Space and Temporalities

Source: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/research/units/hss/groups/space-and-temporalities Parent: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/engage-and-innovate/consultancy

Group Leader(s): Dr Thomas Chambers, Dr Mel Nowicki

Contact:

tchambers@brookes.ac.uk

About us

The Space and Temporalities (SaT) research cluster sits within Oxford Brookes’ Centre for Environment and Society (CES).  As a cluster, we draw on disciplinary positionalities from across the humanities and social sciences including human geography, social/cultural anthropology, sociology, international relations, politics, history, criminology and philosophy, as well as creative fields such as art and theatre. In this context, we seek to engage with the work of scholars and others who locate aspects of their research within the intersections between ‘space’ and ‘temporality’.

Whilst this opens up a variety of possibilities, examples might include the spatial/temporal experiences of workers engaged in forms of precarious and/or informal labour, (re)configurations of urban space, the relationship between spatial/temporal experiences of migration and migrants' subjectivities, conceptions of 'home', spatial and temporal aspects of social inequality and marginalisation, or relations between humans and non-humans.

Our primary forum comprises a bi-annual workshop which enables networking, aids the development of research trajectories, fosters collaborative grant applications and facilitates knowledge exchange. In addition to the bi-annual workshop, the cluster also organises smaller special events and seminars around more focused themes which speak in specific ways to the intersection of space and temporality, including events targeted at supporting early career researchers. Across all these areas, we emphasise the value of research longevity, innovation and collaboration.

Part of

• School of Social Sciences
• Centre for Environment and Society (CES)

Related courses

• Anthropology (BA (Hons) / BSc (Hons))
• Geography (BA (Hons) / BSc (Hons))

Leadership

Dr Thomas Chambers

• +44 (0) 1865 483749
• tchambers@brookes.ac.uk

Senior Lecturer in Anthropology

View profile for Thomas Chambers

Dr Mel Nowicki

• 01865 483945
• mnowicki@brookes.ac.uk

Reader in Urban Geography

View profile for Mel Nowicki

Membership

Staff members Research students

• Staff
• Students

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Staff

Research impact

The clusters research impact is focused around 5 areas:

Research environment Collaborative working Policy and agenda setting Public engagement Teaching and pedagogy

• Research environment
• Collaborative working
• Policy and agenda setting
• Public engagement
• Teaching and pedagogy

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Research environment

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A creative and outward-looking research environment lies at the core of our impact strategy. The Space and Temporalities cluster collaborates with other research clusters, groups and University-wide networks to enhance impact and research progression. By bringing together researchers from across the arts, humanities and social sciences, we not only foster interdisciplinary exchange but also share skills and experiences around delivering meaningful impact within and beyond academia.

Upcoming Events

Meanings of Home: A Workshop for GCSE & A Level Students

(Part of the Oxford Brookes Think Human Festival)

What makes a home? What does home mean to different people in different places? What does it mean to be without a home? Is a home just one place, or can it be many?

This workshop is aimed at GCSE and A Level students. It offers a reflexive space to think about ‘meanings of home’. The program comprises two parts: The first is a virtual gallery through which students can view videos of individuals from difference parts of the world and from different backgrounds as they discuss what ‘home’ means to them. This can be undertaken in the classroom at the convenience of educators (but will also be available on the day of the workshop). The second component comprises an onsite follow-up workshop at Oxford Brookes university (Tuesday 5th April, 2-4pm). This in-person event will ask students to collaboratively create material that reflects the ways in which home is understood. Here, too, students will be encouraged to reflect on conceptions and meanings of home in a range of contexts. As a whole the program offers two learning outcomes. Firstly, it will enable students to develop an understanding of cross-cultural perspectives surrounding the idea of home. Secondly, it will enable students to reflect on their own positions and to better understand their perspectives within broader local and global contexts.

If you are a teacher or educator and would like to sign up a group for the session then please contact tchambers@brookes.ac.uk.

Past Events

The Sense of 'Home’: An Interdisciplinary Workshop

The Sense of 'Home’: An Interdisciplinary Workshop

Tuesday 29 June

What makes a home? How have our understandings of home changed across space and time? What can we learn from an interdisciplinary approach to conceptualising home?

