Abstract
This chapter elaborates on the theoretical foundation of the book, an adaptation of Martina Löw's spatial theory in the context of a refugee camp. Examining how space is socially (re)produced through the interplay of structures and refugees' practices, it thus provides tools to analyze the camp as a relational arrangement by identifying its constitutive elements and the linking practices that hold it together. Thereby providing grounds to analyse the respective rules and resources contributing to the spatial structures and conceptualizing practices of spatialization by focusing on the ways in which people (re)produce linkages between elements: namely, by means of interaction, usage and synthesis. Following a multilayered understanding of spaces, the author contributes to current debates on camps by emphasizing the processes that determine which spaces come to visually dominate and which remain hidden (and why).
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Notes
- 1.
Being beyond the scope of this book, I remain with these superficial enumerations of scholars who are prominent in their shaping of certain schools of thought. For more detailed reflection, see, for example, Bernhard Miebach (2010) and Andreas Reckwitz (2004); Reckwitz (2002).
- 2.
See, for example, the discussion on “boundary objects” by (Star and Griesemer 1989).
- 3.
The effect on ascribed identity which this powerful apparatus entails has, for example, been captured by so-called labelling (Zetter 1991, 2007; Krause 2016c; Cole 2017). Nevertheless, social roles cannot be forced upon people; they also enter and accept them, sometimes translating their roles according to their own interests. This has been addressed in refugees using the ‘refugee’ label deliberately or discarding it when no longer necessary (Ludwig 2013), or when matching certain criteria in order to gain access to diverse resources and the like (Inhetveen 2006; Jansen 2015).
- 4.
Social positioning is hereby not only determined by externally set demarcations but also historical and social expressions of positioning, such as language, traditions, habitus and so on. These represent the expression and mediation of social position. However at this point interest lies manly in the bureaucratic positioning of people as refugees, since it determines access to rules and resources in the camp; I therefore decline to investigate these complex social structures further.
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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature
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Schmidt, H. (2023). Theorizing Socio-Spatial Practices. In: Weaving the Camp. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41650-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41650-8_2
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