Introduction

In this chapter, I will take an autobiographical approach providing a short presentation of my own theoretical trajectory from the 1970s until 2021 in the crossover and intertwining of ‘Nordic’ and ‘international’ currents. I hope in the same move to show how Danish (and Nordic) geography is developed in a situation of ‘in-betweenness’ in both a geographical and linguistic sense. It means that in the socio-spatial theorization, ‘local’ knowledges are intertwined with both German, French and Anglo-Saxon sources of inspiration.

Three issues have been guidelines throughout my intellectual trajectory: (1) a fascination with cities and a general interest in urban everyday life, (2) persistent attempts to overcome theoretical oppositions between objectivism and subjectivism or structure and agency, and (3) an interest in time-space; general theorizations and modalities of spatial concepts; space, place, scales, and borders. The trajectory is cross-inspired by international currents as well as continuous Nordic discussions performed first in the annual Nordic Symposia of Critical Human Geography (from 1979 to 1999) and later in the biannual Nordic Geographers Meetings. For earlier publications coming out of these networks, see Häften för kritiske studier (1979), contributions to Nordisk Samhällsgeografisk Tidskrift, Öhman (1994), Öhman and Simonsen (2003) and Jones and Olwig (2008).

In the following, I shall present first what I consider Nordic predecessors that rather early legitimized everyday life as a research issue within geography. After that, I will represent my own theoretical development by identifying three periods and approaches developed in conversation with Nordic and ‘international’ currents and around my own (theoretical and empirical) questions.

Some Nordic Predecessors

As an early inspiration to address issues of everyday life and the lived space – issues that at that time did not have much room in Danish geography – one can mention two lines of thought within the Nordic countries. I consider both of them somehow grounded in a Nordic context and the Nordic welfare states. One came from analyses of living conditions and modes of life in the Nordic welfare states, the other (connected) inspiration came from time-geography, which put the question of day-to-day activities at the heart of the subject.

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s quite a few geographers in the Nordic countries were involved in surveys and statistical analysis measuring living conditions and the distribution of welfare amongst the Nordic populations, often conducted as a knowledge base for the politics of redistribution of the growing welfare states. However, the policies and the analyses also provoked criticism, often from the margins of the Nordic countries. Most powerfully, the Norwegian sociologist Ottar Brox (1966) mounted a severe attack on the homogenizing discourse involved in the social-democratic welfare project. On the basis on a regional analysis in Northern Norway, he exposed deep-lying conflicts between planning performed by the Norwegian state and the needs, values and systems of meaning within the local populations, thus giving voice to a ‘central state/local culture’ opposition. These discussions situated the question of cultural difference right into the centre of the planning discussion and gained a wide influence in the social sciences throughout the Nordic countries. In particular, an approach formulated by the Danish ethnologist Thomas Højrup (1983) became influential, first in Danish geography, later also in the other Nordic countries. With a point of departure in Althusserian Marxism, he developed a concept of life-mode as a system of mutually dependent practices and ideologies, all assigning meaning to one another. The result was a specification of different life-modes beginning from modes of production and the meaning of work, thus suggesting that the question of cultural difference not only had a dimension of place, but also one of class. While the approach was based on rather economistic arguments and a gender-biased analysis (Simonsen, 1993), it did put cultural identity on the agenda and did so from a conception of culture related to social practice (as I shall return to later).

The other line of thought was time-geography, as it was formulated by Torsten Hägerstrand and associates at University of Lund, initiated by his seminal text ‘What about people in Regional Science?’ (1970). Time-geography was developed in intensive involvement with Swedish planning (in this book, see also Wikman & Mohall, 2022). It was not supposed to be a theory, but rather an ontological contribution focusing on how different phenomena are mutually modified because they co-exist in time and space. Hägerstrand attributed a certain naturalism to the approach, characterizing it as a ‘topoecology’ designated to grasp a society-nature-technology constellation. He admitted some affinity with phenomenology, but stuck to a physical approach to the social world (Hägerstrand, 1982). The basic elements of the approach are connections between continuous trajectories of individual entities (or people) in time-space. From these, descriptive concepts were developed, such as paths, stations, projects, prisms, time-space bundles and time-space domains. They concern the capabilities of bodies, their means of mobility and communication, and their paths through everyday life and life-cycles – that is, bodies understood as projects and paths in time-space contexts. In this way, the routinized character of daily life became the core of the effort, and Hägerstrand’s well-known time-space diagrams can be seen as a geographic vocabulary aiming to describe what cannot be written, namely the possible movements and copings of everyday life.

