defining space

International Interdisciplinary Conference
University College Dublin

Often invoked as the key parameter for understanding twentieth-century culture, does space retain this centrality today? Since the 1970s space has been increasingly problematised: imploded through technological acceleration (Virilio), emptied out by the circulation of consumer goods (Baudrillard), transformed into a trap through surveillance (Foucault), or manipulated to conceal profound economic transformations (Fredric Jameson and David Harvey). The once reassuringly neutral category of space has been unmasked as uncanny and warped (Anthony Vidler), distorted by relations of gender (Doreen Massey) and race (Homi Bhabha). After a century largely devoted to thinking and creating in spatial terms, does space remain a viable paradigm or has it reached a point of exhaustion, simultaneously banal and fraught?

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