Accounting for Space in Social Studies Research and Practice

• In Event: Rethinking Place and Space in Social Studies Research: Toward a Spatial Justice Agenda

Abstract

Purpose

As the title suggests, this paper is intended to be an accounting. First, it considers how economics and spatial theories can inform and enrich each other. Second, it considers what new understandings and insights are produced when spatial theories are utilized in social studies conceptual and empirical research.

Theoretical Framework

In addition to many of the spatial theorists already mentioned, I draw on those theorists who locate the body in space as the site of in/justice, past, present and future (Busey & Walker, 2017; Browne, 2012; Schmidt, 2013; Ds4si, 2012). For economic analyses, I turn to economist Nina Banks (2020) who contends that the community functions as a “third space” of economic production. By coding community activism as civic and economic, Banks intervenes in the circular flow model taught in high school economics courses wherein the only two spaces of economic production are taken to be households and the market. Doing this prompts a (r)evaluation of community activism and spaces.

Results

A spatio-economic lens can be applied to a variety of situations such as Montgomery Bus Boycott, Congress and situation rooms that are usually viewed as the purview of civics and history. As Soja (2010) put it, geography helps us see “Rosa Parks demanding her democratic spatial rights to sit anywhere on the bus” (p. 46). While true, there is more. Seeing the Bus Boycott through a spatio-economic justice lens makes it clear that it was part of an ongoing, unresolved racial mobility project that is about resource mobilization across racial lines in conjunction with bodies in space (Parks, 2016).
In the study highlighted in this paper, youth drew maps of the schools they attended. The maps helped them articulate their feelings about school, which they often found to be inequitable, stifling and sometimes even unbearable. When shown the youths’ maps, teachers in four groups, working independently from one another, described the school spaces they saw as having something to do with economics and embodiment, even if they could not say exactly how or why. For example, they explained ways schools engage in difference-making through demarcation (Simmons, 2009). By revealing teachers and students’ “tacit dimensions,” (Polanyi, 1966) maps and map-readings materialized understandings gained through experiences in spaces but which reside just beyond verbal articulation (Tobin & Hayashi, 2015; Wood & Fels, 1986). These methodologies revealed long-lasting effects of spaces on bodies that are otherwise unaccounted for (Author, 2021) or considered metaphorical rather than material (Gallagher, 2010).

Significance

The author’s unique research methodologies were able to produce new insights, such as the way school buildings acclimate teachers to surveillance, which they internalize, normalize, and eventually reproduce (Foucault, 1995). Findings suggest teachers and students can and do understand and even resist the impact of spatial arrangements and surveillance (Hope, 2009; Schmidt, 2013). Spatial justice is about freedom and democracy. Particularly for Black and Brown bodies, the “most tangible, tactile understanding of freedom, of liberation” is in the ability to “move about” as one pleases (Themba, 2012, p. 1).

Author

• Erin Adams, Kennesaw State University