While time-geography’s representational potential is widely acknowledged, its metaphysical basis has been severely criticised. Two streams of criticism have prevailed. One points to a problematic relationship to social theory and particularly how the naturalism or ‘physicalism’ of the approach leads to a deceptive conception of human thought-and-action and erodes the possibility of developing a social understanding of time-space (Giddens, 1984; Gregory, 1985). In order to mend this problem, some geographers have sought to develop more socialized versions of time-geography (Pred, 1984; Åquist, 1992). The other line of criticism charges time-geography with ‘masculinism’ (Rose, 1993). It regards time-geography as a visual strategy that renders space objective and transparent, and the moving bodies become ‘imaginary bodies’, ‘universal’ and deprived of social markings of race, gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, time-geography has since long remained a weighty element in Swedish feminist geography as a method to describe possibilities and restriction in women’s daily programs and mobility projects (Mårtensson, 1979; Friberg, 1990; Åquist, 2003; Friberg et al., 2012; in this book, see also Forsberg & Stenbacka, 2022).

What this retrospective exploration shows is that working with everyday life and cultural identity is not a new endeavour within Nordic geography, even if the degree and the character of their treatment have varied between countries and institutions. So, even if I shall not draw directly on these traditions in the following, they are part of the backdrop of my work.

The First Approximation: A Non-deterministic Social Ecology

The notion of human ecology had a seductive appeal within geography as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. The American geographer Harlan H. Barrows defined geography as ‘the science of human ecology’ concerned with ‘the relationships existing between natural environments and the distribution and activities of man’ (1923, p. 3). The appeal obviously attaches to the wish to synthesize the different subdisciplines of geography (in this book, see Holt-Jensen, 2022). Within Danish geography, human ecology had a strong position far into the twentieth century (Christiansen, 1967). Therefore, it is not surprising that the first theorizations within urban geography took inspiration from the Chicago School of Sociology where Robert E. Park defined human ecology as ‘… an attempt to apply to the interrelations of human beings a type of analysis previously applied to the interrelations of plants and animals’ (1936, p. 1). This is of course not just a Danish phenomenon; the Chicago School had great influence on the urban geography provided in textbooks all over the Western world. But human ecology carried a ‘baggage’ of functionalism and positivism, and there was Social Darwinism buried in in its metaphors transferred from biology, such as natural competition, dominance, invasion, succession and natural areas, which naturalized social and economic processes.

The 1970s, when I wrote my PhD thesis, were a period of theoretical showdowns and critique of positivism. Geography at University of Copenhagen, where I was based, made changes in both organization, curricula and scholarly orientations. Among the human geographers, three main directions were differentiated: One group generally stuck to human ecology. A second one developed a Marxist radical geography (Folke, 1972; Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 1977; in this book, see also Jakobsen & Larsen, 2022). The third group was more based in urban geography and oriented towards planning.

Personally, somehow situated at the borderline between the second and third group at the department, I found my way out the Social Darwinism of the Chicago School by adopting a Neo-Weberian approach in analyses of residential choices and segregation in middle sized Danish towns. The inspiration came most of all from the British sociologist Ray Pahl (1970), who argued for an alternative socio-ecological approach to urban analysis. He criticized the limited attention to power in human ecology, and with a focus on urban planning and state intervention he was wondering if post-war urban planning was contributing to greater social justice in the city. The question was: who controls scarce urban resources, under what circumstances, and with what socio-spatial consequences? For me, Pahl and other neo-Weberian authors provided me with some theoretical tools that I at this stage felt had a broader critical edge than the contemporary Marxist attempts.

