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The notion of sense of place developed across disciplines to study the range of experiential, relational, and emotive attachments between people and spatial constellations. This collection proposes a sense of placing to render visible complex cultural practices of meaning making in, around, and through place, while also encouraging reflection on the epistemes of position.
Whether as physical location, social orientation, or facet of differentiation, relations of place are a central consideration of Cultural Studies: yet, this has not been afforded sustained engagement as a means to analyse dynamics of cultural power. Unpicking the practices that determine, while being determined by, the heres, theres, and somewheres in-between, the contributions showcase engagement with diverse media through which senses are placed and places are sensed. Gathering perspectives from sociology, law, philosophy, human geography, literature, and cultural studies, the volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour to practice a dialogic placing across often siloed academic work.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Circular Hybridity: Reconciling Identity and Place in Randa Jarrar s A Map of Home.- Chapter 3: Environmental Sensemaking and the Body as Cartographic Organizing Principle in the Poetry of the London Underground.- Chapter 4: Framing Places of Concealment, Invisibility and Disarray in Christina Fernandez s Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D.- Chapter 5: Place Making, Pomparles Bridge and Public Space Protection Orders.- Chapter 6: Inventing Ecotopia : Experimental Urban Design in 1970s California.- Chapter 7: Contested Space and Creative Placemaking in Selected Projects by African American Artists Dread Scott and Theaster Gates.- Chapter 8: Thinking-With Sounds: Spatial and Epistemic Configurations.- Chapter 9: Autoethnography in Creative Writing: Exploring Place and Identity Through Autobiographical Narrative Landscapes.- Chapter 10: The Spatiality of Social Media: A Social-Phenomenological and Practice-Theoretical Approach.- Chapter 11: Afterword: Place as a Necessary Social Construct.- Chapter 12: Reorienting Place Research: Upcoming Perspectives and Positions in Practicing Place .
About the author
Sarah Earnshaw (she/her) is a postdoc in American and Cultural Studies whose research interests revolve around spatial compositions of class struggle, labour mobilisation, and practices of freedom and autonomy. She has recently published in Lateral (2024) as well as the monograph Human Rights and Sovereign Standards in US Security (2025).
Summary
The notion of sense of place developed across disciplines to study the range of experiential, relational, and emotive attachments between people and spatial constellations. This collection proposes a sense of placing to render visible complex cultural practices of meaning making in, around, and through place, while also encouraging reflection on the epistemes of position.
Whether as physical location, social orientation, or facet of differentiation, relations of place are a central consideration of Cultural Studies: yet, this has not been afforded sustained engagement as a means to analyse dynamics of cultural power. Unpicking the practices that determine, while being determined by, the heres, theres, and somewheres in-between, the contributions showcase engagement with diverse media through which senses are placed and places are sensed. Gathering perspectives from sociology, law, philosophy, human geography, literature, and cultural studies, the volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour to practice a dialogic placing across often siloed academic work.
