This term refers to a fixed conceptualisation of space within which events are recorded or planned. Associated with the works of Newton and Descartes, this space is often depicted as a pre-existing grid suitable for standardization, measurement, and calculation.

To learn to use from below. However, in Latin, 'ab' means more than just below, indicating both motion away and agency. Spivak, by coining this term, suggests creating alternative ways to critically engage with European Enlightenment.

Alternative education involves non-traditional learning approaches outside of mainstream universities and educational institutions, emphasizing personalized, student-centered methods to promote critical thinking and creativity.

Describes a feeling of being torn between two contradictory subjective investments (e.g., love and hate) concerning a particular object.

In classical Marxism, antagonism refers to the long-standing historical and dialectical conflict between different classes’ material interests (i.e., control over the means of production, such as labour, land, industrial facilities and/or machinery), existing intrinsically to capitalist relations of production.

Rooted in Foucault's work, biopolitics refers to a political rationality centred on managing and regulating life and populations: ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order.’ It involves the governance of bodies and lives through health, reproduction, and welfare policies.

A set of mechanisms where the biological aspects of human life become the object of political strategy and where power deals with the administration of life itself; the biological governance of populations.

A method for spatially plotting collections of mental processes and representations within a given environment picked up by Frederic Jameson as a mode of social, political and economic critique.

The process of sharing the past and its results among members of a particular social group, the conditions for ensuring the transmission of collective memory are social interaction and the need for group consciousness to extract the continuity of the memory.

A mode of analysis which draws a distinction between what immediately exists (e.g., materially, empirically, etc) in a given environment or object and the forces working to determining it whilst remaining unlocatable and external to it, existing as absent causes or modes of structural or immanent determination.

A disparate network established between a heterogeneous set of elements, including everything from languages, discourses, institutions, practices, sites, and technologies, and serving as a strategic function in an operation of power; an apparatus of power.

It is the pure movement or passage of time through which the genesis or individuation of singularity(s), conjunctures and events take place; the conditions of possibility or container for (e.g.) the constitution of modes of consciousness or feeling, historical periods of time and events, material and/or social transformations.

Embodied sensations that can be psychically and cognitively interpreted, which can either drive or inhibit action and open or foreclose a sense of possibility.

The quality of a space that allows it to adapt to various uses and conditions, responding to changes in environment and activities. College Green exemplifies flexibility through its responsiveness to seasonal and weather changes.

The capacity of a space or environment to allow for dynamic changes and interactions without fixed boundaries or rigid structures. In the context of College Green at Goldsmiths, The lawn does not have concrete spatial demarcations, making it a flexible area where identity and social roles can shift quickly. This fluidity is emphasised by the space’s ambiguous nature, which allows it to mediate transitions between different realms and identities.

Refers to the subtle, everyday forms of resistance and subversion by marginalized groups that operate beneath the surface of formal political actions and public discourse. The term was developed by the political theorist James C. Scott. 

The accumulated residues of material manifestations and structures that emerge from historical struggles, including practices such as mutual aid, which endure over time. While often associated with movements towards freedom, liberation, and justice, these remnants extend beyond specific struggles to encompass broader societal dynamics. They are found in present fragments, shaping collective experiences and emotions.

The visible and/or invisible material and/or immaterial undergirding foundations that facilitate the flow of ideas, materials and people, shaping and organising the conditions of social life. 

“Material space” is the space composed of the matter and provides humans with sensory encounter. David Harvey uses this term to refer to the “perceived space” in Lefebvre’s terminology, who in The Production of Space calls it “spatial practice” and emphasizes more on its association of the use of a space. 

Speculating on the effects of the pictorial and representational arts (which can also be extended into print, electronic and temporal media or aesthetic forms such as architecture) and the role of reconstructive memory in the phenomenological encounters of daily life, Marcel Proust describes an in-the-flesh encounter with an aristocratic figure whom had only been seen previously in a painting. A conflict ensues between the frozen apotheotic image stored in the onlooker’s memory and the bathos of the encounter, ‘where two discs are rotating at different speeds in separate planes, with the face being squashed together between them’.

An informal organisation or entity that operates alongside formal institutions, often filling gaps or supplementing official institutions' functions and services.

It originated from Greek parasitos. Sitos means ‘grain, bread, and food’ while the prefix para indicates ‘alongside, beyond; altered; contrary; irregular, abnormal’. Bluntly, parasite means to ‘feed beside', and stemming from this, the scientific meaning of the word is an animal or plant that lives on or in and at the expense of another. But looking back at the Greek origin, the prefix also connotes ‘altered’, ‘contrary’, or ‘irregular’.Michael Serres closely examines this ‘altering’ characteristic of parasites by saying that “The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic.” Parasite is not just the act of being beside the host but also altering it in contravention of the host’s original system.

