Space and Power

The Research Team "Space and Power" (UCM-970648) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, active since 2007, was formally validated by the UCM in 2012, and evaluated positively in 2018. Its basis is the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. It is integrated by researchers and professors of the UCM and other universities. The Group has focused its activity on the study and analysis of the different forms of interrelations between space and power, integrating geographical regards of the political and social with the study of public policies on the territory, particularly in cities.

The Research Team has hosted a MSCA fellow with the project ROJAVA-74855 (The Kurds in Syria: A complex interplay between local regional and transnational). We are hosting as well a postdoctoral research UCM, and another fellow of the Program of Postdoctoral Contracts "Atracción del Talento 2018", co-financed by the Comunidad de Madrid (Ref. 2018-T2/SOC-10508).

The Group is affiliated with the International Political Science Association and a member of the group, María Lois, serves as the chair of a research committee on Political and Cultural Geography at IPSA.

The focus of research of the group goes beyond the spatial registration of power in the form of territories and also deals with the lattice spaces linked to other logics of power. Therefore, territory, borders, networks, logistics, and places are the objects of the group"s research. Politics and space, a priori, appear to be the central objects of two types of knowledge or, if one prefers, scientific disciplines (Political Science and Geography, respectively), which are now fully established and differentiated. But things are not often as they appear; we would recall that, etymologically, the word "politics" comes from the Greek polis, which was the denomination of a geographical space (the city), so that, from its origins, the study of politics has been confused in part with the study of political spaces. But it was in the late 19th century when the discipline (or sub-discipline if you will) arose which had, as its analytical objective, the relations between politics and geography: Political Geography. After a period of marginalization after the Second World War, it has become more important and has renewed the thread of the general "spatial turn" in the social sciences that has occurred in recent decades. That"s where we are and from where we work.

Therefore, the general research line is: Political Geography

And we can point out the following specific lines (areas in which individual members of the group have done research):

- Geopolitics and critical geopolitics
- Border studies
- Geopolitics of globalization
- Urban Politics
- Electoral Geography
- Feminist Geopolitics

People interested should send us:
- short CV (4-5 pages)
- draft of project (3-4 pages) PRUEBA