First of all, they directly focused on the constraints affecting people’s access to urban resources and their life chances in urban areas. It was about social constraints connected to economic classes formed by the labour market as well as housing classes connected to conflicts over housing on local housing markets (Rex & More, 1967). Secondly, as theories developed in the 1960s, a period with growing welfare states in many European (and not least Nordic) countries, they emphasized the role of urban managers as mediators of the constraints. The managers could be many – planners, landowners, developers, estate agents, local authorities, social workers and pressure groups of all kinds – representing power in different ways. Finally, they opened for a stronger connection to everyday life by (like time geography) including the issue of spatial constraints in the access to facilities, in this way putting focus on interaction between everyday social activities and spatial structures.

This was the thinking behind the creation of an analytical model of segregation processes in my PhD-thesis on processes of segregation in smaller Danish cities, including an analysis of residential patterns and everyday activity chances (Simonsen, 1976). For me, it became the first small step into a critical geography by taking a socio-ecological approach to the connection between urban structure, access to housing and everyday life.

The Second Approximation: Towards a Theory of Practice

My thinking in this second period, from around 1980 to the publication of my habitation-thesis in 1993, was partially formed through participation in three different intellectual networks. First, the above mentioned Nordic Symposia of Critical Human Geography, which in the beginning were encounters between quite different strains of critical thinking: The Danes came with a discussion of a Marxist grounded radical geography; the Norwegians mostly came with a strong local community paradigm, influenced by the above mentioned work of Ottar Brox; the Swedes were more connected to regional planning, but also brought in a practice of action research in cooperation with local labour unions; the Finns also came with Marxism, but in a form that tried to fuse the economic thinking with a more humanistic one. The first years the discussions mostly developed around production and regional development, but eventually other subjects appeared such as urban conflicts, society-nature relations and not least feminist geography (in this book, see Forsberg & Stenbacka, 2022).

At the same time, however, what might be the most profound critique of positivist thinking within Nordic geography came from a different angle. The Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson (1980) emphasized while conventional reasoning only knew the either-or distinction of the excluded middle, reality knows the both-this-and-that of dialectics. This recognition took him on a travel through the philosophy of internal relations exploring how thought, language and action are inevitable internally related and folded into each other.

My second network was a Danish and an international cross-disciplinary one on urban studies connected to Research Committee 21 within the International Association of Sociology. It evolved around the simultaneous development of critical urban theory initiated by amongst others David Harvey (1973) and Manuel Castells (1977) (for contributions to the Danish debate, see the edited collections by Tonboe, 1985, 1988). And the third one was a small European network in feminist geography developed within the ERASMUS program. It was a teaching network, but it also initiated personal networks and research collaborations.

On the personal level, this period involved some changes in affiliation. The first move was to Nordplan, a Nordic institution based in Stockholm offering supplementary teaching and postgraduate teaching within planning. I consider this move the most important one in my career. Coming from the somewhat insular Department of Geography in Copenhagen to an institution that was both cross-disciplinary and cross-Nordic, I felt an extreme extension of my horizons – not least due to the inspiring contact with Gunnar Olsson (Professor at Nordplan). The following moves went to Geography at Aarhus University, where I worked as associate professor for 3 years, to the Danish Ministry of Environment, where I worked with urban and regional planning, and, finally, to a position as associate professor in geography at Roskilde University in 1986. I consider the experiences from these different affiliations important for my following development.

