Space, mobility, and materiality: Rethinking notions of geographic coherence

Abstract

The recent spatial turn in the humanities and interpretive social sciences has made us aware of the central importance of place and space in our understanding of our objects of study. But it has not stopped the territorial reorganizations that are rendering geographic coherence unstable and shifting in the academy. As we interrogate the area-studies model and nation-based organizations of knowledge, concepts of circulation, displacement and mobility are gaining currency. My essay focuses on the paradigm of mobility to propose a geographic consciousness that thinks of space in terms of a multi-centered world of circuits and contacts. This system is already producing interesting work that deals with objects, persons and discourses in circulation. The very enterprise of tracing displacements in space (not only objects, of course, but also the mobility of refugees, pilgrims, merchants and many other entities on the go) allows us to discover productive itineraries that are no longer bound to fixed space categories. My essay develops illustrations of this paradigm, and the general theoretical implications of a move away from sedentarism.