13 G eohumanities: E ngaging Space and Place

in the H umanities
Trevor M. Harris

I ntroduction
In very recent years the term “geohumanities” has been used to capture a
number of engagements,primarily between geographers and humanities
scholars, focused on a rethinking and reestablishment of space in
humanities disciplines: what has become known as the “spatial turn.” The
release of GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text At the Edge of Place (Dear et
al., 2011) and its companion volume, Envisioning Landscapes, Making
Worlds: Geography and the Humanities (Daniels et al., 2011) has brought
to the forefront a number of these ongoing engagements,initiatives, and
projects interfacing geographywith a variety of humanitiesdisciplines. The
book GeoHumanities captures a number of these engagements,where the
intellectual and artistic interactions between geography’s focus on space
and place are interwoven with scholarship in the humanities. The
antecedenceof the conjunctive term “geohumanities” would at first glance
suggest its usage is long established, yet in reality even Google Trends
denotes only very recent usage largely associated with the release of the
textbook of that name. While Richardson et al. (2011, 3) suggest the term
“geohumanities” captures the “fortuitous convergence of this intellectual
traffic … [and] distinctive scholarly terrain and emerging zone of practice,”
in reality at this point it represents more a polyglot of fascinating projects
and research endeavors teasing away at the spatial interface between
geographyand the humanities.As the editors suggest,traditional disciplines
in geography and the humanities are “being actively breached by a
profusion of intellectually and artistically challenging scholarship and
practice, itself propelled by social, technological, and political change”
(ibid., 3). As discussed later, a number of other related fields, including the
spatial humanities, historical GIS, and spatial history, are pursuing similar
themes. These spatial engagements,interjections, and short interventions
into humanities disciplines range from history to art and drama, yet all
intrinsically foreground geographical concepts of space and place.
The spatial turn in the humanities lies at the core of these
transdisciplinary intersections between a humanities versed in
multivocality, intertextuality, and contingency, with space and place as
understoodthrough geographiesembeddedin science, social science, and
humanism. The conceptual convergence of geography and space with the
humanities has produced an eclectic mix of methodologies and a
kaleidoscopeof intellectual and artistic outputs.At first glance these studies
suggest more a field of praxis than one built around a core theoretical or
conceptual base: it is what geohumanities scholars are doing that defines the
field through “examples of unfettered practice” (ibid., 4). However,
geohumanitiestracks the manifestation of the spatial turn through these
multi-faceted engagements. The humanities have long been at risk of
treating space, the backdrop to all human behavior and events, as a neutral
spatial vacuum and a seemingisotropic settingto humanaffairs. In contrast,
the spatial turn reinserts space as an active participantin human events and
behavior. This chapter unravels the cross-disciplinary spatial convergence
and engagements between the spatial perspective and the humanities.

G eohumanities: F acets of E ngagement

Engagements between geography and the humanities are not new and
extend back into the origins of geography and many other scholastic
humanisttraditions. In more moderntimes, the early proponentsof cultural
geography, historical geography, and landscape interpretationlong predate
these more recent geohumanitiesengagements(Sauer, 1925; Darby, 2002;
Hoskins, 1955; Baker, 2003). As Richardson et al. (2011) point out, the
intent of geohumanities is to build on the legacies of these respective
disciplines and not to profess a new and radical break; “an exercise in
becoming” and an experiment and invitation to explore the diverse practices
of place making (ibid., 4). The vignettes portrayed in the text represent
work in architecture, art, activism, and writing, and are “rooted in
conventional disciplinary heritages.” Yet the intent is also to encompass a
significantly wider, if not radical, explanation of the production and
meaning of space and place. Thus while geohumanities suggests an
evolutionary trajectory in this discourse, in reality the underlying critique
and concepts of the spatial turn of the past two decades represent a
significant and growing awareness that geographyprovides more than just a
passive backdrop to human af fairs.
In conjunction with the rise of geohumanities, other avenues of
investigation track similar aspects of this engagementand include the
spatial humanities, historical GIS, humanitiesGIS, spatial history, and geo-
literary studies. Geohumanities is thus part of a broader realization that
space and place, long-held constructs of geography, play a critical and
central role in people’s lives and human behavior. The spatial turn in the
humanities represents a rebalancing of historicism and the spatial, which
had been diverted into a largely passive and descriptive role as history’s
“stage” (Mitchell, 2011, 71). Geohumanities and related fields representa
series of engagements that capture and reflect the resurgence of an
intellectual engagementfocused on the interplay between geography and
the humanities. Core to these engagements is the spatial turn.

