our locations in the world shape our social identities and in turn how our identities shape and frame the spaces and places we inhabit. We will explore the ways in which different bodies are distributed across space and place and how this impacts both who and how we are and can be in this world. We will examine how different social groups engage with places in very different ways, so that places can be experienced differently according to a person's gender, sexuality, social class, age, race, ethnicity, and so on.

We will use local and global case study examples that prioritise peoples’ stories alongside familiar places within our own lifeworlds e.g. home, street, community, festivals, school/university, to help us understand what power looks like in these places. We will draw on spatial, affect, queer and feminist theories and pay particular attention to ideas such as: belonging, inclusions and exclusions, agency, in-betweenness and liminal spaces, everyday violence, microaggressions and resilience.

Classes each week will be one hour fifty minutes (including a break) and there will be no tutorials. I will be combining the weekly lectures, our academic readings, videos and multi-media resources to stimulate in-class discussion and engagement. These in-class conversations will shape our learning environment and will be central to how we learn together.