This workshop explored these questions across a broad geographical and chronological range, employing methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. We considered the forces which shape the space and temporalities of the home, as well as the processes by which individuals attempt to make themselves at home in new urban or rural environments. Drawing on examples of voluntary and forced migration and movement, work and worship, family and food, punishment and enslavement, through the lens of gender, class, race, sexuality, and their interconnections, we considered the physical and emotional impact of the destruction and construction of homes. Much attention has been paid to the way in which identities have been forged in opposition to others, particularly through global cultural encounters. This project built upon work done on the domestic and public spheres across diverse spaces and times and encouraged a focus upon the ways in which identities are created, projected, shaped and retained through the space of the home, or its absence. A full video of the workshop is available below...

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Latest news

Think Human Festival

Space & Temporalities will be offering a workshop for GCSE and A Level students at next year's Think Human festival.  See Upcoming Events for details.

2021-22 Planning Meeting (15 April 2021)

The following items were agreed at the meeting:

1. To set up a blog post/Twitter account and establish a working group of people who are happy to take the lead on aspects of this.
2. To fix the date for our inaugural workshop on the theme of 'home'.
3. To begin development of an event (again on the theme of home) for the next Think Human Festival in April 2022.
4. To explore the possibility of holding an autumn seminar series connecting with organisations outside of academia by focusing on practitioner-led sessions.

Workshop Scoping Meeting (18 March 2021)

On Thursday 18 March, the Spaces and Temporalities Research Cluster held the second in a series of virtual round tables for members of the cluster from across Oxford Brookes University. We discussed the theme for our inaugural workshop which we agreed would focus on conceptions of 'home'. Keep an eye on our newsfeeds for more information.

Inaugural Members Meeting (4 February 2021)

We talked through our research interests and hopes for the cluster. Some key themes that connect across peoples’ work include:

• marginality, precarity
• waiting
• surveillance/’watched-ness’
• home and the everyday
• intersections/thresholds between public and private space
• virtual worlds
• subversion

We discussed how the website would be a useful tool for the following:

• holding a directory of members
• promoting the work of members (e.g. via a ‘news’ section)
• hosting a blog where members showcase their research
• flagging and promoting new work in our field that may be useful for other members.
• It was also suggested that the website would be a really useful place to include postgraduate students work.

This led onto wider discussions regarding the inclusion of postgrads - helping them to foster community with one another and with academics outside their supervisory team.

There was also discussion of how we might connect to the other clusters in CES, HOPE (Human Origins and Paleo Environments) and HAE (Humans, Animals and Environment).

It was agreed that a good next step would be to hold another meeting next month with the aim to a) move towards decisions regarding cluster activities, and b) give those who were unable to attend this meeting the opportunity to introduce themselves.

Past seminars

Dr Ella Harris (Birkbeck, University of London) Rebranding Precarity: Pop-up Culture as the Seductive New Normal

26 November 2020 at 1.00pm

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In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, pop-up culture - a trend for temporary and nomadic places - emerged as a 'compensatory' urbanism; designed to keep life going in crisis conditions by filling vacant sites and providing amenities and work opportunities without capital. However, having begun as a second best solution, pop-up became a celebrated format for activities including cultural events, restaurants, work-spaces and even welfare provision.

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This talk argues that pop-up normalised and glamorised precarious ways of living and working in the post-crash era. Specifically, I suggest that pop-up rebranded precarity by reimagining the spatial and temporal characteristics of crisis, replacing, for example, instability with 'flexibility' or diminishment with 'the micro.' Exploring varied case-studies within London, I illuminate the spatiotemporal logics of pop-up and their role in rebranding precarity.

Dr Shalini Grover (LSE) From the Local to the Global: Care Chains, Ageing and Futurity through the Indian Ayah

20 November 2020 at 12.00pm

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The seminar will trace the dynamic formation of Global Care Chains (GCCs) from local settings in urban India, demonstrating how ayahs/caregivers’ movements stretch across different geopolitical locales. Their movements obfuscate the South-North, South-South and North-North migration divide.

My seminar will demarcate the localisation of globalisation; how do female domestic workers in India’s Capital become highly transnational and mobile? I offer a substantial ethnography of GCCs through the eyes off an all-rounder ayah Mary, with her work trajectory having spanned three decades of intimate service with diplomats and global elites. Mary’s journeys raise pertinent questions around, aging, futurity, precarity and the devaluation of social reproduction. Through the aging process, Mary begins to scrutinise embellished employer narratives (a stark continuity of colonial sentiments), while her deep-seated (and silenced) vulnerabilities were equally unveiled. How do ayahs like Mary view their relationships with employers when they are young and how do they view servitude as they rapidly age? The life-cycle approach allows us to prioritise the interconnectedness of Mary’s movements and the critical disjuncture’s between youth and ageing.