Theoretically, the period started with an increasing engagement within the critical urban theory of the 1980s, in particular valuing Henri Lefebvre as an author that was given too little attention in the ‘international’ debate at that time. (An exception was a small group of architects and sociologists in Sweden, for example Peter Eriksson and Sten Gromark, who already in 1982 published a Swedish translation of his Le droit à la ville [1976] (Lefebvre, 1982)). My work initially concentrated on two themes. The first one developed around questions of urban conflict and social movements; about their base in collective consumption, about their mainly local character and subsequently orientation towards the local state, and about the contradictory forces at play when it comes to evaluate the political perspectives of the movements (Jensen & Simonsen, 1981; Simonsen et al., 1982). The second theme was the question of gender and the city, for example the gendered character of urban segregation and planning (Simonsen, 1990), and later with Vaiou, where we took a starting point in women’s lives and experiences and explored their role in the construction of urban spaces in Copenhagen and Athens (Simonsen & Vaiou, 1996). This was also my more general aim during this period. From a critique of the contemporary critical urban theory for mainly adopting a structural approach, I wanted to develop an understanding of the city making room for everyday life and social practice. That work was connected to a group of researchers and PhD-theses within Danish social geography (Baerentholdt et al., 1990) and had connections to more humanist-oriented geographers in Finland (Karjalainnen, 1986; Paasi, 1986; Vartiainen, 1986). In the following, I will present my efforts in three steps, as it was conducted in my habitation-thesis on urban theory and everyday practices (Simonsen, 1993).

‘Mode de Vie’

Earlier, I mentioned the Danish theory of mode of life developed from structural Marxism (Højrup, 1983). For my purpose, I found more inspiration from a group of French urban sociologists whom I visited on a sabbatical. They had a very different approach to the concept, as they temporarily left a priori theories in favour of big empirically based analyses of practices and modes of life. Their aim was to find a way between voluntarist micro-sociology and structuralist reductions of everyday life. I will in particular point to two of their contributions: First, they by way of the concept of mobilization expressed a dialectic between how individuals and families actively mobilize (materially, financially, morally and affectively) to organize their lives and give meaning to them, and how they, on the other hand, are mobilized by structural processes involving institutions and social groups on a large scale (Godard, 1983). Secondly, their methodological-empirical program introduced a biographical approach to the analysis of ‘modes of life’. They collected biographies of individuals and families throughout three generations, including mobilization around education, employment, settlement, consumption and political activity. Focus was on events in their live span and intersections with histories of labour markets, localities, cities and nations (Bertaux, 1980).

A Social Ontology of Practice

One big discussion within the social sciences of the 1980s, which inspired me as well as many others in Nordic human geography, was the one of structure/agency or objectivism/subjectivism. I wanted to apply it in my urban research but also to look behind it seeking its philosophical base. Two very different philosophies offered useful contributions. The first one was Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy. The sentence ‘Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 1953) is sending two messages: first that no pregiven, independent phenomena (structure, consciousness, language) can exist ahead of human beings in their carrying out of specific activities; secondly, that speaking a language is a collective endeavour, part of language-games or modes of life. The other basic contribution was Heidegger’s existential phenomenology forwarding an understanding of ‘being-in-the-world’ as a practical, directional, everyday involvement in the environment (Heidegger, 1962).

On another level, to develop an understanding of social practice, I took inspiration from a range of social theorists from different intellectual milieus, who all contributed to the structure-agency question: the most important ones came from Britain (Giddens, 1984), Germany (Habermas, 1984) and France (Lefebvre, 1984; Bourdieu, 1977). This combined inspiration provided me with a social ontology of practice, which, simply said, is an approach claiming that nothing in the social world is prior to human doings or practice; not consciousness, ideas or meaning; not structures or mechanisms; and not discourses, assemblages or networks. More concretely, this made me construct a triad of concepts for analysing everyday life and social practices, consisting of (1) routinization (both as a concept of alienation and of ontological security); (2) mobilization, life strategies, reflexivity; and (3) communication – the group (Simonsen, 1993).

Time-Space and Contextuality

However, having reached an understanding of social practice did not satisfy my request for one of contextuality. Basically, it is about the situated character of social life, involving coexistence, connections and togetherness as a series of associations and entanglements in time-space. Already Hägerstrand (1974) used the concept when he in the development of the epistemological basis of time-geography distinguished between compositional and contextual approaches. However, my endeavour was strictly social, exploring the role of social temporality and social spatiality in the mediation between structure and agency. Again, the inspirations were manifold, involving particularly Heidegger (1962), Sartre (1963), Lefebvre (1974), Lefebvre and Regulier (1985), Giddens (1984) and, from geography, Thrift (1983). A concentrated illustration of the approach is shown in Fig. 15.1.

