Course Title：Politics and Space

Where does politics take place? How are political spaces constituted? Are they always a priori fixed or a product of social interactions? How has the relationship between politics and space changed in the digital era? Is Offline-politics the same as Online-politics? Where exactly does Online-politics take place? Since the »spatial turn« in the 1980ies the notion space has gained much attention in western cultural and social science. The integration of post-Marxist, post-colonial and post-structural approaches has lead to a new understanding of space which is now seen as a product of social interaction (see Henri Lefebvre). In political science, especially in International Relations, however, many analyses still rely on a static definition of spatiality. The place of politics remains the nation-state. Even new challenges or crises such as the European refugee crises are often responded to with the use of traditional political instruments (for instance, the refocus on powers and borders of the nation-states within the EU). Furthermore, new spaces of political articulation in the digital sphere (like for example social media and networks) exit parallel to traditional spaces (city, states, international organization, etc.). In the long-term, this overlap also demands for a new definition of politics. In this seminar, we hence deal with the important relationship between politics and space. By recurring to central texts of political philosophy, we try to understand main features of the notions space and politics. In a second step, we analyze how these notions are used (and produced) in current affairs. We focus on different spatial scales – global, national, urban and digital.