Initiatives

SPACES – Spatial and Sociomaterial Studies

At the center of Spatial and Sociomateriality Studies (SPACES) is the everyday usage of space, its technical representations, and meanings that users attach to it. It aims to advance understandings of everyday practices as sociomaterial–produced in interactions between people and the material world. The agency of the material world is usually taken for granted, but the expansion or constriction of human agency depends not only upon individuals and their various endowments and competences but also material settings. Indeed, material arrangements encourage or discourage certain forms of social interaction, ideology, and sociability.

SPACES, thus, examines the social effects of the material world and vice versa, recognizing that ‘materiality’ is created through social processes and that ‘the social’ is also made up of material arrangements, spaces, objects, infrastructures, and technologies. This entanglement is everywhere: from spaces in kindergartens to universities, from hyper-conditioned environments to public green spaces, from homes to spaces of work and leisure, to name a few. SPACES welcomes studies that examine lived spaces as well as the power of symbolic and social boundaries within physical spaces. Current research projects investigate cooling consumption (Keeping cool during the pandemic) and the consumption of public parks (Green spaces and sustainable wellbeing).