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Limits to ‘thinking space relationally’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2010

Martin Jones
Martin Jones*
Affiliation:
Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) & Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University
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Abstract

This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of ‘thinking space relationally’ in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 6 , Special Issue 3: Law, Movement, Space , September 2010 , pp. 243 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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