Third Space and Ancient World Studies
International Conference in Innsbruck
Concept and Organisation: Sina Kazemirashid and Alexander Steiner
Wednesday, 29 October – Friday, 31 October 2025
Seminar room 04K100 (4th floor) | Ágnes-Heller-Haus, Innrain 52a, 6020 Innsbruck
The Spatial Turn of the 1980’s shifted the attention of scholars in Humanities, Social, and Cultural Studies towards questions of discursive appropriation of landscape and the physical environment. The term ‚space‘ was defined as more than a physical entity. Rather, its social constructedness became the leading research focus.” The ‘product’ of the ‘production of space’, as it was defined by Henri Lefebvre (1974), is a ‘produced space’, which was, for instance, defined as the Third (or in-between) Space first in the concept of Homi Bhabha (1994) and later by Edward Soja (1996). Bhabha describes ‘Third Spaces’ as spaces of interaction in which new meanings are created through exchange to deconstruct colonial discourses of alterity, while Soja understands ‘thirdspace’ as a connection between real and imagined space that emphasises lived experience. The underlying discourse-analytical approach of Michel Foucault (1984), which implies a kind of ‘thirding’ in a ‘discursive (other) space’ (hétérotopie), must also be mentioned here.
This conference seeks to develop the research on spatial perception in ancient societies by gathering scholars of any discipline in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Sciences and from any stage in their career to discuss spatial concepts from their own disciplinary perspective.