Locating Space and Place in History: Pedagogy and the Spatial Turn, Part 1: History and the Spatial Turn: Pedagogical Approaches, Part 1

AHA Session 245
Sunday, January 8, 2023: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Regency Ballroom C2 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Amanda Madden, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Panel:
Jason A. Heppler, University of Nebraska
Adam Sundberg, Creighton University
Rebecca Wingo, University of Cincinnati
Reese Whitely, University of Cincinnati

Session Abstract

This series of two connected roundtables brings together multiple approaches to spatial history, from GIS workshops to full courses to low-tech methods that engage with spatial thinking. Despite influential works that have centered space as an object of historical inquiry, including Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean World, Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of History, William Cronin’s Nature’s Metropolis, and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, space sine qua non has yet to become a larger focus and approach in the same way as global and environmental history with which the field shares similar approaches and research questions. Nor has the cultural production of space been explored as extensively in history as it has been in other fields. Yet, spatial thinking is central to how students and the public engage with history and is an important part of historical pedagogy.

Spatial history operates in a variety of ways: through studying the relationships between cultural, social, and political change, or how technology or changes to economies and policies create new spatial relationships. While sometimes understanding these changes means marshaling expertise in software, more often it means thinking about how historical documents can be transformed into datasets to help think about space in different ways. The results of such work are varied: from interactive storytelling through classroom exercises or community-academic partnerships, to the reconstruction of past landscapes though GIS maps, to more straightforwardly considering the role of space and place beyond cartography. The panel includes a variety of chronological, geographical, and digital approaches to spatial history, illustrating both the vibrancy of the field as well as its malleability for use in pedagogy, research, community engagement, and public history.

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