Participants

Nick Baron²; Jennifer Keating⁴; Alun Thomas³; Catherine Gibson¹;  ¹ University of Tartu, Estonia;  ² The University of Nottingham, UK;  ³ Staffordshire University, UK;  ⁴ University College Dublin, Ireland

Discussion

The new spatial history, as a field or focus of study delineated in an influential review article by Baron (2007), is concerned ‘to engage critically with the interaction of human agency and space, and with the mediating role of culturally-defined spatial practices and spatially-configured cultural practices.' It goes beyond conventional accounts of space as material setting, mental framework, or discursive construct, directing attention instead to the inter-relations and inter-mediations between ‘conceptualised and physical space’.

Scholarship in the new spatial history has flourished in the last two decades, offering rich insights into a myriad themes and issues in Central and East European and Eurasian history at and across different scales: transnational ideologies and identities; the politics of borders, territories and populations; the creation and regulation of geographical imaginaries; and the conception and experience of more intimate, local, and everyday places and environments.

In particular, there’s been a burgeoning of work on environmental history, much of it focussing on the cultural forms and social-economic processes that shape landscapes and ecosystems; on regionalism, centre-local relations, and ‘indigenous’ or ‘peripheral histories’; on transnationalism or transregionalism as idea and practice; on urbanism and the built environment, in terms of the visions and practices of planners and architects and of lived experience; and on how places have been conceived, construed, felt, lived, and remembered, sometimes drawing on ethnographic or oral history methods, and integrating accounts of contingent spatiality with considerations of time and temporality.

In this roundtable, four established practitioners of the new spatial history reflect on the extent to which this approach still holds historiographical and methodological relevance and potential in the present era of profound disruption, crisis, and anxiety. Does this way of conceiving and understanding the past still help us engage, productively and with integrity, with problems of the present and future? Or do we need to go beyond existing intellectual frameworks to explore alternative ways of engaging with space and place in the context of Eurasian historical studies? 

The roundtable participants and chair will make brief interventions, drawing on their own interdisciplinary research expertise and practice, but a substantial part of the session will reserved for audience discussion and debate.