The Space&Place Research Collaborative is a translocal scholarly and creative network, based in the Department of Geography at the Maynooth University. We regularly partner with individuals, groups and institutions in Dublin and Kildare County, as well as with the Ómós Áite: Space/Place Research Group at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland Galway.

Thematic foci that have developed through projects and members over the past two years include: Art and Geography, Urban Public Spaces, Landscapes and Environments, and Publicly Engaged Research and Creative Practices. From our Art and Geography cluster, three related subareas have also emerged in: Memory and Place, Medical Humanities and the Arts, and Bodies and Space.
 

Photo Credit: Ceara Conway courtesy Vagabond Reviews. Sliabh Bán Arthouse Public Art Clinic No 7, in association with Mapping Spectral Traces V conference, May 2012.

Our experimental forum bridges the methods, concerns, theories and practices of the Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts, and Social Sciences through a focus on space and place. We understand space and place as broad and mobile concepts that are not easily fixed or fixable within existing disciplinary, artistic, geographic and temporal boundaries. Our creative and scholarly explorations of space and place move between and across institutional frames to redefine the practices, performances and representations of transdisciplinarity.

Our forum is multi-modal and process-driven, shaped by an international and local membership within and beyond the academy, artistic institutions or community groups. We respect local, artistic and scholarly knowledges as contributing to sustainable and more just societies. Our reflections, performances and conversations delve into the myriad ways that spatial imaginaries for the future have been limited by linear temporal narratives - in ways that have excluded social groups and natures from various environments - one the one hand, and how produced spaces may work in unjust ways to contain, divide and regulate societies at local, international and global scales on the other. Drawing inspiration from possible pasts and futures, we consider our conversations, events and collaborations as creating spaces through which we can begin to create alternative journeys and pathways toward more socially just worlds.