T he Spatial Tur n
The spatial turn in the humanities, as with many other turns in the
humanities, is a retrospective on the direction of academic discourse; an
inflection point in the course of academic scholarship and a reassessmentof
the paths taken. As Guldi (2013) suggests, it is “a backwards glance at the
reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here.” This
retrospection in the humanities was arguably spurred by two unlikely
bedfellows, social theory and spatial science in the form of GIS. At the
heart of the spatial turn is a philosophical argument about the need to
rebalanceacademic discourse from its overbearingemphasis on historicism
toward a more balanced perspective in which the importance of space,
which had been relegatedand marginalized to the backwatersof humanities
scholarship, is both acknowledged and re-injected into the discourse. Most
humanistshave adopteda chronological research framework, with cause of
intent marching in a linear sequenceof events divorced from their spatial
context (Bodenhamer et al., 2010). While humanists are conversant with
space as metaphor or concept, such as gendered space and the body as
space, the broaderrole that geographical space plays in cultural and human
behavior has fallen prey to the focus on time as the determining factor in
human affairs. Space was largely treated as empirical, inert, frozen, and
devoid of social origins or implications (Arias, 2010). Mitchell (2011)
ascribes the origins of historicism to the time of the Enlightenmentand the
rise of science and the very origins of the disciplines of geography and
history as separateand distinct fields of enquiry, where history was related
to time and narration and “actively becoming,” and geography to
description and space and a “passive being.” Warf and A rias (2009)
additionally see the loss of a recognized understandingof space in the rise
of environmental determinism and the collapse of global space into a
Europe-centric imperial core, where developmentand temporal progress
were equated with distance from that core.
Lefebvre (1991) and Foucault (1980) in particular have soughtto reinsert
space into modern social theory and redress what Soja (1989, 10) calls the
“obsession with history.” As Foucault (1980, 70) describes it, “Space was
treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialetical, the immobile. Time on the
contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.” Soja (1989, 10–11), in his
powerful writings, suggests: “So unbudgeably hegemonic has been this
historicism of theoretical consciousness that it has tended to occlude a
comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life, a practical
theoreticalconsciousness that sees the life world of being creatively located
not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human
geographies,the social productionof space and the restless formation and
reformation of geographicallandscapes: social being actively emplaced in
space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical
contextualization.”
It is thus on theorists such as Lefebvre, Foucault, Y i-Fu Tuan (1974,
2001), de Certeau (1988), Harvey (1989), Massey (2005), Cosgrove (1998),
and Soja (1989), amongmany others, that the basis for the Spatial Turn and
the call for a renewal of the study of space and spatiality in the humanities
has been based. These writers emphasized the power relations implicit in
space and argued that space and place are not given but are socially
constructed and represent an important, if not critical, dimension to
humanistic enquiry and understandingthe human condition. As Warf and
Arias (2009, 9) forcefully put it: “geography matters, not for the simplistic
and overly used reason that everythinghappensin space, but becausewhere
things happenis critical to knowing how and why they happen.” The spatial
turn calls for a critical revaluation of space and spatiality across disciplines
whereby space is no longer inferior or subordinateto time or the social but
where social theory is part of, and contingenton, a triad of all three: space,
time, and social being (Soja, 1989). Space is thus a window permitting
insight into what separates and unifies; “the difference that space
makes”—“the space that difference makes” (Sayer, 2000, 109, 123). Space
is not an afterthoughtbut is intimately involved in the creation of social
relations.

