Pedagogy, Culture and Society

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Critical pedagogy: the spaces that make the

difference

John Morgan

To cite this article: John Morgan (2000) Critical pedagogy: the spaces that make the difference,
Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 8:3, 273-289, DOI: 10.1080/14681360000200099

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Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Volume 8, Number 3, 2000

Critical Pedagogy: the spaces

that make the difference

JOHN MORGAN
Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT The recent literature of critical pedagogy has been rich in spatial
references and metaphors. Indeed, McLaren (1999) recently called for the
development of a ‘critical pedagogy of space’. This article considers the
implications of space for critical pedagogy. Drawing on recent debates
about space in the geographical and sociological literature, it suggests that
space must be seen as social construction. As such, space is involved in the
production and reproduction of social relationships, and is linked to
political struggles of inclusion and exclusion. The article suggests that
space should not be seen simply as the product of capitalist social
relationships, but is tied up with other axes of power, such as gender,
ethnicity and sexuality. The challenge is to develop a critical pedagogy of
space that reflects the multiple and contested nature of space.

Introduction

Critical pedagogy needs to move into the direction of challenging new

carceral systems of social control through the development of a
critical pedagogy of space. Following the lead of critical urban
geographers such as Edward Soja, critical pedagogy should be
encouraged to explore the spatiality of human life and couple this with
its historicality-sociality, especially the genderizing and racializing of
rural and urban cityscapes through the trialectics of space, knowledge
and power. (McLaren, 1999, p. 454)
This article takes as its starting point Peter McLaren’s (1999) call for the
development of a ‘critical pedagogy of space’. The recent literature of
critical pedagogy has been rich in spatial references and metaphors.
There is talk of a ‘border pedagogy’ (Giroux, 1992), pedagogy being
‘between borders’ (Giroux & MacLaren, 1994), and a concern with the
politics of ‘location’ and the ‘margins’, as well as with the ‘spaces of
education’ (Grossberg, 1994). This use of spatial imagery is in line with

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developments in wider social and cultural theory. However, as a

geography educator who has tried to keep abreast of the literature of
critical pedagogy, this ‘spatial turn’ is both welcoming and worrying.
Whilst it is exciting to see space afforded importance in these debates, it
is tempting to worry, with Massey (1993), that this proliferation of spatial
metaphors has blurred the distinctions between different meanings of
space. It is therefore of great interest when McLaren explicitly calls for a
‘critical pedagogy of space’ and, in a footnote, references two leading
geographers – Edward Soja and David Harvey. This article seeks to take
up this challenge and offers a preliminary discussion of the difference
that space might make to the project of critical pedagogy.
In what follows, I introduce the idea of critical pedagogy before
going on to discuss the ‘spatial turn’ in social science generally and
geography in particular. I note the difference between concepts of space
in school geography and academic geography. The article discusses the
implications of seeing space as socially constructed, multiple and
contested for the development of a critical pedagogy of space. Though
the examples I use are taken from the geographical literature, this should
not prevent analysis of a ‘critical pedagogy of space’ from the
perspectives of other disciplines.

Critical Pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is the general name given to the theoretical
perspectives developed by writers such as Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux
and their associates. McLaren (1999) describes critical pedagogy as a
‘way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationship
among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional
structures of the school, and the social and material relationships of the
wider community, society, and nation-state’ (p. 454). Critical pedagogy is
what happens when critical theory meets education. It draws widely on
liberation theology, Freirian pedagogy, the sociology of knowledge, the
Frankfurt school of critical theory, feminist theory, neo-Marxist cultural
criticism and, more recently, postmodern social theory.
Critical pedagogy sees schooling as a form of cultural politics, since
schooling always involves an introduction to, preparation for and
legitimisation of, certain ways of seeing and behaving in the world.
Schooling always involves power relationships and the privileging of
certain forms of knowledge. Invariably, these forms of knowledge serve to
reproduce social inequalities linked to racism, sexism, class
discrimination and ethnocentrism. Critical pedagogy involves recognising
how existing curriculum, resources and approaches to teaching offer
students a perspective on the world that serves to marginalise certain
voices and ways of life. The task of critical pedagogy is for teachers and
students to make explicit the socially constructed character of