As defined by Stuart Hall, rather than forming a discipline the “present conjuncture” becomes one’s object of study which inheres across disciplinary frameworks: a disposition compelled to understand the conditions of the present moment, its historical forces and anterior conditions of existence, and to evaluate it in order to enable activity and a means of affect it.

Coined by Henri Lefebvre. The idea that space is socially produced and constructed, and in so doing, people dwelling in such spaces are equally formed, or at least affected, by them. E.g. A modern city is a produced space which in turn produces urban citizens.

A term from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the punctum is an aspect of a photograph that captures the attention of the reader to create a subjectively unique feeling attached to the image. In the text ‘At the Opening of Knowledge’ the punctum is applied to subjective experiences of space.

Space in this manner is defined as being contained in objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects. The relational view of space posits that there is no space or time outside of the processes that define them.

This concept proposes that space is understood as a relationship between objects, as space exists only because objects exist and relate to each other. Therefore, all forms of measurement within this framework depend upon the observer's frame of reference.

“Representations of space” is the “conceived space.” It is about how material realities are endowed with meanings through their appropriation by signs and abstract representations. Some examples are: words, maps, and pictures.

The process of reorganizing a structure, an infrastructure, an organization or a system, be it material or immaterial, to improve efficiency, adapt to new conditions, or recover from a crisis.

Refers to the identification and use of social cues to make judgements about the social roles, rules, relationships, contexts, or characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness) of others. Refers to the process by which an individual perceives stimuli from social things and thus exhibits his or her own corresponding attitudes or behaviours, and is our attempt to know and understand other people. 

Somatosphere plays on the concept of “noosphere” derived from the Greek words nous(mind) and sphaira (sphere), as conceived by French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to represent another layer in the Earth’s development (e.g., alongside the geosphere and biosphere) concerning the collective knowledge, cognition and consciousness of humanity (i.e., a collective-brain). The somatosphere is the equivalent taking place at the level of feeling: a collective sensuous body. This distinction does not posit a mind-body dualism, but calls into question a sensuous logic underpinning thought.

An unfixed and volatile spatiotemporal unit, that can can be physical, psychic, material, hypothetical or liminal or unfixed and volatile, which is constantly constituted through trajectories that move through and across. 

A transformative environment where individuals or elements undergo continuous change, developing new identities and relations. The lawn acts as a mediator for these identity shifts, influenced by the surrounding social and political dynamics. It is a place where everyday interactions contribute to ongoing personal and collective transformation.

“Spaces of representation” is the “lived space” that one actively engages with and appropriates with feelings. It is the space of affects, emotions, dreams, and imaginations. 

Raymond Williams first suggested the concept of “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” to understand the feelings underlying the  spirit of the age. He says that each age has its own “structure of feeling”, which is a narrative structure for understanding the dynamic material limits to the possibility of change. The concept tries to map out the cultures while denying the fixity of culture, and trying to shape out human consciousness with both dynamic and actual structure.

A struggle that makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term “subaltern” by borrowing it from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. This term describes the vast majority of the global population who are marginalized, silenced, or excluded from mainstream discourses and power structures. It encompasses those whose voices and experiences are often overlooked or ignored, particularly in the context of postcolonial studies.

Also known as the clearing. From the thought of Martin Heidegger, the time-space realm of the open is that which gives being. That which is open is dependent on the lifeworld of a being; that which is concealed and unconcealed provides the lifeworld and, thus, being.

The process of undergoing significant change, often resulting in a new state or form. the lawn’s appearance and use change with the seasons, affecting how people interact with it. Conceptually, it plays a role in the ongoing restructuring at Goldsmiths, symbolizing the shifts in institutional and social dynamics. The lawn’s ability to catalyze change in identity and social roles underscores its transformative nature.

In Étienne Balibar’s reading of Gilbert Simondon via Spinoza and Marx, the “transindividual” marks subjectivity not as something fixed and stable but caught in the perpetual process of (trans)formation, where the essence of subjectivity is located neither in the individual to the detriment to the collective or the collective to the individual, forcing us to move beyond the binary between the two and think subjectivity as something structural constitutive of both agency and interdependence simultaneously; where individuality(s) exist as ensembles of social relations and forms of social communication and vice-versa.