H istor y as a M ap of the Past

Many historians have recognizedthat the decouplingof space and time has
contributed to an impoverished history (Gaddis, 2002; Bender, 2007).
While Gaddis recognized the importance of space in history through his
description of the past as a landscape fashioned by history, it is Ethington
(2007) who perhaps best embraces Foucault’s spatial metaphors of
cartography and the reinsertion of space into history when he argued for
moving from a stratified layering of time to a layered space–time. As he
eloquentlyargues, “The past cannot exist ‘in’ time, becausetime cannot be
any sort of frame within which anything can exist. By western definitions,
time is something other than space, and yet it is incessantly portrayed as
something spatial: as a line, a frame, a background, a landscape, and as
having orientation …. for the past can only exist in space” (Ethington,
2007, 465–466). In history, being in the present quickly becomes the past
and histories that representthe past representthe places (topoi) of human
action. History, Ethington argues, “is not an account of ‘change over time’
… but rather, change through space. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is
literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the
coordinatesof spacetime” (ibid., 466). Here then is a clear exposition of the
centrality of space in humanaction whereby the past is a set of places made
and remade by humanaction. History is a map of these places with multiple
scales and simultaneous yet inharmonious rhythms, and distinct from
chronology and chronometry with their confusing allusions of stability,
consensus, and unproblematicassumptions(ibid., 470). This accords well
with Lefebvre’s (1996, 16) perspective that space makes time and time
makes place: “place is but the ‘inscription of time in the world.’” In this
form, one can never observe time but rather can only experience time as
motion and movementin space. The past representsa spatial understanding
of phenomena in motion and the “‘future’ is nothing more than the next
emplacementof the bodies of the world, leaving behind the places of the
past (passed) with every new configuration of presence” (Ethington, 2007,
478).
Ethington takes this line of reasoning even further to provide a holistic
joining of space and time where historical writings should be thought of as
a map, “because the past can only be known by placing it, and the way of
knowing places is to map them” (ibid., 486). “T opoi touch the ground in
myriad ways. They are not in time; they are in space. They can only be
discovered, interpreted, and debated via the coordinates of spacetime.”
Therefore, declares Ethington, history is cartography, for knowing the topoi
of history is to map the human past (ibid., 485).
Ethington’s thesis of the unavoidable emplacementof human life is a
powerful critique on postmodernhistoricism that has heretofore been the
mainstay of history, and he provides a forceful spatial–temporalconceptual
foundationthat reunites a previously separatedhistory and geographyinto a
holistic vision. A number of scholars have critiqued such a vision,
suggestingthat the historian’s rejection of the spatial is overstated and that
the cartographic metaphor unnecessarily limits the role of language and
narrative as a form of discourse and is merely anotherform of storytelling;
“Scientists dependon their instrumentsand mathematicsto explain reality,
historians depend on language. We read and write our topoi with all the
potentialfor misunderstandingand multiple meaningthese activities entail,
and only then can space be said to speak to us” (Dimendberg, 2007, 516).
Nonetheless, even these critics acknowledge that spatiality is rapidly
challenging the hegemony of temporality in history
.

G I S and the Spatial Tur n

While the spatial turn in the humanities has largely been propelled by the
writings of social theorists, geospatial technologies (and especially GIS)
have also motivated geographers and humanities scholars to explore
spatiality. GIS provides a powerful digital technology with its integrative
spatial data capabilities and ability to portray and share geographies through
its mapping and visualization competencies.The eye is a powerful image
processor and able to rapidly interpret complex spatial patternsthat would
be difficult, if not near impossible, to describe through other narrative
means. Furthermore, complex spatial patternscan be displayed in a single
map, and the old admonition that a picture is worth a thousand words comes
immediately to mind. The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative was an early
forum for humanities scholars to explore the power of GIS to map historical
themesand detectspatial relationships (Buckland and Lancaster, 2004). As
Lancaster observed, mappingthe residencesof early Korean poets and their
predilection to locations on the eastern seaboard of the Korean peninsula
posed immediate questions as to the reasoning behind such locational
decision making. Maps have an objective, authoritative, and reductionist
allure, despite their subjective social constructions, but they are also
functional, effective, and powerful representations.Maps are a powerful
medium and text is often ill suited to represent the higher order
dimensionality of spatial data. In addition to GIS, a veritable cornucopiaof
Web 2.0 geospatial tools including the geospatial web, neogeography ,
mashups, online mapping and virtual globes, geovisualization, geotagged
social media and technologies, and crowdsourced volunteeredgeographic
information are now available to produce, store, access, map, and represent
spatial data: essentially, to use location, space, and geospatial technologies
to provide a powerful means to reference subject matter and explore spatial
and social relations.
 Thus GIS provides a powerful mapping platform that appeals to some
historians, historical geographers,and other digital humanists interestedin
analyzing vast quantities of digital spatial data and mapping effective
graphical representations.GIS enables space to be a powerful integrating
theme, facilitating multiple scaled explorations of relationships by virtue of
their common location and in ways that text cannot. The coupling of
geographyand history in the form of historical GIS (Knowles, 2002, 2005,
2008; Gregory, 2003, 2005; Gregory and Healey, 2007; Gregory and Ell,
2008), visual history, and spatial history (White, 2010) have produced
notable advances in the spatial analysis of historical data. At a practical
level, the power of GIS is well suited to inventory, manage, and map
immense quantities of spatial historical data and has contributed
substantially to social science historians embracingGIS in their analysis of
large historical datasets. GIS has also contributed to humanists
rediscovering the power of the map. As Rumsey (2009, 3) writes of
geospatial technologies in the humanities, “… there is an unexplored
universe of spatial information implicit in existing sources, both digital and
analog. When ‘liberated’ from a static analog medium and made legible to
geospatial technologies, a whole new reservoir of information will be
available to nourish new fields of inquiry.”
However, a GIS-based perspective on the humanities raises several
concerns, some of which are pursued in the later section on the spatial
humanities. One concern is the tendencyto separateand disembody spatial
analytical geographies from the mixed methods approaches of social,
cultural, and political geographies (Sui and DeLyser, 2011). A second
concern is the imperative to look beyond the perceived “button-pushing”
aspects of GIS and to embedspatial thinking and spatial conceptsinto these
analyses (Goodchild and Janelle, 2010; Logan et al., 2010). While spatial
analysis and map creation are outward expressions and products of spatial
understanding,these must be underpinnedby critical spatial thinking and an
understanding of spatial concepts involving scale, respatialization, accuracy
,
uncertainty, ontology, representation,and complexity. One would expect,
for example, that practitioners of spatial analysis would understand the
concepts that underlie the techniques used, and qualify their findings
accordingly. Concern about spatial intelligence is rooted in the seeming
assumption that spatial thinking is an innate skill, not a taught one.
Certainly spatial thinking has not received the same level of interest as
reading, writing, computing,or communication(ibid., 2010, 3). In line with
the notions of the spatial turn, spatial truths in spatial information science
are not universal but vary and change across space based on spatial
heterogeneity , spatial autocorrelation,and spatial dependence.Constructing
a map in GIS and building understandings of causality and inference
through the incorporation of space necessarily demands critical spatial
thinking in the form of spatial concepts, tools of representation,and spatial
processes of reasoning (ibid.).

