Reconstructing Social Space: Spatial Dynamics through Gendered, Cultural and Emotional Lenses

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Background

This Research Topic welcomes sociological contributions focused on a reconceptualization of the notion of 'space' using the cultural, emotional, and gender lenses of analysis. Departing from the ground work of Gregory and Urry (1985) and from the more recent invitation to spatial sociology by Fuller and Löw (2017), this edited collection aims to advance our understanding of space as a socially produced and relationally constituted concept. Reflecting on the concept of space is important in sociology because social reality takes place in various types of space, which are ordering our way of experiencing, perceiving and performing in the social world. Today, we can find many types of spaces: there are the everyday institutionalized and intimate spaces in which we live, care and work; migration and mobility create also transnational spaces, within which the movement of some people is promoted and for others limited by borders and fences; there are also imaginative spaces, those that live in our memories, or places of social escape (prisons, health wards, retreats etc.). At the same time, relationships and emotions can create ‘safe havens’ or ‘living hells, and social media is also a new space of relating and communicating.

We welcome new contributions to this field of knowledge that aim to explore how ‘space’ can shape people’s everyday lives in different ways, and how people’s lives shape “space”. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers drawing from both qualitative and quantitative research on the following or related topics:

• Organizational factors affecting new spaces
• Household dynamics and new spaces
• Problematizing the boundaries between private and public spaces
• Migration and transnational spaces
• Our memories and imaginative spaces
• Quality of relations and emotional spaces
• Social media and non-physical spaces
• Theoretical approaches to social spaces
• How collective issues (t.e.x a pandemic) influence social spaces

The contributors to this collection of peer-reviewed articles are encouraged to pay nuanced attention to digital, institutional or professional, intimate or private spaces inhabited by social actors in their everyday lives. The focus could fall on how the gendered and cultural dynamics of spaces become fluid or attain new boundaries through social actors’ interactions, or how different spatial areas overlap or merge (if at all). Moreover, this can be achieved by exploring the links between emotions and mobility, relational closeness and distance, or time/temporality and location. However, analyses of space don’t have to be limited to merely public, material or physical elements but should reflect on how the spatial can become social and vice versa (support communities and classrooms; kin and family rituals such as marriages; spaces of escapism or online ‘socializing’).

We welcome also theoretical and empirical papers drawing from both qualitative and quantitative research, with a particular interest in digital technologies (e.g. analyses of online platforms Instagram, Twitter or how people use apps in the exploration of both professional and intimate spaces, for dating, for wellbeing, or for work).

Keywords: social distance, social isolation, virus, feeling loss, quantitative research, Space, Emotions, Gender, Everyday life, Culture, Qualitative Research

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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