Sustainability through Soja’s trialectic: Influences of social location

All questions of sustainability are spatially constituted; that is, they are mediated by locations in space. In this presentation, the influence of social location in approaches to questions of sustainability is explored by engaging with Soja’s (1996) work in deconstructing and making sense of the varied and multiple ways of encountering and constituting space. Soja’s typology of space recognises a ‘trialectic’ between representations of space, spatial practices and spaces of representation. This threefold structure offers interpretations for the lived experience of spatiality and for the factors that mediate this experience. Drawing on focus group and interview data from participants from diverse social locations, I use Soja’s typology to shift discussions away from spatial tropes and dualistic frames particularly common in sustainability discourses such as ecological/social, global/local, towards nuanced interpretations of spatial relations. I discuss the complexity of participants’ understandings of space, including the importance of fields of practice and identity and explore the influence of media representations in formulations of sustainability concepts to argue that while representations may be similar across the social groups, the representations that participants engaged with, and the interpretations that they made of these representations, both reflected and constituted their understandings of sustainability.