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knowledge, and ask whose interests particular ‘knowledges’ serve. Armed

with such awareness, students and teachers should be able to challenge
unequal and undemocratic structures (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Giroux,
1992, 1994, 1996; McLaren, 1995, 1999).
Critical pedagogy has been criticised in recent years for its attempts
to synthesise a whole range of diverse political projects into one over-
arching ‘master discourse’, its failure to develop a viable form of
educational practice, and its failure to deal adequately with questions of
power and authority (Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993; Buckingham, 1996,
1998). Indeed, critical pedagogy must be seen as largely a product of
United States universities and its theoretical language does not rest easily
with other contexts, such as Britain, where there is a history of more
‘local’ (i.e. subject-based) struggles over pedagogy. Buckingham (1998,
p. 7) considers that:
Despite their apparent address to teachers, the critical pedagogues
have consistently refused to consider the ways in which their
theoretical perspectives might be implemented, or to clarify their
notoriously opaque style of writing ...
As a teacher I have much sympathy for Buckingham’s position, as it is
often difficult to reconcile the emancipatory claims of the critical
pedagogy literature with the day-to-day reality of working in institutions
that appear to work in the opposite direction. However, I would argue
that critical pedagogy does provide a set of ideas with which teachers
can work to explore new pedagogical possibilities, and it is in this vein
that this article works. The literature of critical pedagogy provides a
resource with which to interrogate existing educational practices. This is
the value of some of the more ‘practical’ works of critical pedagogy that
provide examples of how teachers have attempted to develop critical
pedagogies in their classrooms (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998; Steinberg &
Kincheloe, 1998). They provide examples to be rejected, modified or
attempted in new contexts. Indeed, Macedo (1994) argues that a critical
pedagogy is always an ‘anti-method’ pedagogy in that it provides no
specific advice as to the way that a teacher must teach or a student must
learn. This, too, is the value of a teacher undertaking reading into
developments within a subject-discipline. New perspectives and
approaches to the discipline are not to be accepted uncritically, but used
as resources against which to evaluate current curriculum content and
imagine alternative practices.

The ‘Spatial Turn’ and Critical Pedagogy

McLaren’s call for a ‘critical pedagogy of space’ must be seen as part of a
wider ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences. Terms such as ‘borders’,
‘maps’, ‘location’, ‘space’ and ‘place’ are increasingly used in a range of

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academic disciplines. The importance of space was largely unrecognised

in the historical materialist tradition of social science, but this began to
change with the emergence of a Marxist inspired radical geography from
the early 1970s. The view of space as an empty container or ‘receptacle’
of social relationships was challenged by geographers who focused
increasingly on analysing the social and economic processes involved in
the creation and perpetuation of inequality. Instead, space began to be
thought of as something that is produced by human activity. As Gregory
& Urry put it:
spatial structure is now seen not merely as an arena in which
social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social
relationships are produced and reproduced. (Gregory & Urry,
1985, p. 3)
Much of this work in human geography draws on the French urban
Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre who argued that space and society are
mutually constitutive: space is both the product of social relationships
and is involved in the production of those relationships. Lefebvre (1991)
showed how the view of space as a neutral container for social
relationships is an historical construction, and was related to the rise of
capitalist social relationships. He pointed out that different societies have
radically different conceptions of space. Lefebvre’s ideas have been taken
up in the work of human geographers who have adopted a broadly
historical-geographical materialism in order to examine the production of
space in conditions of modernity and postmodernity. For example, in a
series of influential articles and books Edward Soja (1985, 1989, 1996,
1999a,b) proposed the term ‘spatiality’ to refer to the fact that space is
socially produced and interpreted, and argued for the reassertion of
space over time in social theory:
the social production of human spatiality or the ‘making of
geographies’ is becoming as fundamental to understanding our lives
and our life worlds as the social production of our histories and
societies. (Soja, 1999a, p. 262)
Similarly, David Harvey (1989, p. 227) points to the way in which the
production of space is linked with the exercise of economic power: ‘The
common-sense rules which define the “time” and “place” for everything ...
are certainly used to achieve and replicate particular distributions of
social power’.
The call for a ‘critical pedagogy of space’ is thus, in part, a
recognition that space matters:
We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide
consequences from us, how relationships of power and discipline are
inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how

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human geographies are filled with power and ideology. (Soja, 1989,
p. 25)

