Thinking night studies through a southern European perspective

Abstract

To emphasise the contribution of situated perspectives to the advancement of the field, this review provides a genealogy of night studies across southwestern Europe. This interdisciplinary field of research has significantly developed in English-speaking scholarly communities, and it has only more recently been growing in importance on southwestern European scholars' research agendas. Usually, they produce research outputs in both English and a Romance language. As a result, intertwined lines of scholarly literature emerge and contribute to the advancement of night studies to different degrees, depending on international readers' proficiency in the employed (Romance) language and (inter)disciplinary interests. To help handle this accessibility issue, this review focuses on what brings night studies together, despite their heterogeneity. That is, the geographical understanding of local night space–times as situated phenomena frequently referred to as nightscape. Accordingly, the review suggests reframing the geographical nightscape as a connective concept to bridge the gaps between multilingual and multidisciplinary research, fostering the interpretation and assemblage of hybrid theoretical frameworks for situated investigations that delve into the diverse and interdependent relations co-producing local night space–times.