Dr Richard Carver (Oxford Brookes) ''Stopping Torture: What Works?''

22 October 2020 at 2.00pm

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Richard researches and teaches human rights in the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. He is also editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford). Richard’s research focuses on the institutional protection of human rights, in particular the rights of people deprived of liberty.

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Does Torture Prevention Work? (with Lisa Handley, Liverpool University Press, 2016) was a pioneering multi-country study of the effectiveness of the torture prevention methods advocated by international legal authorities and anti-torture campaigners. The research found that although many recommended preventive steps had a positive impact, some did not. It also found that the preventive measures most strongly embedded in international law were not necessarily those that worked best in reducing the risk of torture.

Members' recent publications and outputs

[### Populism vs the New Globalisation by Barrie Axford (Sage Publications, 2021)

Populism is usually cast as globalisation's nemesis with globalisation often said to be in retreat. This book shows that while populism tends to be anti-globalist, the globalism it is pitted against has changed dramatically in recent years and is increasingly multipolar and destabilised.](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/populism-versus-the-new-globalization/book267825 "Populism vs the New Globalisation by Barrie Axford (Sage Publications, 2021) ")

[### Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans by Thomas Chambers (UCL Press, 2020)

A detailed ethnography of everyday experiences of Muslim artisans in a North Indian city and during migration across the country as well as to The Gulf. The theme of 'spatial enclavement' is used to explore how forms of marginalisation and temporal considerations shape labour subjectivities.](https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/116905 "Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans by Thomas Chambers (UCL Press, 2020)")

[### Is anyone home? by Mel Nowicki (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020)

The paper explores the political significance of narratives of home. Using the aftermath of the 2012 criminalisation of squatting in England and Wales, the paper traces how the concept of ‘home’ is deployed to reinforce neoliberal ideals, and as a tool of resistance by squatters.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2399654420964835 "Is anyone home? by Mel Nowicki (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020)")

[### ‘Homeward bound: Manliness and the home’ by Joanne Begiato (Manchester University Press, 2020)

This chapter, from her book Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, emotion, and material culture, demonstrates how men in the home inculcated feelings that produced, reinforced, and disseminated notions of masculinity.](https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526128577/ "‘Homeward bound: Manliness and the home’ by Joanne Begiato (Manchester University Press, 2020)")

[### On Commemoration: Global Perspectives Upon Remembering War Edited By Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro (Peter Lang, 2020)

How, in the twenty-first century, can we do commemoration better? How can commemoration contribute to post-war reconciliation and reconstruction? Brings together people from areas of public life to explore these questions through three different forms of commemoration: Textual, Monumental, and Aural](https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/68826 "On Commemoration: Global Perspectives Upon Remembering War Edited By Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro (Peter Lang, 2020)")

[### ‘Comfort’ and ‘Discomfort’ by Thomas Chambers (Teaching Anthropology, 2020)

The article critically engages with teaching spaces through the use of Bertolt's Bracht work and that of other theatrical traditions. Explores how critical thought is stimulated not by making the audience comfortable but by creating a sense of ‘discomfort’ through alienation and other techniques.](https://www.teachinganthropology.org/ojs/index.php/teach_anth/article/view/549/581 "‘Comfort’ and ‘Discomfort’ by Thomas Chambers (Teaching Anthropology, 2020) ")

[### 回家 Letters Home by Jennifer Wong (2020, Nine Arches Press)

A poetry collection that explores the impact of migration, history and language](https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/letters-home.html "回家 Letters Home by Jennifer Wong (2020, Nine Arches Press)")

[### 'Neo-Confederates take their stand by Niall Munro (European Journal of American Culture, 2020)

Explores how the Southern Agrarians used the Civil War to retard modernist progress, embrace failure as af Lost Cause ideology, and distort the temporal shape of Civil War memory. The kind of white supremacy and violence seen in their manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930) is echoed in the USA today.](https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ejac/2020/00000039/00000002/art00002 "'Neo-Confederates take their stand by Niall Munro (European Journal of American Culture, 2020)")

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