Space and the School Curriculum

In the English secondary education system, it is customary to separate
the study of the spatial, the temporal and the social into distinctive
subject areas – geography, history and sociology. Of these three, social
education is generally given less attention. Edwards (1998) describes the
changing fortunes of political and economics education in the humanities,
and concludes that, with the advent of the National Curriculum in the
1990s:
Social, political and economic education, if it exists at all, now
flounders at the margins of the curriculum where it clings hopefully to
the cross-curricular themes and/or personal and social education
programmes as a potential, if tenuous, lifeline. (p. 190)
This fragmentation means that there is little dialogue between subject
areas and theoretical developments in academic disciplines that might
inform curriculum innovation in schools are often ignored. In the National
Curriculum for English and Welsh schools, geography is the curriculum
area where space is most explicitly considered. In school geography, the
concept of space is decidedly unproblematic: space is simply where
things happen. It is a container in which objects and subjects are
‘situated’ or ‘located’. Pile & Thrift (1995) characterise this view of space
which:
based as it is in positivism, valorises the neutrality of seeing; the
world is turned into a set of geometrical arrangements based on an
abstract, fixed, universal, isotropic and material understanding of
space. (p. 45)
As suggested in the previous section, whilst such a view of space was
common in the positivist approaches that characterised the discipline of
geography in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is different from the ways in
which many human geographers now think about space. Geography in
schools tends to focus on neo-classical economic models and a form of
spatial science that searches for order, predictability and generalisations.
Through the collection and quantification of empirical data, young
geographers are inducted in the quest for detached ‘scientific’ enquiry,
and are encouraged to write in a neutral objective language that reflects
the idea that the geographers’ role is to mimetically represent the world.
As a result, there is little effort made to draw students’ attention to the
ways in which geographical knowledge is partial and socially constructed
(Lee, 1996; Winter, 1996).

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The significance of this ‘a-political’ view of space should not be

under estimated. It serves to naturalise existing spatial arrangements that
favour certain social groups at the expense of others. Examples include
the idea that uneven economic and social developments between and
within nation-states are inevitable and irreversible, and school textbooks
that talk of ‘profitable locations’ as though capitalist spatial relationships
exist in all societies at all times (see Gilbert, 1984). A key concern of a
critical pedagogy of space must be to problematise the notion of space –
to show it as a social construction. The next section discusses debates
about space in academic geography.

Spaces of Difference
So far I have discussed the project of critical pedagogy, noted the spatial
turn in social theory, and pointed to the mismatch between the ways in
which space is treated in academic and school versions of geography.
This section outlines some important debates over space and discusses
their implications for a critical pedagogy of space.
The importance of the work of ‘radical’ geographers is that it is no
longer possible to see ‘space’ as natural. Instead, the production of space
is always tied up with questions of power and politics. This point is
vividly made in the opening chapters of David Harvey’s Social Justice and
the City (1973). Harvey shows how well-off residents can afford to live in
areas which give them open space, clean air and access to good schools,
as well as being able to pay to travel to other parts of the city for work
and leisure, while poor and deprived groups are forced to live in areas
where schools and the housing stock are old and of low quality. In this
way, the production of space is actively linked to the production of
inequality. Similarly, Soja’s (1989) discussion of Los Angeles sought to
map the contours of a new form of urbanism.
However, in the ensuing debates about postmodern urban space,
Harvey and Soja’s work has been criticised because it tends to regard the
production of space as the outcome of capitalist economic power
relationships, and downplays the importance of other axes of power such
as race, gender, nation and sexuality (Deutsche, 1991; Massey, 1991; Rose,
1991). Thus, spaces such as ‘the city’ have to been seen as more than the
product of class relationships. Consider for instance, a typical street in
inner London:
An ‘Indian’ restaurant here, run by a Bangladeshi family whose
relatives may have been recent flood victims in Bangladesh, an East
African newsagents there, part of a national chain run by a family of
refugees from Uganda, descendants of indentured Indian labourers,
whose immediate fortunes are bonded into the recession of the British
economy and the actions of the German Bundesbank, and whose
children are spoken to by an African-American expressive culture.