T he Spatial H umanities
The spatial humanities represent both a critical theoretical engagement
betweengeography and the humanities centered on the spatial turn and a
methodologicalengagementprimarily involving GIS, but in reality drawing
upon a variety of geospatial technologies ranging from visualization to
immersive geographies (Harris et al., 2011). This tight coupling of the
conceptualthemes of the spatial turn with GIS has contributedto the term
“spatial humanities” becoming a more widely accepted term to describe
such linkages (Bodenhamer et al., 2010). Applying GIS in the humanities,
in the light of the earlier discussion on social theory and humanist
traditions, would appear oxymoronic and antithetical to most humanists
(and spatial science communities), for GIS and humanities disciplines rest
on fundamentally differing epistemological foundations. T here is an
apparentmismatch betweengeospatialscience and the humanisttradition of
weaving a multivalent construction of nuanced emphasis and pluralistic
methods.While GIS has seen considerablesuccess in the physical sciences
and in spatially integratedsocial science (Goodchild and Janelle, 2004), its
usage in the humanities—withthe exception of historical GIS, which has
drawn on the spatial analytic strengths of GIS—has lagged behind these
early adoptersand uptake has been somewhatdisparate, uncoordinated,and
largely project-driven.
As Morgan and Firth suggest(2010), theories do not stand apart from the
people who produce them, for they are human projects and reflect the
conditionsunder which they are produced.While many humanistsmight be
familiar with the capability of GIS to create maps, the full exploitation of
geospatial technologies in the humanities has remained limited, for
humanists must largely fit their questions, data, and methods to the rigid
parametersof the software, rather than the technologybendingto the will of
the humanities (Bodenhamer et al., 2010). The core of this tension stems
from the positivist and spatial science traditions of GIS, which is often at
odds with humanist traditions. GIS, as a tool of the sciences and social
sciences, demands precision and accuracy, built as it is on spatial
primitives, entities, fields, objects, geometric topology, accuracy,
measurement,categorization, and Euclidian coordinate space. As a digital
abstraction of reality, GIS privileges certain types of data, information,
representations, logic systems, and ways of knowing over others.
Incomplete data, silences in the data, and structural knowledge distortion
pose significant challenges to users of GIS in the humanities particularly,
and perhapsironically, becauseof the spatial determinantin GI S (Harris et
al., 2010b, 170). GIS, as with other digital environments,emphasizes non-
linear modes of expression and analysis, of which the World Wide Web is a
great example, whereas the humanities tend to express ideas in a linear
format characterizedby storytelling and linear narrative. Merging these two
traditions is challenging, not least because the humanities pursue multiple
and equivocal perspectives on topics and are at pains to retain the ambiguity
and preemptiveresolution of issues that characterize the sciences and social
sciences. This ambiguity is anathema to GIS. Incorporating and accessing
qualitative information such as text, oral history, photographs,paintings,
moving images, and sketches is less easily accomplished in GIS.
This clash of scholastic cultures is not new to either knowledge
paradigm, and yet has obvious and far-ranging implications for any
discussion of a GIS-inspired spatial humanities. It is too simplistic to speak
in terms of a qualitative-orientedhumanismand a quantitativeGIS, yet the
contrasting emphases on conceptual mapping rather than cartographic
mapping represent significant challenges to the development of a
humanistic GIS . GIS privileges spatial analysis, reductionism, and
disambiguationin its organizationof knowledge.In contrast, the humanities
treat knowledge as multivalent, equivocal, and proteanand are focused on
issues of place that include the symbolic, the emotional, and the many
meanings associated with place (Harris et al., 2010a). In recognizing the
importance of these issues, spatial humanities draws on an important
higher-level conversation betweenhumanities and geographic information
science, rather than with GIS as a system and as a spatial tool kit—with the
nuts and bolts of space. For the geospatial humanities dialog to prosper, it
must be more than method-basedand requires a reconceptualizationand
recalibration of the humanities–GIS interface as part of a higher level
conceptual engagement between the humanities and Geographic
Information Science and geography as a whole rather than simply with GIS
as system.
The socio-theoretic critique of GIS in the 1990s in the form of the GIS
and Society and Critical GIS discourses questioned the assumptions
embeddedin GIS in its representation of society and nature and clearly
resonates with the humanist-scientific method encounter (Pickles, 1995;
Aitken and Michel, 1995; Weiner and Harris, 2007). This intellectual
engagement has both led to a critical assessment of the assumptions
embeddedin spatial technologies and pushed the field in new directions,
such as participatoryGIS (Craig et al., 2002) and qualitative GIS (Cope and
Elwood, 2010), where the focus on mixed spatial methods and the
incorporation of community information in qualitative and diverse forms
should resonate considerably with humanities scholars. There is a need
therefore to critically engage geospatial technologies in ways that are
sensitive to the subject matterand needsof the humanitiesand that will lead
to new agendas which will shape both the technology and humanities
scholarship to create richer multidisciplinary collaborations within the
humanities. In this context, recent attemptsin GIS to explore the spatiality
of latent place-rich geographies embedded in text and primary archive
