Join us for a complimentary lecture, Behind the Walls: Power, Identity, and the Spaces We Take for Granted, with limited spaces available—register now to secure your spot and gain fresh insight into how everyday spaces shape power, identity, leadership, and organizational culture in ways we rarely stop to question.

Walls are everywhere.  Although we hardly notice them, they define who is legitimate and who is not.  Whether you are inside or outside the walls of a home, office, prison, public building, or even border walls, affects your identity and its legitimacy.  Every time you are uncomfortable in a space, this points to a power imbalance; a value-driven decision, or an ideology.  How we decorate walls is also a way to express identity.  Sometimes we even feel watched by our walls! 

Professor Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott explores how the walls that people take for granted can be turned into objects - unveiling hidden power relations, expressions of identity, and the way these dividers can either maintain the landscape of lives, or interrupt them.  Having spent five years studying the flexible and durable meanings of walls in Nunavut, Dr. van den Scott has shifted her focus from spaces in people’s homes, to spaces at work.  She is currently interview faculty about their office spaces. 

In this talk, Dr. van den Scott will argue that walls are cultural objects, technological objects, and boundary objects.  She will speak to some elements of architecture (ex. wide hallways encourage informal conversation), but will focus on everyday walls (at home and in offices) and how they establish and maintain power relations. There is a connection between how physical spaces are organized and informal interactions, hierarchies, leadership, and organizational culture.  Workplaces quietly influence decision-making, collaboration, and inclusion – or not!

Delivered in partnership with: 

Instructor(s)

Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott

Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott is a Professor of Sociology at Memorial University.  Her research interests include space, place, and time in everyday life.  Her recent book, “Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls,” won the Canadian Sociological Association Book Award honorary mention.  She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, Symbolic Interaction.  Dr. van den Scott is also on the advisory board of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology and has a co-authored textbook on qualitative research methods.