Fig. 15.1
An illustration of time-space and contextuality of life. Three boxes are highlighted which include socio-spatial development, biography in time and space, and daily time-space routines.

Contextuality of modes of life

Full size image

My starting point was that all social practice is formed in social, temporal and spatial contexts and that practices and context are inseparable and mutually constitutive. I tried, through an analytical differentiation of social temporality and social spatiality in their institutional, existential and practical dimensions, to develop an analytical scheme for the study of mode of life (Simonsen, 1991). In the heart of the diagram stands individuals’ biographies in time and space. It is here that the concrete production of social individuals take place, and it is here that the complex texture of daily temporal-spatial routines is organized. Thus, the interest in biographical analysis is focused not upon single actions but upon sequences of action getting meaning within larger projects. The situated life story becomes the point of intersection of the mediating categories time and space.

I put the approach into play in a case study using biographical interviews – inspired by the above discussed ‘mode de vie’ group as well as Sartre’s (1963) ideas of progressive-regressive method, where he in writing biographies argued for movements to-and-fro between life story and epoch. The analysis was conducted in the lives of four generations of women in a Copenhagen neighbourhood (Simonsen, 1993). As I see it retrospectively, what I did during this period was to construct an understanding of geography that at the same time changed my theoretical approach and added to my former work. Shortly summarized, it was an adoption of the structure-agency thinking into urban theory, a development of a theory (or ontology) of social practice, and a development of my understanding of time-space. The approach was not very well received in the more traditionalist parts of Danish geography, but I think more welcomed in the younger generation.

In the transition from this period to the next one, a new intellectual network emerged. It was formed around the ICCG’s (International Conferences of Critical Geography), inaugurating in Vancouver 1997. Here, initiated by Lawrence Berg (1997), started a discussion about power relations and Anglocentrism in ‘international’ publishing. With two feminist geographers from England and Greece, I took up the challenge and wrote about both the power geometry of journals and the experiences of writing ‘across’ Europe (Gregson et al., 2003; for other Nordic contributions on this topic, see Paasi, 2005; Setten, 2008). On the personal level, I got a professorship at Roskilde University in 1996, alongside a 20% guest professorships at Oslo University (for 3 years) and later at Tromsø University (for 5 years), and I was very happy to receive a degree as honorary doctor at Stockholm University in 2010.

The Third Approximation: Towards a Critical Phenomenology

I have never totally left the idea of a social ontology having its starting point in practice. Much of the theoretical work since my habitation has been elaborations of the practice approach described above, but along the road I have made so many extensions and changes that it ends up different from what is mostly called practice theory. The end point, so far, is what Lasse Koefoed and I term Critical Phenomenology (Simonsen & Koefoed, 2020). Let me describe these steps.

The Body

One important characteristic of lived, everyday practices is that they are intrinsically corporeal. However, even if it was acknowledged, most practice theory did not develop that point. To mend that was the first point of my extensions (Simonsen, 2000, 2007). For me, attention to the body first came through feminism. Some of the most important inspirations here came from Iris Marion Young, including her iconic essay Throwing like a girl (Young, 1990), and the Norwegian philosopher Toril Moi (1999). Moi, following Simone de Beauvoir, forwarded a concept of the body as a situation – a situation amongst other social ones, but fundamental in the sense that it will always be part of our lived experience and our coping with the environment.