material (Kwan and Ding, 2008; Yuan, 2010; Cooper and Gregory, 2009,
2011; Harris et al., 2010) are one example of GISci developing tools
specifically tailored to the needs of the humanities. The linking of
phenomenologyto GIS through serious gaming engines and 3D modeling
in immersive environmentsrepresents a further advancement(Harris et al.,
2011). A similar recent initiative involves deep mapping.
Deep M apping and Spatial Stor ytelling
In adapting GIS to the humanities with its emphasis on storytelling, place,
deep contingency, and thick description, recent studies have focused on
developing concepts of deep mapping and spatial narratives (Bodenhamer
et al., 2015). Deep mappingprovides a conceptualthemethat seeks to shift
GIS from its dominant view of humans as entities and data points to an
examination of behavior, the material and the imaginary world, and the
relationships comprised in a nuanced, non-reductionist, and scaled
conception of place (Harris, 2015). Spatial storytelling and spatial
narratives provide rich connotations and attachmentsto the humanities’
storied-narrative style, and deep mapping equally links place and place-
making to humanistic examinations of deep contingency. Traditional maps
tend to be dominated by physical features and the bureaucraticmappingof
infrastructure, places of population, and a host of other features traditionally
found on a topographic map sheet. These cartographic representations are
steepedin an extensive praxis of design, aesthetics,science, and technology
that seeks to model reality and communicate that information to an
audience. These cartographic products are characterized by a focus and
concern for precision and accuracy. Harris (2015) has conceived these maps
as “thin maps:” created, designed,developed,and maintainedby experts to
meet specific governmentalor corporateneeds, and heavily focused on the
material and physical characteristics of landscape and society. The term
“thin map” is used to describe these map products rather than “shallow”
map, the antonym to deep map, to avoid implications of shallowness,
superficiality, or inconsequentiality, of which there is abundantevidence to
suggestotherwise. These thin maps have formed the backboneof GIS, have
drawn heavily on spatial data infrastructures, and have proven invaluable in
numerous areas of government, business, environment, and community
applications.
Deep maps in contrast are heavily narrative-based and interlace
autobiography , art, folklore, stories, and memory with the physical form of
a place to “record and represent the grain and patina of a location …
[throughthe] ... juxtapositionsand interpenetrationsof the historical and the
contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the
discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology,
memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to
say about a place” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 64–65).
Deep maps seek to speak to the contingentnature of cultural processes
(Bodenhamer et al., 2015). GIS has difficulty handling deep contingency
and thick description. Places defined through fine-grain studies are
important contributions to lar
ger scale processes because they are connected
throughdeep contingencythat fuses place and time, whereby structures are
articulated to other structures in a cascading, spiraling rupture of local
social processes in responseto structural transformationsof power at other
scales (Ayers, 2010). Deep mapping is one way to see deep contingency and
the rippling of place-basedevents across time and space. The focus in deep
mappingis less on causation than on interpretingthe consequencesand the
resonancesof events evidencedthroughthe intersectionof place, time, and
event—wheregeo-codedsingular events and larger patternsintersect across
time and space in a collage of moments(Harris et al., 2010a). This deeply
layered interpretive history draws heavily on space and place as an
organizing framework to understandthe world, and yet challengesGIS as to
how this might be achieved. A number of approacheshave been proposed
to achieve deep maps, including qualitative GIS, ethnography , virtual
environments,story-boarding,neogeographyand its componentparts of the
geospatial web, participatory GIS, and volunteered geographic information.
The conceptual origin of deep maps stems from the short-lived
Situationist International (Knabb, 2006) and the “thick description” of
William Least Heat-Moon (1999). A counterpart in geography is Y i Fu
Tuan (1974), who proposedexploring the connectednessand ties between
human emotion and the physical fabric of landscape. These concepts of
deep contingency and deep mappinggo beyond the traditional backbone of
GIS mappingand point to new realms for pursuing phenomenologyin GIS
and representing emotion and experience. Deep mapping moves from the
GIS world of observationand measurementto one of habitation,where the
material world is experiencedthrough embodimentand the sense of “being
in the world.” Non-representational theory and the concepts of deep
contingency, deep mapping, taskscapes and affordances, and thick
descriptionenablescholars to engagethe material world rather than observe
it, and interrelate theories of practice and agency and how people both
create their material world and, in turn, are created by it. This linking of
critical geographies, postmodern humanities, and GISci creates a fresh
conceptualizationof a humanities GIS that is recursive, multilayered, non-
authoritative,non-objective, negotiated; is framed as a conversation and not
as a statement; is inherently unstable; and is continually unfolding and
changing in response to new data, new perspectives, and new insights
(Bodenhamer et al., forthcoming). It is a way to pursue a reflexive
epistemologythat is place-basedand capable of integratingmultiple voices
and views based on a GIS that is sensitive to the needs of humanities
scholars.

