ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, a principal concern of ours related to questions about the novelty of contemporary ‘new’ social movements, where the focus was on temporal issues and historical context. In this chapter, we will look at a rather more neglected area of social movement studies that is concerned with spatial issues and geographic context. In previous parts of the book, we have seen how various ‘turns’ (i.e., cultural, emotional, narrative) have influenced social movements studies. In this chapter, we consider the influence of the ‘spatial’ or ‘geographic’ turn. A fundamental premise of the chapter is that space is socially produced and infused with power relations. Space is also conceived broadly as both physical and nonphysical space, where the latter includes (geo) political space, social space, and cultural or identity space. We will see how the study of geography and social movements also requires an exploration of the related concepts of place and scale.