Seeking the philosophical background, I turned to Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology (1962, 1968). Already his well-known ‘slogan’, ‘Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think that” but of “I can”’ (1962, p. 137), shows his affinity to practice. The practically oriented body continuously weaves meaning throughout its life course, and its own capacities materialize throughout its interactions with others and with its environment. In this way, the body is not just an object in the world, neither is it a mere assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts; it a sensuous, lived body that changes through interaction with an environment that it both responds to and actively structures. Later he highlights the intertwining of the body and the world – he calls this common element the flesh and talk about the flesh of human bodies, the flesh others (human and non-human) and the flesh of the world. The human body as self-sentient flesh becomes part of the flesh of the world but is not reducible to it (1968). The most important aspect of the flesh is its reversibility, a ‘double sensation’ by which the body-subject’s practices and perceptions are connected in an interworld or ‘intermundane space’. We are all visible-seers, tangible touchers, audible listeners etc., enacting an ongoing intertwinement between the flesh of the body, the flesh of others and the flesh of the world.

In this way, Merleau-Ponty also placed the body in a field of space and time. He started from the spatiality of the body and accentuated how this is not a spatiality of position, but one of situation. The body is situated in space and time, but it should not be seen in terms of our bodies being in space or in time – they inhabit space and time:

I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. The scope of this is the measure of that of my existence. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 140)

This understanding I combined with Henri Lefebvre’s stronger emphasize on the production of space and his conception of a generative and creative social body as an intrinsic part of social practice (Lefebvre, 1974; Simonsen, 2005a). In his understanding each body both is space and has its space; it produces itself in space as the same time as it produces that space. All three aspects of his well-known conceptual triad of production of space – spatial practice, representation of space and spaces of representation – involves aspects of bodies and embodiment, his theories of everyday life include temporalities (e.g. the conflict between linear time and cyclical time), and his rhythmanalysis (with Catherine Regulier) is a time-space exercise reaching from bodies to global political economy.

From this addition to practice theories, and a simultaneous recognition of practices as both bodily and narrative, both doings and sayings (Schatzki, 2002), I formed a range of open, conceptual tools for analyzing modalities of urban life. An analysis of urban life constructed from spatialities and temporalities of the embodied city and the narrative city respectively was conducted in Copenhagen and published as a Danish book on ‘the multiple faces of the city’ (Simonsen, 2005b).

Emotion and Affectivity

In prolongation of the focus on the body and an arising need coming out of my empirical research, my next elaboration focused on emotions. In urban studies it had for long been an issue around questions of women’s fear in public space; that was also the case in Nordic geography (e.g. Flemmen, 1999; Koskela, 1999; Listerborn, 2002, 2015a), but not much was done about a more general theorization of emotions. The time that I started this search happened to coincide with a heated discussion running in British geography between feminists emphasizing emotion and ‘non-representational’ theorists focusing on affect (Thien, 2005; Anderson & Harrison, 2006). During a sabbatical at Durham University, I realized that I had to find my own way through the discussion. That, of course, did not prevent an involvement later on in particular dealing with whether the critique of classical Humanism should lead to a search for a ‘New humanism’ or a post-humanism levelling human and non-human (Simonsen, 2013; Ash & Simpson, 2016).

This effort led me back to Merleau-Ponty and his ideas of reversibility. Because of the reversibility, the body is simultaneously active and passive. It is at the same time seeing and seen, creative and receptive, affecting and affective. It was and is my argument that an elaboration of this non-dichotomous approach can cut through the distinction between emotion as subjective experiences or significations, on one hand, and affect as an impersonal ‘set of flows moving through the bodies of human and other beings’ (Thrift, 2008, p. 236), on the other hand, and advance the debate about emotion and affect. It starts from the general phenomenological insight that we are never ‘un-touched’ by the world around us – we are always already attuned to it. Emotions are neither ‘purely’ mental nor ‘purely’ physical but ways of relating and interacting with the surrounding world.

This relational account can give rise to a double conception of emotional spatiality (Simonsen, 2007, 2010). One side is an expressive space of the body’s movement, which might be seen as a performative element of emotion. Here, emotions are connected to the expressive and communicative body. The body, Merleau-Ponty argues, is comparable to an expressive work of art, but one that expresses emotions in the form of living meaning. These meanings are communicated and ‘blindly’ apprehended through corporeal orientations and gestures that reciprocally link one body to another. The other side of emotional spatiality is affective space, which is the space where we are emotionally in touch – open to the world around us. Emotions are not just actions, something that our bodies express or articulate. The other side is about the way in which we are possessed by them or swept into their grasp, for instance when experiencing a special event, a city or a landscape. It is the felt sense of having been moved emotionally, the more passive side of emotional experience.