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Overhead, a plane carries (if she is lucky) a Somali woman, who has
lived in border refugee camps for several years, and who may seek
housing in Camden, the housing officer perhaps being the son of a
Jamaican woman who arrived in Britain in the 1950s to work on the
buses. In another street, a heterosexual black man visits an AIDS
project, staffed by gay men who were inspired to establish the project
through the political activism of American groups. (Bhatt, 1994,
p. 152)
The point here is that there is a whole set of social relationships (linked
to capital, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality) that structure
people’s experience of involvement in the production of space. The
important point made in critiques of Harvey and Soja is that by focusing
on class as the most important determinant of space, the diversity of
space gets lost. For example, in The End of Capitalism (as we knew it),
Gibson-Graham (1996) argues that the concepts of capitalism and class
have been constructed as monolithic, when in fact there are multiple
identities and spaces that might provide the basis for new forms of
politics. The 1990s have seen the production of a large volume of
literature that examines the ways in which the production of space is
linked to the production of identities. Spaces are organised to keep a
whole range of ‘others’ ‘in their place’ and can be seen as texts that
convey to certain groups that they are ‘out of place’ (on disability see
Kitchin, 1998; Gleeson, 1999; on age see Laws, 1997; on race see Peake,
1993).
This work has pointed to the ways in which places are constructed
through competing spatialities. Space is always open to interpretation
and contestation by different individuals or groups, many of who are
trying to question and redefine the meanings and boundaries of particular
spaces (Keith & Pile, 1993; Sibley, 1995; Cresswell, 1996). Massey (1995)
provides examples of this when she notes that different social groups
may have distinct spatialities – they may have different abilities and
propensities to travel and mobility, or different levels of commitment to
places. Different groups have different degrees of spatial power, which is
expressed in a variety of ways. For example, powerful social groups may
distance themselves from various ‘bads’, such as production, or from
economic decline and dereliction; or seek to exclude other groups from
residential proximity. In these ways, space is constructed and contested.
Valentine (1996) provides an example of this process in her
discussion of the ‘heterosexual street’. She suggests that public space –
the ‘heterosexual street’ – is not an asexual space. Instead, it is commonly
assumed to be ‘naturally’ or ‘authentically’ heterosexual. She argues that
there is nothing ‘natural’ about this space. Rather, spaces become
heterosexual through the accumulation of repeated acts, including things
such as different-sex couples holding hands as they walk down the street,
adverts and shop window displays that present images of contented

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nuclear families, heterosexualised conversations at bus stops or queues

for the bank, and piped music in shops and restaurants that relate tales of
heterosexual love. Valentine shows that these small, repeated and
seemingly inconsequential acts produce public space as heterosexual
space. Such space is experienced by lesbian and gay men as potentially
hostile, and leads many to police their own desires and actions, hence
reinforcing the appearance that ‘normal’ space is ‘straight’ space.
However, Valentine reminds us that such public spaces are rarely
produced in a singular, uniform way as heterosexual. In fact, there are
usually ‘others’ present who are producing their own relational spaces, or
who are reading ‘heterosexual space’ against the grain – experiencing it
differently. Valentine offers a number of examples to illustrate this. For
instance, dress can provide subtle signifiers of lesbian identities and
gestures such as a glance, or an independent or confident manner can
alert those ‘in the know’ to one’s sexuality. As well as these more subtle,
discrete ways of producing lesbian space, there are more overt in ‘in yer
face’ ways to ‘queer’ public space. Lesbian and gay pride marches allow
gay and lesbian people to numerically dominate the streets, thus
challenging the status of public spaces as heterosexual. These issues are
developed in a vibrant and growing literature concerned with sexuality
and space (see, for example, Bell & Valentine, 1995; Mort, 1996; Bondi,
1998; Knopp, 1998).
The point made by many feminist and cultural geographers is that
space is not simply the product of capital and class relationships and that
we should also take seriously the role of other social relationships in the
production of space. This is reflected in Soja’s latest work (1996), which
has taken on board many of these ideas and now appears to welcome the
new ‘postmodernised and spatialised’ politics of difference in his notion
of Thirdspace. For Soja, Thirdspace offers the possibility of expanding the
scope of our geographical imaginations about the spatiality of life, a
dimension as significant as historicality and sociality. This means
building on and going beyond a Firstspace perspective which focuses on
the ‘real’ material world, and a Secondspace perspective that interprets
‘reality’ through representations, to reach a Thirdspace of multiple ‘real-
and-imagined places’. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theorists,
Soja conceptualises Thirdspace as a space of ‘radical openness’, which
those marginalised by racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and
other oppressions choose as a speaking position. Thirdspace offers a
source of community for those oppressed by the social categories around
which society is structured.
This brief discussion has attempted to capture the flavour of some
of the debates about ‘space’, which characterise contemporary human
geography. It is possible to suggest that there has been a shift from a
conception of space as ‘essential’ to a conception of space as
‘constructed’. More specifically, there has been a shift away from the idea

