This chapter distinguishes various sorts of rudimentary spatial structure and particularity that are present in our visual experience, in a kind of palimpsest. It develops a modal structuralist understanding of the neurophysiology that roots this type of experience.

The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

How did the Peloponnesian War change the way in which spaces were arranged and experienced, and how did the pre-existing spaces and spatial imagination of communities play a role in the type of war that was fought? Athens provides a lens through which to see wider changes: the Propylaia was left visibly unfinished to mark the outbreak of war, the temple of Athena Nike exaggerated Athenian infantry competence, and the Long Walls reshaped interstate relationships at the same time as redefining Athenian social experience. They allowed for the evacuation of the Athenian countryside, and the housing of thousands of refugees for long periods of the war. This synoikism was paralleled elsewhere during the war in Thebes, Olynthos and Rhodes with significant and long-lasting effects. The accounts of the variety of ways in which the war tested and frayed the political fabric of Athens make us aware of how communities’ experiences of their own spaces could be transformed by the pressures of war, for instance in the terror of frequent night-time attacks. Finally, the Aigospotamoi monument at Delphi gives a contemporary perspective on the moment of victory and speaks articulately across spatial aspects of the Peloponnesian War as a whole.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

Over the past three decades, catatonia research has experienced a remarkable renaissance, driven by the application of diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks. This renewed interest has significantly reshaped our understanding of catatonia, a complex syndrome with multifactorial origins spanning epidemiology, historical context, phenomenology, genetics, immunology, and neurobiology. These advancements have offered a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective, culminating in the recognition of catatonia as a distinct diagnosis in the ICD-11 – a landmark development that underscores its clinical and scientific relevance. Despite these strides, several unresolved issues remain that require future research. Bridging these gaps is crucial not only to enhance our understanding of catatonia but also to identify the most effective treatments and uncover the mechanisms underlying their efficacy. Such advancements hold the promise of developing improved diagnostic markers and tailored therapeutic strategies, offering significant benefits to patients affected by this challenging condition. In this chapter, we explore the profound implications of catatonia research, spanning its impact on clinical psychiatry and neuroscience, as well as its broader contributions to our understanding of the intricate relationship between the brain and mind.

This chapter will explore the fundamentals of drama, both as a skill and as a methodology for teaching other curricular requirements. It also offers practical activities and assessment practices, as well as theoretical underpinnings and methods to further develop teaching methodologies beyond this text. You will have the confidence and knowledge to engage learners of all ages and abilities to explore their own ideas through dramatic performance and to evaluate the performance of others. The key to drama is not only the development of skills, but also the ability to apply processes and value these processes as equal to the end product of a drama activity. The application of drama in literacy, numeracy and other areas of learning will be embedded throughout. A great deal of the focus on drama in the classroom in Australia is from a western perspective.

This chapter “deprovincializes” the histories of Lake Kivu’s societies in the “frontier”, (present-day Rwanda and Congo), during the second half of the nineteenth century. It challenges the dominant narrative of the “greater Rwanda” thesis, which argues that colonial border-making “amputated” Rwanda from a significant portion of its territory. The chapter shifts the attention to the societies Rwanda claimed were part of Rwanda since centuries. The chapter shows that while the Nyiginya kingdom – Rwanda’s antecedent – indeed increasingly sought to exert control over and integrate some of these societies, especially under mwami [s. King] Rwabugiri, their control was incomplete, at times impermanent, and often contested. Such complexities are overlooked when considered from a state-centric, often ideological perspective premised on the stability of a centralized authority. The histories and memories of local communities within the region defy these narratives and provide critical alternatives to what has been largely accepted as mere prologue. These questions are not merely a matter of historical debate, they remain crucial for understanding contemporary debates. While the geographical complexity of this chapter makes it a challenging read, it is foundational for understanding the historical continuities and contradictions throughout the book.

