Spatial Politics and Practices
The HGRG Spatial Politics and Practices research theme examines space-politics relations and explores, analyses and addresses the practices, processes and contestations that shape them. Our work seeks to unpack the dynamic relations between space and politics in both the global North and South, in the past and in the present. Our thinking about space and politics is informed by a range of approaches, including postcolonial theory, critical theory, subaltern studies, feminist thought, histories from below, and post-foundational work on the political. We are committed to approaches that foreground diverse forms of political imaginations and agencies and the opening of subaltern spaces of and for politics.
Through theoretically innovative and empirically rich work, we explore the diverse practices of everyday life and modalities of citizenship and how these practices and modalities contest and become entangled with dominant politics. We engage with and intervene in debates around migration, urban governance and politics, the gendered and racialised politics of space as well as the affective, material, and more-than-human landscape through which power is performed and transformed – including the bodies, machines and technologies of geopolitics. These critiques also inform our engagements with the dynamics, potentials and limits of social movements, resistances and urban uprisings, labour organising, and practices of solidarity and being-together. These approaches to theorising and intervening in space-politics relations demand alternative, innovative, and engaging methodologies, including participatory action research, artistic collaborations, and documentary film-making.