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of space as homogenous, continuous, objective, Cartesian and knowable,

towards a view of space as fragmented, imaginative, unknowable and
subjective. Rather than being regarded as a neutral container for social
action, space is increasingly regarded as tied up with issues of power and
difference (Watson, 1999).
The debates about space described here appear far removed from
the concept of space that currently dominates school geography.
However, if we accept the argument that space is not an innocent
container of social events but is a political concept, then we need to
examine how space is dealt with in the curriculum. The school geography
curriculum adopts a view of space, which is no longer widely accepted in
the discipline in that it tends towards a ‘spatial fetishism’ and ignores the
social and political (Peet, 1998). Whilst this discussion has focused on the
discipline of geography, a critical pedagogy of space would also consider
the ways in which space is conceptualised in other curriculum areas. For
example, in History models of time-space are represented, and Art and
Design is concerned with issues of the use of public space.

Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Space

In a recent lecture Ed Soja (1999b) commented on the pedagogical
implications of his work. He suggested that students need to learn how
space is filled with power and ideology at all scales from the body to the
global. They should be taught how they live their lives in socially
constructed spaces that have the potential to both entrap and enable.
The key contribution of the critical geographical literature discussed
in the previous section has been to analyse the power relationships
involved in the production of space. A ‘critical pedagogy of space’
revolves around the political task of understanding how resistance to
oppressive power relationships can be realised. This is implied in
McLaren’s call for critical pedagogy to ‘move in the direction of
challenging new carceral systems of social control’. McLaren outlines
what he regards a central feature of this pedagogy:
The critical pedagogy to which I am referring needs to be made less in-
formative and more per-formative, less a pedagogy directed toward
the interrogation of written texts than a corporeal pedagogy grounded
in the lived experiences of students ... (McLaren, 1999, p. 452)
There are many examples that could inform such a ‘per-formative’
pedagogy. One of the lessons that children learn from a very young age is
that space is both enabling and constraining. Children quickly learn that
some spaces – such as the sweet shop with a sign on the door saying
‘only two schoolchildren at a time’ – do not welcome them, whilst others
require that they have the necessary cash to gain admittance. They learn
that there are limits to our spaces and that some people can dominate

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space to exclude others. In what follows, I discuss two examples of how a

critical pedagogy of space might be grounded in the lived experience of
students in order to highlight some of the issues raised by such a
pedagogy.
There is now a growing literature that points to the ways in which
student experiences in the geography classroom are gendered:
What geography is today is very much the product of those who have
had their particular interpretation of the world accepted. It is
therefore not surprising that the discourse of contemporary
geography can, on the whole, be seen as a statement by white, middle-
class, and middle-aged men about their environment. (Longhurst &
Peace, 1993, pp. 3–4)
Alison Lee provides a detailed account of how particular gendered forms
of geographic knowledge are produced in an Australian school geography
classroom. She shows how curriculum resources, practices such as
writing and teacher feedback, work to produce subject positions for
students to occupy, and these are gendered (and raced). Karen Nairn
(1997) raises similar issues in her study of the politics of silence and
voice in geography classrooms. She argues that geography teachers are
the products of gendered institutional contexts, and students experience
geography as a gendered subject reflecting its position in a more general
condition of male hegemony. This work suggests that a critical pedagogy
of space might begin with an analysis of the gendered use of space in the
classroom, and the ways in which the curriculum ‘empowers and
disempowers, authorises and de-authorises, recognises and mis-
recognises different social groups and their knowledge and identities’
(Connell, 1994, p. 140). Nairn devised her own intervention, which
involved trying to get ‘quiet’ female students to speak more in lessons.
This involved developing a deliberately women-focused lesson and the
creation of space for female students to develop their own thoughts
before a public discussion that was devised to allow all students to
participate. A critical pedagogy of space might encourage female students
to question the use of classroom space and be involved in devising
alternatives.
A second example of an issue to be addressed by a critical pedagogy
of space might be the experience of public space. Empirical studies in
Belfast (Jenkins, 1983), Sunderland (Callaghan, 1992), Manchester and
Sheffield (Taylor et al, 1996) have all pointed to the centrality of localised
existence in framing the ‘cognitive maps’ of young people. In discussing
the MetroCentre, a large indoor shopping centre in Gateshead, England,
Sibley (1995) notes that, whilst it provides a warm, well lit, clean and
generally pleasant environment for consumption for those who visit, it
can also be experienced as a space of exclusion for some groups:

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Out of sight in the control room, employees of the private security

firm that polices the centre had their eyes fixed on closed-circuit
television screens. They were looking for ‘undesirables’, mostly
groups of teenage boys who did not fit the family image projected by
the company. When they were located, security guards evicted them,
not just from the building, but from the precinct. (p. xi)
The planning and design of urban space is increasingly informed by wider
concerns for population control and surveillance. The closed-circuit
television camera (CCTV), as well as gates, locks and alarms, has become
a familiar sight in British town centres, and many housing estates and
rural villages. It can be suggested that some groups (namely the young,
male and black) are the targets of this disciplinary gaze. Whilst city
centres were once dominated by public spaces (parks, high street,
municipal building) with only a few private buildings (offices and shops),
increasingly they are dominated by private spaces (shopping malls,
cinema complexes). Ian Taylor (1999, p. 60) has described the effects of
this:
One inescapable feature of the social geography of post-Fordist cities
is the growth and development of a range of residual territories, or
places of social exclusion, left over for the use of those populations
who do not have claims to membership of the private spheres of work
and consumption defined by market society.
One does not have to visit Los Angeles to see the ‘gated-city’ described
by Mike Davis (Davis, 1990) or enter the realms of William Gibson’s
cyberspace (1984) to get a taste for the future of public space.
A critical pedagogy of space would involve analysing examples such
as these to help students recognise the ways in which space is used to
dominate and oppress some individuals and groups. In Keith & Pile’s
(1993) terms, it would help students recognise space as an ‘active
component of hegemonic power’. In addition, an important task of such a
pedagogy would be to enable students to consider that there are also
geographies of resistance through which people deal with, and resist,
oppressive practices (Pile & Keith, 1997). A recognition of geographies of
resistance is important if a critical pedagogy of space is to empower
individuals to make their own spaces. However, there is no simple mirror
relationship between spatialities of domination and spatialities of
resistance. For example, the teenage boys in the shopping centre may
resist their exclusion through acts of petty vandalism, graffiti or shop-
lifting, but is this a local act of resistance against local processes of
domination, or is it a reaction against wider, national oppressive policies?
Is it possible to say that these teenage boys are challenging, at some
level, the processes of bureaucratisation and commodification of public
space that serves the capitalist economic system? In addition, there is the
question of the relative status to be afforded to the various scales of

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experience. Is the resistance of young males to the privatisation of public

space of more significance than the resistance of young females to the
organisation of classroom space? There are no easy answers to these
questions, but they seem to me to be the types of questions that are
raised by a critical pedagogy of space.
The two examples offered here – of the gendered use of classroom
space and the exclusion of young males from public space – highlight an
important issue at the heart of debates over critical pedagogy: should
there be one basic organising principle of struggle, which mirrors the
fundamental structure of oppression in society? Should there be multiple
points of resistance, where one or more is prioritised on the grounds of
their importance in that situation (Keith & Pile, 1993)? The notion of
space as multiple, and contested and linked to multiple axes of power
appears to conflict with the idea that space is primarily the product of
capitalist power relationships. For some, the danger is that all this
concern for difference risks obscuring the ‘real’ forces that produce
space.
This argument is made forcibly by David Harvey (1996) in his
discussion of the case of the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina, where
a chicken-processing plant owned by Imperial Foods burnt down in 1991.
Many of the fire exit doors were locked, and 25 of the 200 workforce were
killed and a further 56 were seriously injured. It subsequently emerged
that workers were paid wages below the official poverty line. These were,
argues Harvey, deaths that resulted from labour exploitation as capitalist
interests exploited the geographical location of Hamlet in a rural area
where there were few other employment opportunities. Harvey is
concerned by the lack of political reaction to this event. He argues that
the failure to respond to this as a class struggle between capital and
(exploited) labour is an example of the fragmentation of radical politics,
together with other power factors, such as race, gender, and the ‘new
social movements’ related to ecology and animal rights. Harvey’s
conception of resistance is relatively straightforward. He sees struggles
as arising out of the process of economic exploitation and resistance is
therefore to be grounded in labour opposition to exploitation. Resistance
can only be effective when organised in opposition to one structure of
power relationships. This argument has important implications for a
critical pedagogy of space, since it suggests that critical educators should
seek to reveal to students the ‘real’ forces that structure space. McLaren
comes close to this position when he argues:
I believe that postmodernist theories, in straddling uneasily the abyss
between identity politics and class analysis, have relegated the
category of class to an epiphenomena of race, ethnicity and gender ...
and when you mix this reality with the frenetic advance of
contemporary global capitalist social relationships, you have a recipe

