Topic 10

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering geographic perspectives on social movements, spatial concepts (space, place, scale), urban contention, protest policing, and Hans Pruijt's typology of urban squatting configurations.

Spatial Turn (Geographic Turn)

An intellectual shift across the social sciences recognizing that social relations, contentious collective action, and power dynamics are inherently structured by, and enacted through, physical and nonphysical geographic context, space, place, and scale.

Abstract Space (Lefebvre)

In Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory, the externalization of economic and political practices originating with the capitalist class and the state, characterized by commodification, technocratic planning, and administrative control over everyday life.

Social Space (Concrete Space)

In Henri Lefebvre's theory, the space of use values produced and experienced by individuals and groups across classes in the concrete, everyday pursuit of social life.

Place

The specific human and physical characteristics of a geographic location that anchor localized social relations and serve as an experiential foundation for collective identity construction.

Scale

Defined by John Agnew as the focal setting at which spatial boundaries are defined for a specific social claim, activity, or behavior, organizing governance into territorial tiers such as local, national, regional, and global.

Freeganism

An anti-consumerist movement and alternative consumption strategy that combines urban foraging ('dumpster diving') with do-it-yourself ethics to live off capitalist waste, boycotting the monetized food economy.

Symbolic Inversion

A carnivalesque protest tactic wherein activists transgress place-specific spatial norms and dominant behavioral codes, demonstrating that prevailing social and spatial hierarchies can be denaturalized and reordered.

Closed Sociospatial Structures (Thompson)

Nonurban and suburban built environments that exert centrifugal force—dispersing populations and restricting diverse interactions—which fosters a dogmatic moral cognition style that predisposes individuals toward conservative political outlooks.

Dogmatic Moral Cognition

A cognitive style shaped by insular sociospatial socialization, marked by low tolerance for opposing viewpoints, defensive adherence to traditional community arrangements, anti-intellectualism, and support for punitiveness toward social difference.

Spatial Citizenship

Democratic contentious practice wherein citizens contest the uneven exclusions of neoliberalism by directly occupying and repurposing public physical spaces to demand socio-economic equality.

Settler Colonialism

An ongoing imperial structure of invasion and spatial occupation perpetrated by settler states (such as Canada and the USA) that continuously dispossesses indigenous populations to secure land for the settler majority.

Negotiated Management

A 'soft' protest policing style characterized by continuous communication between police and organizers, tolerance for peaceful community disruption, protection of free speech, and minimal reliance on physical force.

Strategic Incapacitation

A protest policing strategy employing pre-emptive mass arrests, non-lethal weapons, 'frozen' security zones, surveillance, and physical containment ('kettling') to neutralize potential disruption before it materializes.

Place Promotion (Mayer)

The competitive marketing and packaging of cities under neoliberal governance to attract international capital and tourism, requiring the systematic exclusion of 'undesirable' elements such as protestors and homeless populations from downtown event spaces.

Boomerang Effect

A strategic rescaling of contentious politics wherein domestic social movements, blocked by their national government, bypass domestic channels and appeal to international bodies like the United Nations to pressure the state from above.

Urban Squatting

The practice of living in or otherwise using an unoccupied building or dwelling without the consent of the legal property owner, with the intention of relatively long-term use.

Deprivation-Based Squatting

A top-down squatting configuration in which middle-class activists organize the occupation of regular low-income housing left inexcusably vacant by the state or church to shelter severely deprived, deserving families.

Squatting as an Alternative Housing Strategy

A horizontally self-organized squatting configuration in which participants solve their personal accommodation needs outside bureaucratic housing queues, targeting properties that do not compete with low-income housing stock.

Entrepreneurial Squatting

A squatting configuration dedicated to opening self-managed establishments—including social centres, cafes, band practice rooms, daycare centres, and artist workspaces—free from market rents and bureaucratic constraints.

Conservational Squatting

A tactical squatting configuration used by middle-class preservationists, students, and tenants to defend historic cityscapes, buildings, or rural landscapes against efficiency-driven urban transformation and gentrification.

Political Squatting

A militant, top-down squatting configuration driven by an ulterior anti-systemic agenda, utilizing occupied properties as fortified focal points to establish counter-power and provoke direct confrontation with the state.

resource mobilisation theory

focuses on networks and organisations but ignores differing geographies of recruitment e.g. localised institutions in San Francisco such as gay bars and neighbourhood areas for allowed the mobilisation of the gay community