The Spatial Turn of Social and Cultural History: A Review of the Current Field

Infraestructuras mundanas en perspectiva histórica

“…This approach is relevant not only because it understands the logics of government as a historical phenomenon that can be traced (Foucault, 2007), but also because it argues that the goals and rationalities of government are expressed in everyday issues, such as texts, norms, schedules and, above all, in the built space (Huxley, 2008). Due to the spatial shift that began to gain traction in the humanities and social sciences in the early 1990s (Kingston, 2010;Williamson, 2014), historians began to consider the spatial dimension as a possible approach to study the past, offering a new set of tools that demonstrate that the political field determines the production of space, but, at the same time, that the materiality of urban space influences political and social processes (Bennett & Joyce 2010).…”

New protest history: Exploring the historical geographies and geographical histories of resistance through gender, practice, and materiality

“…Over the last two decades, the study of resistance, protest, and dissent has become a lively subfield within historical geography. Largely thanks to a “spatial turn” within history (Kingston, ; Williamson, ), there is now also a significant number of protest historians whose work is inherently geographical. Collectively, the work of these historical geographers and historians has become known as “new protest history,” a subdiscipline characterized by critical and creative engagement with archives and other historical sources.…”