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This article analyses the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict, founded in 2013, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, and its use of museum space both within its designated location and the broader socio-spatial surroundings of the neighborhood and city. The museum is discussed as a site that offers space to experience and engage with conflicts about religion, citizenship, caste, identity and belonging in the historically and contemporary, polyphonic processes of Indian nation-making. By unpacking four, partially interrelated, dimensions of spatial transformations in the Conflictorium, the article offers an empirically-grounded understanding of museums’ different spatial strategies to convene information, create affective atmospheres and memories about contentious aspects of contemporary Indian society that might not be attended to in state-run museum or political discourse. In sum, the article argues that museum spaces can function as socio-spatial and -technological infrastructures that forge for the cultivation of consciousness about conflict, and the radical interrelatedness of India’s diverse social fabric.

This article presents a nuanced discussion of four episodes on the complexity of possible trajectories for sustainable futures through diverse but intersecting practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of ‘adaptation and space.’ As design and creative processes evolve, new tools and methods, often adopted from science and technology, are integrated into art, design, and architecture. However, knowledge flow in these developments tends to be unidirectional, with science and technology influencing these fields more than vice versa. The diverse developments relating to the concept of ‘space’ have profound impacts on industries, urban habitats, design approaches, and the arts within the expanded field. This article engages in a conversation from four different disciplinary perspectives, each articulating its own voice in relation to the broad notion of ‘adaptation and space.’ Through this multidisciplinary dialogue, presented in four episodes, it critically contributes to the ongoing discussion on sustainable futures, offering new trajectories for Problem-Based Learning (PBL) beyond disciplinary boundaries. In an era dominated by umbrella terminologies like sustainability, the field of higher education faces the challenge of integrating different expertise to foster new solutions for complex challenges. This article highlights the need for diverse fields such as architecture, art, and social science to engage in a dialogue about perception, interaction, and manipulation of space. Its purpose extends beyond the exploration of novel solutions, instead inviting multifarious perspectives that shape interconnected agencies for sustainable futures and their impact on education.

In this paper, we explore urban cultural politics and policy-making in Austria through the conceptual lens of the arena. In relation to this, we apply the methodological toolbox of Adele CLARKE's situational analysis. With a focus on the dynamics of cultural political conflicts and negotiation, we analyze urban cultural policies and programming. A particular focus is placed on a city-wide cultural program in the city of Graz. Via interpretive analysis of interviews and situational mappings, we aim to analytically unpack the continuous and contingent processes of cultural political negotiation with conflictual consensus as a sensitizing concept. With this objective, our analytical engagement is situated at the intersection between radical democratic theory, referring mainly to Chantal MOUFFE and Oliver MARCHART on the one hand, and social worlds and arenas theory by Adele CLARKE on the other. We hope to contribute to a theoretically sensitized and empirically informed cultural policy research effort by operationalizing the notion of conflictuality in constellations of cultural political actors and negotiation processes in cultural policy-making.