Chapter 13: Geographies of Resistance in Critical Pedagogic Practices

How can we have been misled into thinking “the social” and “the educational” without the consideration of space? The notion of space and the politics of space implicitly enter into conceptions of both “the public” and “the body” (the body politic). The public is inherently spatial, referring to the structure and the morphology of a shared place. Public spaces exist in many different forms; boulevards, parks and gardens but also cafes, malls, markets and city-centres. These spaces can also be enclosed spaces of public institutions such as universities, schools and libraries. Habermas has written of the development of the “public sphere,” a developing public space that is intimately connected to the logic of democracy and citizenship, and hence, public debate and participation.