A related concept with geographical relevance is atmosphere. It has its roots in phenomenological philosophy and architectural theory (Böhme, 1993), but came into geography during the 2000s, first in Germany (Hasse 2002) and later in the Anglophone world (McCormack, 2008; Anderson, 2009). Anderson defines atmosphere as ‘spatially discharged affective qualities that are autonomous from the bodies that they emerge from, enable and perish with’ (2009, p. 80). A colleague and I discuss how to mend what we find to be an overstatement of the passive side in the constitution of atmospheres and argue for a combination of practice theories, sensuous phenomenology and the theories of atmosphere in order to highlight how atmospheres are created both by materiality and through the presence and practices of people (Bille & Simonsen, 2021).

Encountering the Stranger

Rather than a theoretical problem, this extension is provoked by political and empirical problems. One trigger was an anger about the increasing Islamophobia in Denmark, for me rendering the life chances of ethnic minorities an indispensable research theme. I entered this field together with my colleague Lasse Koefoed, first with a couple of introducing publications (Haldrup et al., 2006; Koefoed & Simonsen, 2007), later in two joint projects.

The pivotal point in this work is embodied cross-cultural encounters as they pass off in different urban spaces. Through this, we wrote ourselves into a concurrent Anglophone network on ‘the geography of encounters’ (Valentine, 2008; Hopkins, 2011; Darling & Wilson, 2016). In line with the above-mentioned ideas of intercorporeality and reversibility, we ascribe ontological primacy to interrelations or encounters. In this move, however, encounters become more than just meetings. They are meetings involving two characteristics: surprise and time-space (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Ahmed, 2000). Encounters involve surprise (and maybe conflict) because of their inevitable content of similarities and difference, inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion that constitutes the boundaries of bodies and communities. Hence, the constitution of strangers involves spatial negotiations over mobility and home, (imagined) communities, boundaries and bridges, etcetera. ‘Like bodies’ and ‘unlike’ bodies do not precede encounters, rather likeness and unlikeness are produced in them.

In this way, encounters are about face-to-face meetings as experienced in everyday life. They are, however, also temporal and spatial through historical-geographical mediation. They presuppose other faces, other encounters of facing, other bodies, other spaces and other times. They reopen prior histories of encounters and geopolitical imaginations of the Other as traces of broader social relationships. That is why we had to include postcolonial thinking, taking off from Said’s (1978) well-known analysis of Western imaginations of the Orient. More present inspirations have been Ahmed (2000, 2006) and Gregory (2004). Both authors develop the postcolonial thinking; one in relation to cross-cultural encounters in everyday life, the other one on the distorted imaginative geographies in contemporary warfare in the Middle East. The point is how the past inform the present and how ‘farness’ as a spatial marker of distance become embodied as a property of people and places. The Other becomes associated with the other side of the world.

Of our two joint projects, the first – The stranger, the city and the nation – addressed the possibility of belonging for ‘strangers’ in socio-spatial formations on different scales (Koefoed & Simonsen, 2010, 2012), the other – Paradoxical spaces: cross-cultural encounters in public space (also involving Maja de Neergaard and Mathilde Dissing Christensen) – focused on different modes of encounters, such as collective planned encounters, encounters with authorities and everyday encounters (e.g. Koefoed et al., 2017, 2020; Simonsen et al., 2020; Koefoed & Simonsen, 2021). Our primary networks in relation to this work were to be found amongst international contacts within ‘geography of encounters’, but also colleagues from cultural studies at Roskilde University (Christiansen et al., 2017) and people dealing with similar issues in Sweden (Pred, 2000; Molina, 2011; Listerborn, 2015b) and Norway, for example through participation in a Norwegian project, Cit-egration, about more hospitable encounters with refugees and immigrants (Koefoed et al., 2021).