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for the uncontested reproduction of global relationships of

exploitation.(p. 445)
However, there is a big leap from examining young people’s lived
experiences of space to reaching the conclusion that it is all, after all,
down to global capitalism (This argument about whether we should see
space as essentially the product of capitalist social relationships or
whether we should pay attention to the multiple and contested of other
axes of power has its corollary in debates over critical pedagogy (see
Cole & Hill, 1995; McLaren, 1995). A key insight raised by feminist and
cultural geographers in the debates over space in geography has been
that spaces are contested and argued over, and whilst they may be
structured by class, gender, race and age relationships, they also provide
spaces for identity formation and can provide opportunities for groups of
people to experiment with alternative lifestyles and communities
(Hetherington, 1998). This suggests that more ‘local’ struggles over
space, related to the politics of identity and difference should also be
central to a critical pedagogy of space. One of the important lessons of
these debates is that the relationship between politics and space is
complex. Spaces are made in the living of our lives, and since they are
always being made, the possibility remains for them to be made
differently. The challenge for those of us who want to develop a critical
pedagogy is to suggest to students that they can reconstruct spaces in
new ways and articulate their future in previously unimagined ways.

Conclusions
This article is a preliminary response to Peter McLaren’s call for a ‘critical
pedagogy of space’. It has drawn upon recent literature in social and
cultural geography that regards space as more than an innocent
container of social relationships. Dominant approaches to space as
reflected in curriculum documents and interpretations of these
documents currently promote the idea of space as the ‘container’ of
events, with the result that students are denied the opportunity to
understand space as socially produced and politically contested. The
effect of conceptualising space as natural and given is to suggest that
current social arrangements that exclude certain groups of people and
maintain social hierarchies go unchallenged.
A critical pedagogy of space needs to begin by encouraging students
to interpret spaces as social texts. This suggests a pedagogy that allows
students to read the world in such a way as not only to understand it, but
also to change it. Much of this could be achieved through an examination
of the lived spaces experienced by students and supported through the
study of both primary and secondary texts. Developing such a pedagogy
requires attention to the politics of scale. Smith (1993) argues that scale
must be seen as a social construction and that geographers need to

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examine which scales are selected for study and which are ignored. He
proposes the study of a range of geographical scales ranging through the
body-home-community-city-region-nation-global and recent work in
geography has demonstrated the usefulness of thinking in these terms
(Bell & Valentine, 1997; McDowell, 1999). In terms of a critical pedagogy of
space, a focus on scales of study traditionally ignored in the classroom,
such as the body and the home, would allow a focus on student’s existing
knowledge and allow students to recognise how space is tied up with
power relationships based on class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and
age. Much recent work in social and cultural geography could inform
curriculum development in geography, and contribute to personal, social
and political education at a time when the question of what education
should play in citizenship is being debated. Whilst geography educators
in the early 1980s were attentive to arguments in the discipline of
geography, in recent years school geography has largely ignored these
developments.
This article has suggested that calls for a ‘critical pedagogy of space’
are to be welcomed, though there are important and difficult questions
about the shape and form of such pedagogy. Most notably, the multiple
and contested nature of space suggests that a critical pedagogy of space
needs to be less interrogative (seeking to correct the deficits and flaws in
students’ existing knowledge) and more dialogic (seeking to recognise
and explore existing knowledge). It suggests that teachers start with the
‘mattering maps’ or ‘cartographies of taste, stability, and mobility within
which students are located’ (Grossberg, 1994, p. 18) and seek to help
them explore alternative possibilities.

Correspondence
John Morgan, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol,
35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, United Kingdom.

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