Immediate Spaces

This book presents the distinctive theoretical and methodological approaches in geography education in South America and more specifically in Brazil, Chile and Colombia. It highlights cartography and maps as essential tools and provides a meaningful approach to learning in geographical education, thereby giving children and young people the opportunity to better understand their situations, contexts and social conditions. The book describes how South American countries organize their scholar curriculum and the ways in which they deal with geography vocabulary and developing fundamental concepts, methodologies, epistemological comprehension on categories, keywords and themes in geography. It also describes its use in teachers’ practices and learning progressions, the use of spatial representations as a potent mean to visualize and solve questions, and harnesses spatial thinking and geographical reasoning development. The book helps to improve teaching and learning practices in primary and secondary education and as such it provides an interesting read for researchers, students, and teachers of geography and social studies.

Every day millions of children in developing countries face adversities of many kinds, yet there is a shortage of sound evidence concerning their plight and an urgent need to identify the most appropriate and effective policy responses from among the multiple approaches that exist. This collection of journal papers aims to engage with researchers and debates in the field so as to understand better some of the numerous risks confronted by children in developing countries. It highlights the complexity of protecting children in various forms of adversity, challenges conventional wisdom about what protects children, demonstrates why it is essential to consult with children to protect them successfully, and suggests that successful protection must be based on strong empirical understanding of the situation and the perspectives of children and communities involved. The contributors are all experienced researchers and practitioners who have worked for many years with children in developing countries. The book offers suggestions for reform of current child protection policies, based on empirical findings around a range of child protection concerns, including children’s work, independent migration, family separation, early marriage, and military occupation. Together, the contributions provide a body of knowledge important to humanitarian and development policy and practice. This book was published as a special issue of Development in Practice.

In Experimental Practice Dimitris Papadopoulos explores the potential for building new forms of political and social movements through the reconfiguration of the material conditions of existence. Rather than targeting existing institutions in demands for social justice, Papadopoulos calls for the creation of alternative ontologies of everyday life that would transform the meanings of politics and justice. Inextricably linked to technoscience, these “alterontologies”—which Papadopoulos examines in a variety of contexts, from AIDS activism and the financialization of life to hacker communities and neuroscience—form the basis of ways of life that would embrace the more-than-social interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds. Speaking to a matrix of concerns about politics and justice, social movements, matter and ontology, everyday practice, technoscience, the production of knowledge, and the human and nonhuman, Papadopoulos suggests that the development of alterontologies would create more efficacious political and social organizing.

The Studio for Immediate Spaces (SIS) is a two-year MA programme at Amsterdam's renowned Sandberg Instituut. It aims at exploring and shaping spatial practices on the genesis and production of contemporary spatial configurations. Through extensive field investigations, SIS works as a laboratory testing ideas relevant to how we live today and how we could live tomorrow. Rural flatlands, suburbia and gritty city settings; Mediterranean shorelines and Alpine mountainscapes; open-pit mines and industrial legacies; abandoned buildings and unfinished infrastructures; harbors, airports and refugee camps: Such places were the sites of SIS's research and production between 2016 and 2019. Directed by Swiss architect Leopold Banchini, it embraced a truly global approach that crossed, and deliberately ignored, borders. This book offers a glimpse into this unique journey around the world. Illustrated with some 790 color and black-and-white photographs, it features work produced collectively by participants in simultaneous roles of geographer, researcher, architect, urban planner and designer. Brief texts on each project and essays by Leopold Banchini and IS faculty members Marie-Avril Berthet, Ludwig Engel, Fabulous Future, Mark Minkjan, Julian Schubert, and Maike Statz as well as by curator and writer Lukas Feireiss round out this exceptional documentation of forward-thinking higher education in spatial design.

How has Berlin’s urban landscape changed in its remarkable transformation from divided city to creative capital? Despite the monumental heritage and grand development projects, Berlin still conjures up images of urban fragmentation and vacant inner-city land. The book reveals the changing nature and complex politics of this open space. A rephotographing of sites between 2001 and 2016 shows how no man’s land has made way for new apartments and underground hangouts have changed into commercial hubs, but it also transports us to remaining pockets of urban wilderness and unexpected freedom right next to the city’s most iconic squares. The accompanying essays by noted urban thinkers explore this little-known but vital reserve—forcing us to reflect on our unrelenting efforts to chart the future of the city at large.

“A masterpiece of thriller and mystery. Blake Pierce did a magnificent job developing characters with a psychological side so well described that we feel inside their minds, follow their fears and cheer for their success. Full of twists, this book will keep you awake until the turn of the last page.” --Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos (re Once Gone) IF SHE FEARED (A Kate Wise Mystery) is book #6 in a new psychological thriller series by bestselling author Blake Pierce, whose #1 bestseller Once Gone (Book #1) (a free download) has received over 1,000 five star reviews. When another woman is found dead in a vacant, suburban house, the FBI must call in brilliant FBI special agent Kate Wise, 55, and ask her to come out of retirement from her suburban life to find the psychotic killer. But why is the killer staging the bodies in empty houses in suburbia? What do the victims have in common? And can Kate, despite her age, stop him in time to save another woman’s life? An action-packed thriller with heart-pounding suspense, IF SHE FEARED is book #6 in a riveting new series that will leave you turning pages late into the night. Book #7--IF SHE HEARD--is also now available!