Critical Spatial Practices: Power, Knowledge, and Co-Production (doctoral course)

This doctoral course treats knowledge-making as a relational and spatial practice of inquiry. Situated within the field of urban humanities, the course prepares doctoral students to create and hold spaces for critical reflection across disciplinary and social difference.

Background

Across fields such as urban studies, oral history, action-based research, feminist and decolonial studies, collaborative scholarship has developed sophisticated methods for working with communities and across difference. Placed in dialogue with Jane Rendell’s concept of critical spatial practice, first developed in Art and Architecture: A Place Between (2006), these developments are reframed as a spatial, pedagogical, and curatorial approach to scholarship: one that organises relations and shares authority by opening and holding spaces in which people can encounter one another, negotiate meaning, and participate in the making of knowledge.

Framing knowledge production as a spatial practice offers a way to engage the inherent division of labour in research and to reconfigure it in more just ways. Such practices enable researchers to practise critique through situated acts of sense-making with and in relation to others.

Spatial practice is addressed both as an object of analysis and as a research practice. The course foregrounds criticality, reflexivity, positionality, and responsibility in processes of co-production. Attention is given to the material, aesthetic, and procedural forms through which collaboration across disciplinary and social difference is organised and negotiated over time.

The course considers multiple kinds of spaces: seminar rooms and research circles; archives and exhibition sites; neighbourhood settings and public institutions; as well as the discursive and institutional spaces through which knowledge circulates. Participants examine how such spaces enable, constrain, and transform collaborative inquiry.

Teaching combines active participation with exploration of theoretical perspectives from the humanities with practice-based and exploratory methods drawn from art, architecture, urban studies, geography, gender studies, and related fields. The course is open to doctoral researchers across the humanities and social sciences whose projects engage spatial questions, community-based work, or interdisciplinary collaboration.