Equality, marginalisation, and hegemonic negotiation: Embodied understandings of the built and designed environment

Abstract

People’s experience of interacting with the built environment, such as entering a building, varies depending on how the environment is designed. For instance, a set of steps may be tackled without conscious thought by one person while they may prevent another person from entering altogether. Such processes mean that people are being categorised in different ways. The aim of this article is to add to our knowledge of how the built and designed environment, as semiotic resources with social meanings, variously constrains and enables individuals’ participation in society, based on categorisation. Data is collected using a citizen science approach, whereby people have been invited to submit photos and comments about their experiences of the physical environment. This data is analysed using Spatial Discourse Analysis and theories of embodiment. The analysis shows how equivalence, marginalisation, and hegemonic negotiation variously inform people’s sense-making of the physical environment as a multimodal resource. The article uses this analysis to expose unspoken norms in the physical environment and to extend Spatial Discourse Analysis. It argues that multimodal analyses of the physical environment need to further consider the situated materiality of the interaction between people and the environment by accounting for individual variance.