Spatial perspectives on labor and social movements: Multidisciplinary dialogues and dilemmas

This article provides an overview of the study of the spatiality of labor and social movements. It describes how the dialogue between social movement research and critical labor studies has enriched our understanding of the spatiality of social conflict. It begins with a description of the theoretical approaches and research interests that arose in the 1980s as a reaction against Marxist and structuralist perspectives; specifically, New Social Movement theory, drawing on constructivist and poststructuralist approaches and the local and community turn in labor studies. In the second part, the article reviews several works that in recent years have developed new approaches to the spatiality of labor and social movements that pay attention to agency, multiscalarity, and the manifold dimensions of space. The article explores how important developments in social movement research and labor studies have nourished from the intersections of both fields of inquiry.