TY - JOUR
T1 - Limits to ‘thinking space relationally’
AU - Jones, Martin Russell
N1 - Jones, M. (2010). Limits to 'thinking space relationally'. International Journal of Law in Context, 6 (3), 243-255.
* This article is an abridged version of a much longer review of relational space, and its extension as ‘phase space’, published in Progress in Human Geography (Jones, 2009). I am grateful to the reviewers and editors of this special issue for specific comments on this article for a legal studies audience. The article has also benefited much from collaborations, on related themes, with Gordon MacLeod. I would also like to acknowledge the funding and support for the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods. WISERD is jointly funded by the Welsh Assembly Government (HEFCW) and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to draw together and build upon the existing expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods and methodologies at Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Glamorgan and Swansea Universities (see www.wiserd.ac.uk).
PY - 2010/9
Y1 - 2010/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/2160/8844
U2 - 10.1017/S1744552310000145
DO - 10.1017/S1744552310000145
M3 - Article
SN - 1744-5523
VL - 6
SP - 243
EP - 255
JO - International Journal of Law in Context
JF - International Journal of Law in Context
IS - 03
ER -