Spatializing critical education: progress and cautions

Abstract

Recently critical scholars have shown a renewed interest in spatial relations in educational contexts. In this essay we use selections from Gulson and Symes's edited volume Spatial theories of education as a point of departure to examine what spatial analysis can contribute to the critical education traditions. We argue that, when done thoughtfully, spatial theory can shed new light on existing and taken-for-granted social relations in education, though we raise cautions regarding particular forms of its application. In the process we connect the more recent attempts to ‘spatialize’ critical education to the ways in which space has been dealt with in past moments of critical work. Finally, we conclude by advocating for the expansion of the types of methodological tools used by critical theorists of spatial relations and of critical projects more broadly.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• methodology
• quantitative methods
• sociology of education
• space

Notes

1. We would like to thank the reviewer for insightful comments on our essay.

2. We would argue that primacy is still given to temporal relations, but socio-spatial relations are increasingly given explicit attention in social science research. In addition, as Massey (2005) and others have argued, space and time must be conceptualized as inter-related processes working together rather than in isolation. Thus, it is important to remember that spatial processes unfold in time and, conversely, that temporal processes occur within spatial arrangements.

3. This would be in contrast to the view noted by Gulson and Symes (2007b), drawing upon Massey (1992, 1994), that space has often been ‘written about as if it were an empty vessel within which action took place, or as an effect of social, political, and economic relations’ (p. 4).

4. Cited in Gulson, 2007, p. 40.

5. While this is certainly part of the process of challenging dominant modes of thought in a given field, the point here is that the motivation behind such strategies is not solely about status and positioning, although at times it will be (see Apple, 2010).

6. Elsewhere one of us has written in greater detail about the need for consistency between critical theories of education and the methodological tools we use to build upon them (see Ferrare, 2009).

7. For a detailed description of Social Network Analysis see Wasserman and Faust (1994). For a detailed description of Correspondence Analysis see Greenacre and Blasius (1994) and for Multidimensional Scaling see Kruskal and Wish (1978). Finally, for a more conceptual summary of these methodologies and their potential application in critical education research, see Ferrare (2009).

8. The late Pierre Bourdieu was a frequent user of correspondence analysis as a means to represent social spaces and the distances between actors and or categorical attributes in a given field of social relations.

9. Due to limitations in space we have not drawn upon each chapter in Spatial theories of education. This is regrettable since each of the chapters offers a unique perspective of the spatial lens. Nevertheless, we chose to focus on the chapters that provided the best ‘fit’ for the particular points we wished to make in this essay.