Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung/ Journal for Discourse Studies

Lost in Space: Introducing the spatial dispositif in space-sensitive discourse research

Zusammenfassung

The appearance of New Materialism has brought about a rupture in the social sciences and opened new positions to analyze social entities like space. In our contribution, we claim that it also offers a starting point for theoretical considerations in reference to the relationship between discourse, space and materiality – especially regarding the perspective of materialization beyond a culture-nature-dichotomy. In our research on the German-Polish border area, we combined »classical« studies of newspapers with the study of discursive practices among local residents. Here, the questions that arose for us were: To what extent is material space important for our discourse analysis? And how can it be included as an element in our conceptualization of discourse on space? Building on Foucault’s idea of the dispositif and Barad’s understanding of materiality, we introduce the spatial dispositif as a way to conceptualize discourse-material interrelations in the analysis of space.