XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

309

The Spatial Reconfiguration: Challenges for Social Theory

RC16 Sociological Theory (host committee)

Language: English

We face fundamental changes in the spatial order since the second half of the 2oth century, notably technologically advanced mediatisation and the globalisation and transnationalisation of a huge number of actions at economical, political, cultural, everyday and planning levels: A continually growing albeit unequally distributed, hierarchically structured increase in interconnections and interdependencies between individual and collective actors and places, an increase in individual and collective systems of reference, and an ever-growing quantity of circulating objects, technologies and human beings all lead to transformations of the spatial order and changing spatial actions. This process of reconfiguration of space is not as an abstract process, but rather as an experiential process of communicative, lived practices that engenders new institutions and novel forms of localisation, interconnectedness and spatially shaped self-experience. The session starts from the assumption that the transformation of the social becomes particularly clear when looking at the restructuring of spaces. Social changes are leading to new forms of synthesizing spaces and new dynamics of spacing, which result in the spatial reorganisation of societies. We are looking for papers that rethink social theory from a spatial point of view. How can we theorize the process of rearranging and restructuring spaces, which we regard as fundamentally social and relational in nature? How are different social formations of space related to one another? What are the constitutive features of reconfiguration of space?