ABSTRACT
Within Human Geography, otherness1 has in the latest decades been approached through Said’s (1978) seminal work on Orientalism and ‘imaginative geographies’, which from its basis in Colonialism has been translated into ‘national’ and ‘local’ scales. While this ‘exterior’ approach to the construction of otherness is extremely important, it is equally important to understand how it occurs in everyday life, how everyday experiences and bodily encounters at the same time respond to and produce otherness. In this chapter, I will argue that a turn to practice can inform such an understanding. I will explore and seek to illustrate how embodied encounters construct differentiated bodily and social spatialities and how these practices of differentiation include emotional as well as ethical aspects.
