ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the spatial turn that emerged in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1970s and discusses what it can offer to the study of language, migration, and mobility. The main purpose of this chapter is to examine recent work in applied linguistics that has engaged with the view of language practices as spatial practices and to consider how this view reframes lines of inquiry in language and migration. Scholars from other disciplines who have contributed to the spatial turn have argued for an understanding of space as dynamic and socially constructed. Accordingly, much of this work treats as its target the processes involved in spatialization rather than the more static notion of space in order to examine the human activities and materialist processes through which spaces are made and remade. The spatial turn is often traced to the writings of Henri Lefebvre (1974, 1991) and Michel de Certeau (1984), whose seminal work challenged the premise that space is a container for language and instead asserted that space is the ongoing construction of human activity and practices. This view has many implications for the study of language and migration, for it calls into question the static view of spaces as inherently associated with languages and draws attention to the need to study how spaces – including nation-states, but also spaces of language instruction and language use – are produced through the intersection of human activity, including the imagining of spaces as belonging to particular ethnicities, religions, genders, and languages. Lefebvre (1974) theorized space as a triad of physical, social, and imagined spaces, and argued that since imagined space is where we conceive and analyze social events and the physical environment, all three spaces are ultimately inseparable. An important consequence of this triadic view is that a physical space is never really an objective space since it is always conceived by and for people. Hence, all spaces are ultimately political realms, and power is constantly embedded in their representation and in how people experience them. In De Certeau’s well-known essay, “Walking the City” (1984), he presents a vision of urban space as one that is produced through an embodied experience of moving through city streets, and constructed through people’s narratives about their day-to-day lives in urban spaces. For De Certeau, pedestrians create a city as they walk through it, giving new meanings to places and thoroughfares which are different than those originally assigned to them by urban planners and city officials.
