GEOG 3300
Space, Place & Scale
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University
Fall Term 2011-2012
Week 12
Possible Worlds: Imaginary Places
and Digital Geographies
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
1
Research Essay
• Critical essay official due date: Tuesday 6
December 2011. Late essays will not be read or
graded without formal documentation.
• Please submit your graded outline along with
your final paper.
• Make sure your paper is analytical rather than
descriptive, and that it engages critically with
the meanings of space and place.
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
2
GEOG 3300 Term Paper:
Suggestions for Organization
Section
Content
Pages
1
Introduction: thesis statement (explain what you are writing about,
how you will do so, and why it is important or meaningful),
summary of arguments you will use
1 or 2
2
Context / background: brief explanation of theoretical
perspective(s) that inform your paper. Where does this
perspective ‘fit’ in the literature/debates on SPS?
2 to 3
3
Analysis: A thoughtful, complete exploration of your subject
(using evidence and examples) that justifies / fulfills your
thesis statement.
5 to 7
4
Conclusion.
1 at most
Don’t forget to choose an interesting title and provide full references
and notes as necessary. Yes, you can use “I”.
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
3
Is Facebook a Place?
• A space and a place?
• Can you have a sense of ownership, connection, privacy,
belonging, dwelling, embodiment?
• Going back to Cresswell – John Agnew’s three aspects of
place: (1) location (coordinates); (2) locale (setting;
perhaps landscape); (3) sense of place (spatial meaning;
significance)
• (How) can we use spatial concepts to understand
Facebook, cyberspace, and online ‘communities’ in
general?
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
4
If Facebook is a place, what kind of place is it?
• From a descriptive perspective …
• From a phenomenological perspective …
– Is dwelling (Stefanovic, Heidegger) possible on Facebook?
– What kind of performance or movement does Facebook
enable?
– Is there an authentic experience of place on Facebook?
• From a Social constructionist perspective …
– What would Lefebvre say about it ?
– How would Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle describe
Facebook ?
– How would you analyse Facebook from a postcolonial
perspective ?
– From a feminist perspective ?
– Through the lens of someone with a disability ?
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
5
Metaphors of Place
• How far can we stretch metaphors of place?
• Metaphors of place (Adams) can connect the familiar with the
unfamiliar; can also destabilize taken-for-granted meanings; can
change how we think about things; can even efface reality
(Baudrillard’s simulacrum; Borges’ map)
• Metaphors themselves have spatial aspects: metaphor as a
threshold, a journey, a migration between ideas. We can use
metaphors to journey from one place (or one idea of place) to
another.
• Three kinds of metaphor (after Deetz, Lakoff, Johnson): (1)
positional metaphors (translating nonspatial conditions into
spatial ones; on, over, under) (2) ontological metaphors (where
some tangible connection between phenomena is
presupposed); and (3) structural metaphors (relations between
familiar experiences).
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
6
Virtual Places
• Are they fundamentally different from other kinds of places
and spaces?
• What are the limits of spatial metaphors? At what point do
the concepts themselves rupture?
• Adams (after Tuan) suggests that metaphors have
particular uses when we consider technology, largely
because technology is innovative in much the same way
language (or ideas) are.
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
7
Three Cyberspatial Metaphors
1. Virtual Architecture
2. The Electronic Frontier
3. Cyberspace
How do we see these metaphors unfold and rupture and
rebuild themselves … in ‘social networking’ sites like
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter? In films like The
Matrix?
Do these kinds of spaces change how we think about
geography?
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
8
Brave New World?
• Utopia: ou/topos --? “no place”. Imaginary worlds; “the
ficticity of nowhere” (Hutchinson); metaphors of charting
and discovery (metaphors themsleves extended by
“subtexts” to become “semiotic rectangle[s]” (Hutchinson,
173); “invented” places: worlds; ideologies.
– Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
– Your online identities
• Two meanings of ‘no-place:’ either it is impossible to
achieve, or it has no material form or existence.
• Is social networking the ultimate utopia? In one or both
senses of the word?
• Utopia / dystopia / eutopia
Week 12
24 November 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
9
• Utopias as “out there;’ a “hitherto unexplored region of the
world. … Utopias may be set on some distant island, valley
or mountaintop, in the Amazon basin, the Far East,
Ethiopia, or the other side of the world, on the moon or
other celestial bodies, inside the earth or a sea monster, or
in the remote past or future.” (Hutchinson, 172)
• Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as utopian
societies? But how are they regulated?
Week 12
20 March 2008
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris, 2008
10