The Great Indoors: Research frontiers on indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces

Abstract

In this progress report we call for nature-society geographers to give greater attention to indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces. Nature-society geographers often treat such spaces as fixed and unnatural. Yet a growing body of research attests to the active role played by sites ranging from homes to factories to shopping malls in the production of nature, scale, and environmental citizens. Furthermore, environmentalist and public health projects have increasingly targeted indoor spaces for scrutiny and action, yet these projects and scientific literature typically lack a critical geographical perspective on scale, space, power, and nature. We argue that exploring indoor environments is necessary to fully encompass socio-natural assemblages that include flows of energy and knowledge, embodied subjects, technologies of power and resistance, and a variety of non-humans.