ABSTRACT
The contributions in this volume have highlighted different ways in which space or spatial perspectives become relevant in the analysis of contemporary social structures and open up new angles on the world(s) we live in. Overall, we have argued that spatial considerations ought to be part of social theory in order to grasp how social structures, knowledge and meaning are produced within and out of the materiality of our lives. This may seem at first obvious but in social sciences preoccupied with discourses, values, norms, beliefs and now also data, the significance of the spatio-material was for a long time un- or underacknowledged. The contributions to the present volume have moved bodies, objects, directions, movements and locations, among others, into the focus of their analyses in order to better understand the macro-structures and developments of contemporary societies (Weidenhaus and Poferl), inequalities and social structures (Krishnan), as well as various foundational dimensions of social theory, for example epistemological (Hoerning, Santos and Boatcă), gnoseological (Mignolo) and topological ones (Füller). They also tied spatial considerations to a key sociological question of meaning making (Bartmanski, McDonnell and Vercel) and explored how space and a series of derivative categories shape meaning production in various contexts (Pospech, Fassari, Last). While we are certainly not implying that every social theory requires a spatial analysis, we are convinced that our world cannot be grasped fully without it. Even if a vast number of social phenomena seemingly detach themselves from the material geography of our world, like a company’s value as expressed through shares and financial derivatives, or digitalized social communication, there are still underlying materialities (e.g., offices and production facilities, servers, cables, the body) that at the very least inform those seemingly non-spatial aspects of social life. What our contributions show over a diverse array of different perspectives of analysis is, on the one hand, what we lose or can miss if social theory continues to be spatially blind, and, on the other hand, what we gain by zooming in on the spatial sociality not only in terms of empirical phenomena, but also in terms of theorizing.
