Introduction

In this introductory chapter, the editors set out the volume’s two overarching arguments: first, that in embodying discursive disjunctures, heterotopias highlight the tensions and complexities inherent in the seemingly homogenising process of globalisation; and second, that twenty-first century globalisation has transformed heterotopian practice, in that digitisation, migration and global environmental change are producing new discursive clashes at ever greater scales, new technologies and spaces, and new modes of cultural practice. The chapter also unpacks the volume’s specific take on the concept of heterotopia: we conceptually look forward – rather than backward towards Foucault or earlier stages of modernity – for further development of the concept of heterotopia; heterotopia are not unambiguously good or bad; and we foreground the relational and representational nature of heterotopia. The introduction concludes with an outline of chapters, emphasising how each case study reconfigures heterotopia as a means of analysing the complexities in globalising processes unfolding today.