This session will be streamed, recorded, and archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

Curated Track: 

Description:

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about space and place (Warwick and Lees 2022; Pohl 2022; Bissell 2021; Callum 2020). This has included new levels of attention to – and anxiety around – the problem of interior space. From mass quarantines and working from home, to the exacerbation of housing insecurity, to rising mental health issues, to cottagecore internet aesthetics, the "interior" has reemerged for many as a site of intense – and intensely uneven – crisis and containment, ranging from the psychic to the domestic, the immunological to the geopolitical.

Capitalist modernity in the early twentieth century was often associated with the liquidation of the interior, whether in terms of a loss of dwelling, spiritual homelessness, or defensive detachment (Dubow 2020; Rice 2006). And yet geographers have long demonstrated the continuing role of interiors and interiority in the reinforcement – but also interruption – of uneven social relations. This is especially true of feminist engagements with the home (Blunt and Robyn 2022) and intimate geopolitics (Öcal and Gökarıksel 2022) as well as recent work on the "interior" spaces of carcerality, infrastructure, digital technology, the subterranean, among other examples.

In a time of catastrophe, it's clear that interiors are not simply "liquidated" but variously re-formed and re-presented as spaces of reaction, (in)security, and refuge. From territoriality and border controls (Paasi et al. 2022), rising xenophobia and the everyday geographies of the far-right (Luger 2022) – to ecological security and resiliency infrastructures (Wakefield 2022), logistical and aesthetic containment strategies (Yong 2023), and sanctuary space for refugees (Mitchell and MacFarlane 2022): the production of interiors "encapsulates" an explosive mixture of spatial forms and practices. A pressing question for geography has become: what is the politics of the interior today? What is the relationship between interiorization and the spatiotemporalities of capitalism? How does the restructuring of the interior help account for the rise of right-wing populism, neo-authoritarianism, and conspiracy theories? And to what extent can today's social struggles be understood as struggles over interior space?

This panel is an invitation to rethink the problematic of the interior as a site for mapping the shifting political contours of the present. The goal is to bring together an array of theoretical and empirical approaches around the question of interior space, while reconsidering the latter's "place" within and beyond human geography.

Topics might include but are not limited to

Interior design, architectural atmospheres, aesthetic capitalism
Domesticity, dwelling, social reproduction
Climate control, green architecture, ecofascism
Carceral interiors and racial capitalism
The (planetary?) urbanization of consciousness
Geographies of housing, housing finance, housing bubbles
Art, literature, "images" of the interior
Health geographies, containment strategies, interiorized risk
Logistics, aesthetics, cartographies of the interior
Topology, topoanalysis, politics
Zoom, digital interiors, algorithmic space
Psychogeographies of crisis, catastrophe, decay
Sanctuary, asylum, cloisters, sacred space
Interiors and interiorities of the far-right
The privatization of public space
Ontological security and globalization
Interior space and the "internal contradictions" of capital accumulation


References

Bissell, D (2021) A changing sense of place: Geography and COVID-19. Geographical Research 59(2): 150–159.

Blunt, A, & Dowling, R (2022) Home. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.

Dubow, J (2020) In Exile: Geography, Philosophy and Judaic Thought. London: Bloomsbury.

Luger, J (2022) Celebrations, Exaltations and Alpha Lands: Everyday geographies of the far-right. Political Geography 96, doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102604

McKittrick, K (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mitchell, K, & MacFarlane, K (2022) Sanctuary Space, Racialized Violence, and Memories of Resistance. Annals of the American Association of Geographers doi: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2060792

Öcal, D K, & Gökarıksel, B (2022) Grounding religious geopolitics: The everyday counter-geopolitical practices of Turkish mosque communities in Germany. Geoforum 129: 151–160.

Paasi, A, Ferdoush, M, Jones, R, Murphy, A, & Espejo, P (2022) Locating the territoriality of territory in border studies. Political Geography 95: 92–94.

Pohl, L (2022) The empty city: COVID-19 and the apocalyptic imagination. City 26(4): 706–722.

Rice, C (2006) The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London: Routledge.

Wakefield, S (2022) Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene. Urban Studies 59(5): 917–936.

Ward, C (2020) The annihilation of time by space in the COVID-19 pandemic downturn. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 191–194.

Warwick, E, & Lees, L (2022) Osmosis across defensible space: Observations and lessons from dérives in London during COVID-19. Urban Geography 43(6): 810–820.

Yong, S (2023) The Sublime and the Logistical: Containment Strategies in the Aesthetics of Circulation. In M. Denecke, H. Kuhn & M. Stürmer (Eds.), Liquidity, Flows, Circulation: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization (pp. 295–312). Zurich: Diaphenes.

Non-Presenting Participants