Third Space Theory

The Third Space is a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory of identity and community realised through language or enunciation. It is attributed to Homi K. Bhabha. Third Space Theory explains the uniqueness of each person, actor or context as a “hybrid”.^[1] See Edward W. Soja for a conceptualization of the term within the social sciences and from a critical urban theory perspective.

Origins

Third Space theory emerges from the sociocultural tradition ^[2] in psychology identified with Lev Vygotsky.^[3] Sociocultural approaches are concerned with the “... constitutive role of culture in mind, i.e., on how mind develops by incorporating the community’s shared artifacts accumulated over generations”.^[4] Bhabha applies socioculturalism directly to the postcolonial condition, where there are, “... unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation”.^[5]

Wider use

In media arts theory, the third space has more recently been used by media artist Randall Packer to represent the fusion of the physical (first space) and the remote (second space) into a networked place that can be inhabited by multiple remote users simultaneously or asynchronously (third space). The hybrid notion of blurring the real and the virtual is expanded in the third space through distributed presence, in which the participants of the third space are in distributed physical spaces, essentially, referring to a shared electronic social space. The third space extends the notion of the real and the virtual by suggesting a hybrid space that allows remote participants to engage in social relations with one another at a distance.

In discourse of dissent, the Third Space has come to have two interpretations:

• that space where the oppressed plot their liberation: the whispering corners of the tavern or the bazaar
• that space where oppressed and oppressor are able to come together, free (maybe only momentarily) of oppression itself, embodied in their particularity.^[6]

In educational studies, Maniotes^[7] examined literary Third Space in a classroom where students' cultural capital merged with content of the curriculum as students backed up their arguments in literature discussions. Skerrett ^[8] associates it with a multiliteracies approach.^[9]

Pre-school: Third Space Theory has been applied to the prespace within which children learn to read, bringing domestic and school literacy practices into their own constructions of literacy.^[10]

Another contemporary construction of three “spaces” is that one space is the domestic sphere: the family and the home;^[11] a second space is the sphere of civic engagement including school, work and other forms of public participation; and set against these is a Third Space where individual, sometimes professional,^[12][13] and sometimes transgressive acts are played out: where people let their "real" selves show.

Sporting associations may be labeled as Third Space.^[14] Often bars and nightclubs are so labeled (Law 2000, 46–47). Latterly the term Third Space has been appropriated into brand marketing where domestic spaces and workforce-engagement spaces are set against recreational retail space: shopping malls as third spaces (see Third place, Postrel 2006; and see also Davis 2008). Bill Thompson (2007) offers an opposite conceptualisation of Third Space as public, civic space in the built environment under pressure from shopping malls and corporate enterprises, transforming public space into an extension of the market.

Explanatory and predictive use

Third Space Theory can explain some of the complexity of poverty, social exclusion and social inclusion, and might help predict what sort of initiatives would more effectively ameliorate poverty and exclusion. Bonds of affinity (class, kin, location: e.g. neighbourhood, etc.) can function as "poverty traps".^[15] Third Space Theory suggests that every person is a hybrid of their unique set of affinities (identity factors). Conditions and locations of social and cultural exclusion have their reflection in symbolic conditions and locations of cultural exchange. It appears to be accepted in policy that neither social capital nor cultural capital, alone or together, are sufficient to overcome social exclusion. Third Space Theory suggests that policies of remediation based in models of the Other are likely to be inadequate.

References