The Question of Space: A Review Essay

Abstract

This article is a review essay which discusses the inter-disciplinary collection of essays edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, titled The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017). The book was published as part of the Place, Memory, Affect series, edited by Neil Campbell and Christine Berberich. As well as providing a detailed critical overview of The Question of Space, the article responds to some of the broader questions that the book poses in terms of the radical inter-disciplinary of space and spatiality, relating these firstly to ideas drawn from Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of ‘blind fields’. The review essay then goes on to question what we might understand by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and whether this itself requires some rethinking in order to better take stock of the developments in and around the inter-disciplinary scholarship on space and spatiality. Following this, the essay engages more directly with the individual chapter contributions in The Question of Space, before drawing together some concluding remarks that speak to the concept of ‘atmosphere’ as an affective and phenomenological quality of space as experiential and embodied ‘spacing’.