This forum examines the spatial dimensions of human experience, how spatial knowledge is produced, and the ways in which people and institutions represent space to realize visions of order. How do people interact with the spaces around them? How do they reach out to the wider world to shape it? How do their understandings of these spaces, in turn, shape them as individuals and as members of cultures and societies?
Here are just some of the ways we will explore how space shapes the production of knowledge and understandings of the world:
- Throughout human history, states have claimed spaces, asserting sovereignty, taking possession of territory, and regulating land and water to proclaim and expand their power.
- Race, class, gender, and sexuality are social categories that determine rules for mobility in and across spaces that range from the intimate and domestic to the regional and global.
- The study of warfare, law and justice, political action, and social conflict is inherently spatial.
- The map is a vital object through which we gain access to this process of conceptualizing, representing, and disseminating ideas about space.
- Mathematics emerged as a method of enquiry to make it possible to perceive terrestrial space at scales beyond human sensory.
- Every human culture explains its place in the universe through cosmology, and “space is our word for the vast dimensions of the universe beyond earth’s atmosphere.
- To study the human territoriality describes the conscious as well as the subconscious ways in which people understand their relationships to the world around them.
- The rise of instantaneous, low-cost interactions across “cyberspace” seem to challenge the distances that physical spaces once imposed and break down the hierarchies that once generated knowledge about places we could not easily see and experience for ourselves
The ramifications of space runs through the breadth of the Liberal Arts & Sciences. Energized by new computing tools for visualizing geospatial data, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, literary scholars, and historians of art, architecture, and landscape are undertaking pioneering new work. Astronomers, physicists, environmental scientists, geographers, and geologists have always conducted their research and expressed their findings in spatial terms. Whether examined through their material, ecological, political, or cultural aspects, the relationship between nature and society is fundamentally a spatial problem. The experience of travel, in all of its wonder and danger, is a bright thread that runs through literature, the visual arts, and music.
Instructors
Max Edelson, Associate Professor of History
My research focuses on the history of empire and mapping in the North America, the Caribbean, and beyond. My first book focused on the rise of plantation societies in colonial America. To understand the spread of plantation slavery in early South Carolina and Georgia, I studied agriculture, environment, and economy across the landscapes of the Lowcountry region. My new research explores how Great Britain mapped America in the generation before the American Revolution. To visualize hundreds of maps of North America and the Caribbean, I helped design and develop MapScholar, an online platform for geospatial history. I teach classes on early American history, digital humanities, and the history of maps and mapping, and I am developing a new courses on indigenous cartographies around the world.
Our Forum will be a place in which to think deeply about how space structures culture, society, and everyday life. We will explore how the mind grapples with navigation; how maps of all kinds connect individuals to households, communities, and nations; and, by doing so, hone a perspective on learning that begins from the idea of every individual is immersed in wider spaces that give life meaning.
Ricardo Padrón, Associate Professor of Spanish
As the child of an immigrant family (My mom, brother, and I are from Ecuador, and my dad was from Cuba), I grew up hearing stories about distant places and people, and learning to love them from afar. So as I got older, I developed a fascination with books (mostly fantasy and science fiction) that were good at creating convincing, immersive, alternative worlds. I became fascinated with the maps that often came with those books, and discovered that I could make my own stories by tracing their outlines and exploring the parts that did not figure much in the stories. It never occurred to me that maps could be something one could study seriously, but years later, I found myself in the library at Harvard University trying to figure out how to do just that. I had enrolled in the doctoral program in Romance Languages and Literatures determined to settle in to a particular intellectual discipline, something I had never been good at doing. Both of the degrees I had already earned, a BA in Political and Social Thought from U.Va. and an MA in Religious Studies from Chicago, were interdisciplinary in nature, and most people were telling me I would never get job as a professor if I continued to do interdisciplinary work. Yet that was the way my mind worked, so I dove into the emerging field of cartography and literature, exploring the ways that storytelling helps make sense out of space, and the way mapping tells stories.
Since then, most of my academic work has involved figuring out how speakers of Spanish conceptualized the world during what we used to call the Age of Exploration, the period of aggressive European expansion into the non-European world that spanned the years 1450 through 1650, more or less. My research has taken me to archives on three continents, where I have had the privilege of studying rare and beautiful maps, as well as the books and manuscripts that went with them. Most recently, I’ve gotten interested in the ways that Spaniards mapped the Pacific Ocean as a small, navigable basin that served to integrate America with Asia, rather than separate the two. This work has taken me to China, Japan, and the Philippines, places I never expected to visit a scholar in Hispanic studies. I look forward to helping participants in the forum think critically and creatively about some things that seem completely innocuous, but are not, space, place, and the maps we build to make sense of them.
