Maps: academia,invisibility, secrecy…
1. Perhaps this might sound off, but I was thinking about the emphasis that Soja and Paglen put on the role of academia in the configuration of spatial justice and geographical design. In Soja’s article, spatial justice is a concept that arises from local (and global) social movements that make academia “rethink” about the different possibilities to define and theorize about spatial justice. Something that really annoys me about academia is that, in our position, we tend to “analyze” the movements and their demands, but the commitment with such social groups is always limited by certain aspects of “power differentials.” I believe that many of us have read/think about this, but how can academia be more involved in such processes? Soja gives me some hope because of the different projects he mentions at the end of the chapter, but I am still hesitant about the actions of our disciplines in social life.
2. Visibility and invisibility are powerful ideas that I got from the three articles. While Paglen looks at these concepts from the perspective of secrecy, Soja analyzes them from the lack of spatial justice, and Harpold looks at it from the notion of presence/absence. This makes me think also of the article on participatory mapping that we read last class. It occurs to me that (in)visibility is constantly present in the configuration of space. I would dare to say that such notion of not being present is the part of space that nobody wants to recognize (poverty, social inequality, taboos, anything that goes against the system of values of a given society, everything that is deviant). Now, I wonder if the (lack of) use of technologies in our society is also a consequence of (in)visibility. In terms of the digital age, which could be the places that we could consider invisible? Could we think for example of parts of the cities or countries where there’s no internet or phone access? What are the implications of not being present in the map of certain technological services when thinking about the digital age?
3. I’d like to make a connection from Harpold’s article with something that is occurring right now in the world. For Harpold the misrepresentation of conditions of access and identity “are likely to return to the real as consequences of economic policy, military intervention, and technological and symbolic exclusion” (para. 42). This makes me think of the recent news about Iran and its government’s decision to create their own version of internet. I would not dare to say that I am in favor or against to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s government (since everything I got from the news and from Iranian people in the U.S. is quite contradictory). However, it is also true that any person in our ‘free’ world that read this article from the Washington Post would definitively be sorry about the level of repression imposed by the Iranian government on its people. Anyways, in the Post’s article I found this part very interesting: “We have concerns from not only a human rights perspective, but about the integrity of the Internet,” David Baer, deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said in an interview. “When countries section off parts of the Web, not only do their citizens suffer, everyone does.” In a sense, what I can understand is that Mr. Baer is putting the internet at the level of human rights, and therefore the Western world has no other option but to isolate Iran in a kind of ‘Dark Continent’. I don’t know if this would generate a military intervention in Iran, but I’m sure that more sanctions are expected.
Space [revisited]:
It is possible to think about Space from the physical and the social realms (although both are inherently connected). From a physical perspective, space could be related to the way in which the body enters in connection with other bodies or objects. Therefore, what we can sense, smell, see could be considered as the primary level of the recognition of space. However, such physical relation cannot be separated from social relationships that are conformed within those spaces. As Soja argues, space is “filled with politics, ideology, and other forces shaping our lives and challenging us to engage in struggles over geography” (Soja, 2010, p. 19). I would say that Soja’s argument is related to Henri Lefevbre’s notion that space is produced according to the social relationships that occur through time: “space is neither a ‘subject’ nor an ‘object’ but rather a social reality –that is to say, a set of relations and forms” (Lefebvre, 1991, 116).
Spatial Justice:
This concept comes from the recognition that the interactions between privilege and power shape the production of space. Therefore, spatial justice is a practice with a political objective that intends to give relevance to the way our geographies are constructed in the context of (in)justice, the uneven development of the global (and local) economy, and the way these geographies “can be changed through forms of social and political action” (Soja, 2010, p. 20).