C onclusion: Space, Place, and the H umanities

The spatial turn lies at the heart of many recent engagementsbetweenon
the one hand, geographerswith their focus on space and place, and on the
other, the humanities. Whether geohumanities, the spatial humanities,
historical GIS, or spatial history, these spatial engagementsare ongoing and
the responsehas been uneven across disciplines: “Space … comes to have
multiple, sometimes contradictory, layers of meaning: the spatial turn
speaks with more than one voice” (Arias 2010, 31). The spatial turn
represents an intellectual engagement with the goal of reshaping the
interface between the humanitiesand the spatial. Soja (1989) contendsthat
the spatial turn has the potential to be one of the most significant
intellectual and political developmentsof the twenty-first century. While
Fish (2011) sees the horizontal layered spatial reality of complex
relationships as the beginnings of a new discipline, rather than the
(re)joining of space and time, and the “T riumph of the Humanities” in the
theory wars where “nearly everyone now dances to their tune,” this dualism
perhaps stands in the way of the spatial turn, where the unifying theme of
space is no longer an inert, neutral, or given entity, but rather provides a
framework for scholars to reconsider spatiality and enable lateral mappings.
As A rias suggests (2010, 30), “At a moment when cultural studies and
interdisciplinary approaches are at the forefront of so many agendas, the
analysis of space and spatiality has strengthenedscholarship, built bridges,
stimulateddebates,and provided a more effective and holistic engagement
with issues of social and political relevance.” As a result, the geohumanities
could become pivotal in understanding space and place in a humanistic
world of contingent ideas, discourse, and meaning.

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