Navigating the Forum
In the first semester (Fall ’17) you will enroll in FORU 1500: Introduction to Space, Knowledge, and Power. Team-taught by Max Edelson and Ricardo Padrón, the introductory course will cover historical and theoretical readings chosen to help you think about your world in spatial terms. We hope that you will take this experience into your other courses, and use it to shape what you study, rather than to participate passively in a pre-determined agenda.
Outside of the introductory course and capstone, you will take courses across five categories:
- Local Spaces
- Regional, national, Cultural Spaces
- Global Spaces
- Space, Power, and Justice
- Space, Science, and Math
The primary distinction between these categories is not discipline, but scale. We want you to think about different kings of spaces, so we have chosen to distribute our attention among local spaces (architecture, cities, global spaces (the world, through somne disciplinary lenses), and “in-between” scales. We have also identified an additional category, not around scale, but around issues of power and justice, which is central to any consideration of space in the humanities and social sciences today.
Finally, in your fourth semester (Spring, ’19), we will gather again to consider space as part of the Forum’s 3-credit Capstone.
Coursework
Core Required Courses (6 credits)
FORU 1500: Introduction to Space, Knowledge, and Power (Fall ’17)
FORU 2500: Capstone Seminar (Spring ’19)
Local Spaces (6 credits, 3 from each category)
Local Spaces (Category One)
AMST 3559 Indigenous Histories of Place
AMST 3559 Identity, Space, and Public Art
DRAM 1010 How Theatre Works
DRAM 2010 Theatre Art: Image to Form
HIEA 1559 Shanghai in Modern China
INST 1550 Housing and Urban Poverty
SOC 2950 The wire – Sociology through TV and Film
SOC 3470 Sociolgy of Development
SOC 3490 Cities and Cultures
ARTH 2372 Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Local spaces (Category Two)
ARCH 1010 Lessons of the Lawn
ARH 1010 History of Architecture I
ARH 1020 History of Architecture II
ARH 1700 Thomas Jefferson’s Architecture
ARH 2700 Thomas Jefferson adn American Architecture
ARH 2753 Arts & Cultures of the Slave South
ARH 3040 Metropolis
PLAN 1010 Introduction to Urban and Environmental Planning
PLAN 2020 Planning Design
PLAN 2110 Digital Visualization for Planners
PLAN 3860 Cities and Nature
Regions, Cultures, and Nations (6 credits, 3 from each category)
Regions, Cultures, and Nations (Category One)
AMST 3641 Native America
ANTH 1010 Introduction to Anthropology
ANTH 2120 The Concept of Culture
ANTH 2153 North American Indians
ANTH 2156 Peoples & Cultures of Africa
ANTH 2230 Fantasy & Social Values
ANTH 2410 Sociolinguistics
ANTH 2625 Imagining Africa
ANTH 2820 Emergence of States and Cities
ANTH 3340 Ecology and Society
ANTH 3370 Power and the Body
ARH 3802 Mondern Jpananese Architecture
HIAF 1501 Introductory Seminar in African History
HIAF 2002 Modern African History
HIAF 3112 African Environmental History
HIEA 1501 Introductory Seminar in East Asian history
HILA 1501 Introductory Seminar in Latin American History
HIME 1501 Introductory Seminar in Middle Eastern History
HISA 1501 Introductory Seminar in South Asia
HIUS 3011 Colonial Period in American History
HIUS 3651 Afro-American History since 1865
MDST 2660 The Internet is Another Country
RUTR 2470 Understanding Russia: Symbols, Myths, and Archetiyps of Identity
Regions, Cultures, and Nations (Category Two)
EAST 1010 East Asian Canons & Cultures
ENAM 3559 America and the Global South
ENMC 3559 Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Lit
ENLT 2514 The Western & The West
ENLT 2523 The Poetry of Exile
ENLT 2526 Migrant Fiction
ENLT 2530 The Universe of Black Fiction
ENLT 2555 Frontier Literature & Culture
GSGS 3115 Work, Women's Work and Womne Workers in South Asia
MDST 3405 New Latin American Cinema