The analysis of spatio-temporal data is critical for understanding change in ecological systems. Spatio-temporal methods are the natural extensions of spatial statistics incorporating change over time. This chapter covers spatio-temporal approaches such as join counts, scan statistics, cluster and polygon change and the analysis of movement, cyclic phenomena and synchrony. In all these applications, we must consider and account for multi-dimensional autocorrelation in the data.

The chapter introduces Agnew’s three-fold definition of place – as location, locale, and sense of place – to structure its reflections. Over the last thirty years, a digital revolution has transformed what it is possible to map since Martin Gilbert first produced his Atlas of the Holocaust. The rich array of printed and digital maps now available serve both historiographical and memorial purposes. In terms of location, the terrain depicted has shifted eastwards in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and often homed in on meso- and micro-regions, representing spaces long neglected in older surveys. Moving on to locale, the chapter introduces recent work on the Nazi understanding of “Raum” and on the place of the Holocaust in the colonial imagination. Other studies have explored the spatial patterns of arrests and deportations, the multiple border changes of ghettos, or the creation and destruction of new kinds of spaces for concentrating and murdering human beings. Finally, historians of victim experience have used a variety of means to convey victims’ sense of place and space both at the time and as conveyed through testimony.

It is now widely accepted that our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Little wonder, then, that space shapes our very language, both in our metaphors (as with “central” and “deeply”) and in what and how we write. Even the movement of the pencil across the page, or the cursor across the screen, is a spatial phenomenon, and one that creative writers and poets have integrated into their work. Literature explores and gives expression to the myriad ways in which space impacts human experience.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

This chapter offers an overview of the key thinkers, main concepts, and critical arguments that inform feminist geographers’ work on the relationship between gender and space, and it conveys some principal ways in which this work has been important for literary scholars interested in the interplay between gender and space. I propose that the field’s multidisciplinary theoretical conversations on space and gender have two principal objectives. On the one hand, by revealing how everyday spaces are gendered and queered, they work to dismantle the traditional patriarchal order that governs them. On the other, they adopt intersectional approaches, aiming to expose the relationship between patriarchy and other axes of oppression (racism, classism, ableism, etc.) in a variety of spaces, making visible the complex ways in which marginalized people navigate, negotiate, and subvert oppressive spaces. Feminist geographers thus propose and enable more liberatory gender discourses in order to envision alternative, inclusive spatial configurations of social relations.

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

This chapter takes plantation as a rubric under which theorizations of race and space in Marxism and Black and Indigenous critical theory might be usefully coordinated for the sake not only of intersectional practicality but intellectual purchase for literary scholars in particular. Historically associated with the racializing regimes of both settler colonialism and enslavement that made what historian James Belich has called “the Anglo-world,” plantation comes into view as a key means through which capitalist social relations originating in late medieval southeastern England have been planted across the planet to the massive detriment of human and nonhuman life. Understood as sites at which the compulsion to expand set in motion by capital in the metropole confronts noncapital in its most resistant difference, white settler colonies in North America and Oceania are treated as experimental spaces for the satisfaction of that compulsion – that is, as not only spatial but phenomenological frontiers of real subsumption. This chapter focuses on one such experiment: the settler/master’s assumption of the role of the God of Genesis, specifically the power to bring worlds out of and into being through acts of signification, the whole-cloth fiction of race foremost among them.

Opening with an analysis of Instagram, Chapter 2 is concerned with how to think about postdigitality. Touching on multimodality, time-space-place, and responsive loops, this chapter highlights the contrast between digital life and postdigital life, unravelling the many dimensions of postdigitality. It concludes that postdigitality represents a world of symbiosis, whether that be of body and mind, physical life and screen life, representation and non-representation, immersion and connectivity, or interaction and convergence. These combinations are what lends digital media its unique power to move across time, space, and place. To explore these ideas, Chapter 2 analyses data which has been processed through ATLAS.ti to produce a list of postdigital keywords used by crescent voices.