The phrase "spatial turns" signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: "Mapping Spaces" addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; "Spaces of the Urban" takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; "Spaces of Encounter" considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and "Visualized Spaces" concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

In the last few decades, the phrase “spatial turn” has received increased attention in German Studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography. The volume German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives engages the analytical category of space and the spatial turn in the context of German women’s writing. The collection of essays divides its discussion of spatiality in German literature into sections that reflect privileged sites within the current scholarly debates around space. Essays look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of (im-)mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities. German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives continues the challenge to understand the representation of space and place in German language texts by focusing on how spatial theory figures into the realm of feminist thinking and writing.

This book analyses approaches to space, identifying commonalities, and explores how and why differences appear. It includes thirteen essays by authors from America, Canada, Europe and Latin America and will appeal to everyone conducting conceptual and theoretical research on space in geography and other related fields.

This volume investigates the inherent spatiality of human existence and how it affects human behaviour, ideology, identity, and orientation from different perspectives

There is no consensus in the social and cultural sciences on what theory is, and that is as it should be. A consensus would be outright dangerous for the diversity of intellectual life. The perspectives represented in this volume show that theory can be understood as plot, hope, beholding, doxa, heritage, a stalemate, disappointment, personal matter, or family concept. But, even if theory can be defined in many ways, it cannot be defined in any one way. Beyond disciplinary and epistemological differences, theory has the steadfast characteristic of being what academics work with. More than an epistemological matter, the book's title question is an entry into the dynamics of academic practice. The book consists of a multidisciplinary collection of essays that are tied together by a common effort to tell what theory is. These essays are also paired as dialogues between senior and junior researchers from the same, or allied, disciplines to add a trans-generational dimension to the book's multidisciplinary approach. What Is Theory? has been designed for upper division and graduate students in the social sciences and the humanities, but it will also be of interest to anyone who has felt that the question of what theory is can be more easily asked than answered. Contents include: Why Ask What Theory Is? * The History of the Concept of Theory * History of Ideas at the End of Western Dominance * Looking at Theory in Theory in Science * Theory Has No Big Others in Science and Technology Studies * What Social Science Theory Is and What It Is Not * Theory as Hope * Theory Crisis and the Necessity of Theory - The Dilemmas of Sociology * Theory as Disappointment * Theory - A Personal Matter * Theory - A Professional Matter * Economic Theory - A Critical Realist Perspective * For Theoretical Pluralism in Economic Theory * What Is Theory in Political Science? * For a New Vocabulary of Theory in Political Science * Theorizing the Earth * Spatial Theory as an Interdisciplinary Praxis. *** "This highly original, lively and refreshing book is more than welcome: it is needed....the contributors' insights, passion and diversity fully restore the creative value of theorizing as a way to grasp, understand and more importantly shape the world." - Franck Cochoy, Professor of Sociology, U. of Toulouse

Since its foundation the European Union has gradually developed policies that are aimed at achieving increased economic and social cohesion. This book examines the coming of age of the most recent of these, the concept of territorial cohesion. With this book Andreas Faludi brings together years of research and expertise into a definitive single volume on spatial planning at the European level.

This is the first book on spatial entropy in the scientific literature. It links spatial entropy with landscape analysis, landscape diversity and geo-information. It gives all the essential tools that a researcher needs in order to study the spatial entropy of physical as well as artificial landscapes (created with artificial life, swarm intelligence etc). This book explores the fascinating world of the interplay between spatial entropy, spatial information, self-organization and emergence and gives geographers and landscape scientists several alternative mathematical methods to study them, i.e. Shannon's formula, measures from non-extensive thermodynamics, from directional statistics and network theory. An essential book for researchers in landscape analysis and geo-informatics.

This book focuses on the pivotal role which space and spatiality assume in plot and narrative discourse of contemporary U.S.-American literary narratives. Embarking from a new, spatialized approach to cultural history and particularly narrative theory that might also prove useful for neighboring philologies, Marcel Thoene hypothesizes that the canon of novels selected represents a dialectic of simultaneous affirmation and subversion of the American space myth. This results in an integrative and emancipatory function of space reflecting the current dynamic toward a more transcultural, diverse and conflictive post-national U.S.-American society.

Is "space" a thing, a container, an abstraction, a metaphor, or a social construct? This much is certain: space is part and parcel of the theater, of what it is and how it works. In The Play of Space, noted classicist-director Rush Rehm offers a strikingly original approach to the spatial parameters of Greek tragedy as performed in the open-air theater of Dionysus. Emphasizing the interplay between natural place and fictional setting, between the world visible to the audience and that evoked by individual tragedies, Rehm argues for an ecology of the ancient theater, one that "nests" fifth-century theatrical space within other significant social, political, and religious spaces of Athens. Drawing on the work of James J. Gibson, Kurt Lewin, and Michel Foucault, Rehm crosses a range of disciplines--classics, theater studies, cognitive psychology, archaeology and architectural history, cultural studies, and performance theory--to analyze the phenomenology of space and its transformations in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. His discussion of Athenian theatrical and spatial practice challenges the contemporary view that space represents a "text" to be read, or constitutes a site of structural dualities (e.g., outside-inside, public-private, nature-culture). Chapters on specific tragedies explore the spatial dynamics of homecoming ("space for returns"); the opposed constraints of exile ("eremetic space" devoid of normal community); the power of bodies in extremis to transform their theatrical environment ("space and the body"); the portrayal of characters on the margin ("space and the other"); and the tragic interactions of space and temporality ("space, time, and memory"). An appendix surveys pre-Socratic thought on space and motion, related ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and, as pertinent, later views on space developed by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, and Einstein. Eloquently written and with Greek texts deftly translated, this book yields rich new insights into our oldest surviving drama.

This is not a book about the history of computing or the history of information. Instead, it is a meta-historical book about the research and writing of these types of history. The formal presentation of historical research in the form of a publication often hides the process by which the topic was selected, boundaries were drawn, evidence was selected, analytic approach was chosen and applied, results were presented, how this work fits into a larger body of scholarship, the implicit goals and biases of the author, and many other similar issues. This process of learning about the various ways to carry out computer history or information history can be enriched by this collection of reflective essays by experienced scholars, discussing the craft that they practice. This is a book that concerns both computer history and information history. The first scholarship in computer history by professionally trained scholars began to appear in the 1970s, so we are approaching a half century of research and publication in this area. The field has generated numerous pieces of exemplary scholarship from various perspectives such as intellectual history of individual technologies, business histories of firms, economic histories of market sectors, externalist histories of funding and professionalization, and so on. However, the field continues to evolve, especially as computing and communication technologies have drawn together in the form of the Internet and social media; and with them a new set of scholars is participating, drawn not only from the history of science and technology, but also from the communication and media studies fields. Powerful theories, approaches, and frameworks are being increasingly drawn more widely from both the humanities and the social sciences to inform the practice of computer history. The scholars in this volume look at what’s happened, what’s happening now, and where historical scholarship in these disciplines is headed.