Awareness of space has been heightened in many areas of life in recent times. Within the academic world, whilst there has been aclear surge of interest in the last three decades in the scholarly discipline most bound up with space, that of geography 1 ,itisalso evident that the preoccupation with space has become increasingly interdisciplinary.Adiverse range of high profile theorists have highlighted the importance of space. Marxist professor of literature, Fredric Jameson, for instance, famously asserted that "we live in spacious times" (cited in Thacker 2003, 1). The French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in the posthumously published Des espaces autres (1984) that "l' poque actuelle serait peut-Γtre [β¦] l' poque de l'espace" (1984, 46). Henri Lefebvre, aphilosopher who has become particularly well known for his work on urban space, has gone so far as to argue that time is being ontologically and epistemologically killed off in favour of space in the contemporary world (cited in Shields 1997, 188). Across the Arts and Humanities, then, in fact throughout academe, there has been growing recognition that spatial analysis may shed light on many of our most pressing concerns. As Stephan Kohl indicates in the introduction to this special edition, space is increasingly recognised to play ar ole in individual identity formation. 2 Moreover,a tt he level of society,t he emergence of the New Cultural Geography,b ound up as it has been in postmodern thought, has emphasised the notion that space is not adead passive arena in which things happen, but rather an active force in the world that is imbued with ideology and politics. Space, then, is argued to be inextricably interlinked with social power relations and hierarchies and therefore to underpin all social relationships. 3 These epistemological shifts, combined with the emergence of "space-adjusting technologies" 4 mean that, as Foucault puts it, "je crois que l'inqui tude d'aujourd'hui concerne fondamentalement l'espace, sans doute beaucoup plus que le temps" (1984, 47). It is of little surprise, then, that 1 For discussion of the status of geographyinrecenttimes, see Crow 1996, 4and Claval 1998, 100. 2 See also Benko/Strohmayer1997, 115. 3 On the importance of space within cultural studies and sociology see "Cultural Space and Urban Place" in Barker 2000, chapter 10. For the importance of space within literary studies see Norquay/Smyth 1997. 4 The term 'space-adjusting technologies' is used by Dicken/Lloyd 1981, 45. A related term, 'disembedding mechanisms', is used to refer to communications technologies by Morley 2000, 149.