Critical Phenomenology

I will end this personal travel-story through the intellectual landscape of geography and related subjects by outlining the joint framework constructed together with my main co-author during the last 10 years (Simonsen & Koefoed, 2020). When we started to use the term ‘critical phenomenology’ about our work (Simonsen, 2013), we realized that similar terminology appeared in different circles, particularly within North American philosophy (Kerney & Semonovitch, 2011; Dolezal & Petherbridge, 2017; Weiss et al., 2020). We summarized our own take on the term in three points, which also captures where I currently am in my socio-spatial thinking.

First, critical phenomenology is a critical theory that emphasizes experience. Most critical theory focuses on inequalities and oppression as rooted in structures or systemic relations – and in many cases for good reasons. It is, however, insufficient to describe the world’s general structures without also attending to the ways they are experienced from within, including the experiences of those who are suffering from the situations of oppression. This is where Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has an invaluable role to play. It focuses on embodied, situated and affective forms of experiences, but at the same time acknowledges the way in which these experiences are already infused with layers of cultural sedimentation, saturated with habit and inertia, and interwoven with power and obfuscation.

Second, critical phenomenology is a phenomenology that is sensitive to difference. The principal figures in the phenomenological tradition (including Merleau-Ponty) have been targets of criticism for not paying adequate attention to the question of difference, not least as formulated by feminist and postcolonial literature. As regards Merleau-Ponty we would argue that the allegations are only partially true; even if he does not develop ideas specifically around difference. However, already two of his contemporaries drew on his thinking on the body to take that step – Simone de Beauvoir on gender and Franz Fanon on race – and many others have continued this effort and in this way contributed a phenomenology of alterity and difference (e.g Young, 1990; Ahmed, 2000, 2006; Alcoff, 2006).

This leads us to our third point: critical phenomenology involves a politics that emphasize coexistence. Again, we could start from Merleau-Ponty. For him, politics was primarily about collective life and he rooted it in an ontology of the interworld, conceived as thick intersubjectivity or a field of forces where struggles for coexistence are performed. In continuation of that, the thinker who inspired us most was Hannah Arendt. In the shadow of totalitarianism, her reconceptualization of the political centres on the aspect of human condition that she considered destroyed, that is, human plurality (Arendt, 1958). She argues that politics should centre on the spaces in which humans interact and take responsibility for the shared world. The attraction of Arendt’s work is her broad concept of politics focusing on what we experience and live through and our shared capacity to act. It both gives us an approach to everyday politics and uncovers disturbing societal phenomena that we can trace again now in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

We would argue that these three elements of critical phenomenology can lead towards a ‘new humanism’, not as the old humanisms grounded in affirmations of the abstract human potential, but rather in a new potentialization rooted in contextuality and an ethics of alterity. With this move towards ‘everyday politics’, we see links to new political thinking within Finnish geography aiming at developing tools for understanding political agency and political events as they unfold contextually in everyday life (Häkli & Kallio, 2014; Kallio et al., 2021).

Retrospectively, one could argue that the understanding of social spatiality, I adopted in the former approximation, in this one has been deepened with spaces of bodies and embodiment, emotional spatialities and atmospheres, narrative spatiality and geographical imaginations, and political spaces. Important to me is also the critical focus on the liveability for ethnic minorities in the Denmark.

Concluding Remarks

In line with the story presented here, I still see my work as an approach under development, a step in a continuing intellectual travel formed by theoretical and empirical challenges and inspirations. It is a story told by a woman who during her whole academic life has felt it necessary to find her own way ‘in the jungle out there’ and also to fight for it. It has not always been easy in the Danish context. On the other hand, I have been so lucky to achieve a voice within discussions within Nordic and international critical geography, particularly on theorizing space and place, on practice theory, on power relations in publishing, on the body (gendered and racialized), on emotions, on encountering the other, and latest on Critical Phenomenology, a field under development in different subjects and networks.