Theorising Spatial and
Environmental Challenges Notes
Inhoud
HC1 Introduction to Spatial and Environmental Challenges – Jennifer Telesca – 8 April 2024................2
HC2 Geographies of capitalism and uneven development – Dr. Harry Pettit – 11 April 2024.................5
HC3 Racial Capitalism & Coloniality + Intersectionality – Dr. Harry Pettit & Dr. Vinícius Mendes – 15
April 2024.............................................................................................................................................10
Part 1 Racial Capitalism & Coloniality...............................................................................................10
Part 2 Intersectionality......................................................................................................................14
HC4 The Politics of Metageography – Dr. Jen Telesca – 18 April 2024..................................................18
HC5 The nature/culture divide – Jen Telesca – 25 April 2024...............................................................25
HC6 Orientalism and the construction of the other – Harry Pettit – 13 May 2024...............................32
HC7 Epistemic Justice – Dr. Vinicius Mendes – 16 May 2024................................................................33
HC8 The more than human – Jennifer E. Telesca – 23 May 2024..........................................................38
HC9 Orientalism and the construction of the Other + the ‘spatial justice turn’: roots & routes – Harry
Pettit + Olivier Thomas Kramsch – 27 May 2024...................................................................................43
Part 1: Orientalism and the construction of the Other – Harry Pettit...............................................43
Part 2: The ‘spatial justice turn’: roots & routes – Olivier Thomas Kramsch (not for exam)..............46
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,PART I: Foregrounding Political and Economic
Geographies
HC1 Introduction to Spatial and Environmental
Challenges – Jennifer Telesca – 8 April 2024
Course structured in two parts:
1. Political and economic theories
2. Social and cultural theories
Together they inform how best to understand spatial and environmental challenges.
We remain attentive to the possibility for societal transformation at multiple scales, from the
individual person to the nation state to global institutions.
This requires that:
We pay attention to history to understand what’s led to our present condition and to imagine
a constructive, inclusive path ahead.
o There is no one truth that is timeless and universal.
We explore the world as socially constructed, or the extent to which concepts, beliefs, norms
and values are not independent, pregiven, or initially determined but are the product of
power dynamics ingrained in society, often seen in language and culture.
o We’ll see later today the way in which gender and disability are socially constructed.
Why take a ‘critical’ approach to TSEC?
“critical theory”: an approach to knowledge founded in the interwar period before WW2 to
critique and change society rather than to merely describe and explain it.
It refers to the ways in which asymmetrical power relations (political, economic, social,
cultural) inform, permeate, organize and produce structures in society and vice versa.
It is precisely because these structures appear so routine normal and commonplace that
people do not see the degree to which they are intertwined in them and how they oppress,
exclude and dominate others.
More recent critical theory evaluates the status of truth and objectivity.
They are not the same thing.
Critique of positivism
Positivism
Positivism emerges with August Comte in early 19 th century
Positivism is an approach to knowledge production that claims all genuine knowledge is true
(read: positive) based on a priori facts derive from reason. Other ways of knowing (intuition,
religious faith) are meaningless.
In this view, objectivity is rooted in a reliance on discoverable facts that can be measured and
quantified by a seemingly neutral observer for them to appear certain.
o For example, scientific and statistical truths appear “neutral” in part because their
author is invisible
But for critical theorists today truth operates in a field of power.
“Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is the type of discourse which
it accepts and makes function as true…
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,There is a battle ‘for truth,’ … by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be
discovered and accepted’, but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the time and the false
are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’”. (Foucault, 1972).
Critique on positivism without mentioning it specifically.
This raises the false opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, as if the letter is merely
relative and thus a matter of opinion.
Too often subjectivity (sometimes conflated with bias or opinion) is misunderstood as
untrustworthy in part because the author of a knowledge claim remains visible.
o But that position only makes sense if you are a diehard positivist.
We see this in the classroom all the time when, say, a professor claims using the first person
(“I”) is “wrong” in an essay.
Uncovering bias does not provide us with a theory of the ‘real’ world that would enable us to
understand how power operates.
Enter “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective”
Donna Haraway (1988)
Professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the
University of California, Santa Crus.
Biologist by training
Influenced by Sandra Harding’s “standpoint theory” or the idea that knowledge cannot be
entirely separated from its maker.
Avoid the trap of the two poles: radical objectivity / empiricism / positivism vs. radical
subjectivity / relativism
Occupying these poles produces bad knowledge.
Instead insist on better, more related accounts of the world.
A feminist approach reclaiming objectivity is what she calls “situated knowledge” that yield
partial – not universal – truths.
o Not rejection of objectivity, but new meaning of objectivity.
“situated knowledges”
Avoid the “god trick”
As if objectivity = impartiality with a “view from above, from nowhere”
Neutrality hides a very specific subject position (male, white, heterosexual, human) and gives
this position the status of the universal.
A whole range of voices are silenced in the process.
Some noteworthy passages
“The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of
webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” [or the
study of knowledge] (Haraway 1988, 584).
“Partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims…
The goal is better accounts of the world, that is, ‘science’” (Haraway, 1988)
Partial not universal
Locatable it emerges from a certain time at a certain place (often with a specific person)
To make oppressions known is not to let them be, but to remove these oppressions, for the benefit of
many people.
Let’s us ask these questions:
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, "How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who
gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets
the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?" (Haraway 1988:
587)
The objectivity / subjectivity debate is not only misguided. It is a distraction, especially because there
can be no justice without truth.
This brings us to a core focus of this course – justice – in all its multiple and proliferating forms.
Some forms we hear in popular discourse (and discussed in class): planetary justice, epistemic justice,
social justice, environmental justice, social justice, economic justice, criminal justice, etc.
Is law the same as justice? No!
Examples: Apartheid, Slavery.
But we can try to make the law as just as possible for all people.
Some approaches:
Distributive justice: the fair allocation of resources
Procedural justice: fair treatment in the decision-making process
o Participation in process leads to more acceptance of an outcome, is seen as more fair.
Retributive justice: punishment for past wrongdoing
Restorative justice: healing past wounds (not necessarily a punishment)
o E.g. in Rwanda or South-Africa
This list is not exhaustive.
There are a lot of different understandings of justice. You must look at the context to see which kind
of justice is in operation.
Report of European Environment Agency
distributive, procedural and recognitional justice (respect for, engagement with and fair
consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives)
Recognition as justice
Documentary film by Astria Taylor from 2008: Examined life
Interviews major thinkers, including Judith Butler (Prof at University of California-Berkeley)
and Sunny Taylor (disability activist and Astria’s sister)
Butler well known gender and queer studies theorist
Spatial and environmental challenges and how they relate to gender and disability in the view
of justice.
o Physical access leads to social accessibility
o Disabled people are still limited by the organization of society. There is a cultural
aversion against disabled people. The body is ‘ranked’. They are impaired.
o Even the ability for asking for help implies that social connections are needed. Web of
connections.
“What is at stake here is thinking the human as a site of interdependency… Hopefully people
will understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs… I want to
organize a social and political world on the basis of that recognition” (Butler in Examined
Life).
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