Dialogue, Space, and Justice: A Spatial Turn to Social Justice Through Dialogue

The past few months have seen rumblings and eruptions of activism and protest in light of cuts and reversals of legislation impacting higher education students, faculty, and staff in myriad ways. As we grapple with the repercussions of these changes, and face the uncertainty to come, a spatial turn is necessary and needed. A spatial turn asks how we take up, create, and produce space, not only at the local and bounded level of individual institutions and campuses, but space as enfolded and layered nationally and globally, as we look to national politics and legislation and higher education as national and international entities (Massey, 2005). A critical spatial perspective unpacks, complicates, and layers notions of how humanity and materialities interact with the world, and in turn, how those materialities interact with us to shape and create space. This paper takes a critical spatial perspective, “inverting the usual order and putting space first as the primary discursive and explanatory focus” to explore the spatiality of intergroup dialogue workshops, and specifically those led by the Sustained Dialogue Institute (Soja, 2010, p. 17). Through this conceptual framework I ask, how is space constructed within these workshops? How do human and non human bodies intra act to create this space? How is the space of the dialogue enfolded with the space of the institution and what implications does this have for social justice activism nationally? Through exploring these questions, I consider entry points for possibility and change, a spatial turn to the future of social justice.