MESA 1000 From Genghis Khan to Stalin: Invasions and Empires
MESA 2300 Crossing Borders: Middle East and South Asia
MESA 2700 Revolutions in the Islamic World
MESA 3110 Sustainable Enviornments Middle East and South Asia
MEST 2270 Culture and Society of the Contemporary Arab Middle East
MEST 2470 Reflections of Exile: Jewish Languages and the Communities
SAST 1300 Under the Colonized-Gaze
SAST 1600 India in Global Perspective
SAST 2010 Remembering India’s Partition through Literature and Poetry
SATR 2110 Cultural Translation: Travel Writing in South Asia
Global Spaces (3 Credits)
ANTH 1050 Anthropology of Globalization
ARCH 2150 Global Sustainability
ARTH 2851 World Art
ARH 3030 World Vernacular Architecture
ARH 3403 World Contemporary Architecture
MUSI 1070 Global Music
PLCP 1500 Global Development
EDLF 3470 Hip Hop History and Global Movements
ENGL 2559 Global Humanities
ENGL 3030 Global Cultural Studies
ENLT 2530 Globalization and World Literature
ENSP 2810 Women & media in the Global South
GDS 3030 Global Cultural Studies
GSVS 2150 Global Sustainability
HIAF 2031 The African Diaspora
HIST 1501 Gender in the Global South
HIST 2001 Many Worlds: A history of Humanity Before 1800
HIST 2002 The Modern World: Global History since 1760
HIST 2212 Maps in World History
HIST 2559 Hip-hop, History, Global Movement
GSVS 1559 Global Environments and Sustainability
MDST 3584 Global Cinema
PHS 2291 Global Culture and Public Health
RELC 2060 The Reform and Global Expansion of Christianity
RELG 2210 Religion, Ethics, and Global Development
RELC 2559 Global Evangelicalism
RELG 3820 Global Ethics and Climate Change
RELI 2080 Global Islam
SAST 2800 The World According to South Asia
SOC 2499 Globalization and Social Responsibility
SOC 3470 Sociology of Development
Space, Power, and Justice (3 Credits)
ANTH 2250 Nationlalism, Racism, Multiculturalism
GETR 3462 Neighbors and Enemies
GETR 3470 Literature of the Holocaust
GETR 3695 The Holocaust and the Law
MDST 3559 Screening Nature
PLAN 3811 Gender and the Built Environment
PLAP 2030 Politics, Science and Values: An introduction to Environmental Policy
RELC 2850 The Kingdom of God in America
RELG 2210 Religion, Ethics, and The Global Environment
RUTR 3340 Books Behind Bars: Life, Lit, and Community Leadership
SOC 2052 Sociology of the Family
SOC 2220 Social Problems
SOC 2230 Criminology
SOC 2320 Gender and Society
SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality
Space, Science, and Math (7 Credits – One course must have a lab)
Space, Science, and Math w/ Lab
CHEM 1420 Introductory College Chemistry II
EVSC 1010 Introduction to Environmental Science
EVSC 1020 Practical Concepts in Environmental Sciences
EVSC 2220 Conservation Ecology: Biodiversity and Beyond
EVSC 2221 Conservation Ecology Laboratory
EVSC 2800 Fundamentals of Geology
PHYS 1425 General Physics I: Mechanics, Thermodynamics
PHYS 2010 Principles of Physics
PHYS 2020 Principles of Physics II
Space, Science, and Math w/o Lab
ASTR 1210 Introduction to the Sky and Solar System
ASTR 2110 Introduction to Astrophysics I
ASTR 2120 Introduction to Astrophysics II
ASTR 3420 Live Beyond Earth
ASTR 3460 Development of Modern Astronomy
ASTR 3470 Science and Controversy in Astronomy
ASTR 3480 Introduction to Cosmology
EVSC 1010 Intro to Environmental Sciences
EVSC 1040 Virginia’s Environments
EVSC 1080 Resources and the Environment
EVSC 1200 Elements of Ecology
EVSC 1300 Earth’s Water and Climate
EVSC 1450 An Inconvenient Truce: Climate, You , and CO2
EVSC 1600 Water on Earth
EVSC 2010 Materials that Shape Civilization
EVSC 2030 POLITICS, Science, and Values: An Introduction to Environmental Policy
EVSC 2070 Earth Systems Technology & Management
EVSC 2200 Plants, People, and Culture
EVSC 2900 Beaches, Coasts, and Rivers
EVSC 3020 GIS Methods
MATH 1150 The Shape of Space
MATH 1210 Applied Calculus I
MATH 1220 Applied Calculus II
MATH 1310 Calculus I
MATH 1320 Calculus II