We are delighted to announce the publication of Cultural Practices of Place: A Sense of Placing, edited by our junior faculty member Sarah Earnshaw and published by Palgrave Macmillan.
The volume brings together a range of disciplinary perspectives to propose a sense of placing as an analytical lens to foreground how places are made, contested, taken, and reimagined in maps of cultural meaning-making, which also emphasises questions of power and position, since placing is always relational and contingent. As Tim Cresswell notes in the afterword, place is a necessary social construct, but one so often taken as a stable, fixed, common-sense in rooting identity, representation, and history. Exploring diverse cultural practices through which senses are placed and places are sensed across mediums including photography, sound, (public) art, legal doctrine, and literature, the contributions dispel such fixed assumptions and explore key themes of practicing place such as the politics of visibility and belonging, struggles of epistemic ordering, and negotiations between imagined and embodied encounters.
Initially stemming from our conference Here, There, and Somewhere in Between in November 2022, the book marks ongoing conversations and contributions of our Practicing Place perspective, enriched through the committed work of the authors. The publication is especially timely as we develop our interrogation of conflictual placings in the second phase, and the book closes with a co-written coda reaching out to future research directions.
We want extend our warm thanks and congratulations to all the contributors, our colleague Sarah Earnshaw, and to the many others whose invaluable work brought this book to the page and screen!
Cultural Practices of Place is available now in print and digital formats.
