The team of the RTG “Practicing Place” was invited to publish a Special Issue in the Journal of Practice Theory. Please find the call for papers and all details for submissions (deadline of 30 September 2026) here and below. Guest editors will be Robert Schmidt and Joost van Loon.
This special issue derives from the premise that places are practiced rather than always-already “somewhere”. The objective of the special issue is to demonstrate the importance of place for Practice Theory. From a practice-theoretical perspective, situatedness and localization can be understood and made visible as fundamental characteristics of all practical actions and realities of action.[1] Practices never take place “’atopos, placeless’, as Plato said of Socrates, nor rootless and free-floating”.[2] This situatedness, as a process of em-/displacement, can be seen to characterize both routinised everyday social practices, as well as theoretical, scientific, literary, and artistic practices in equal measure.[3] In the context of new geopolitical confrontations, ecological challenges and heightened social polarization, the conflictuality of practicings of place has emerged as the central direction for Practice Theory and research. This orientation is structured around different thematic areas of empirical conflicts and fundamental conflictuality, which often intersect. These include placings of the political and place-based conceptions of the public sphere, the co-production of contested places by humans and non-human entities, and imaginaries of place in the context of post- and decoloniality, geo- and ecopoetics.[4]
This special issue aims to contribute to a strong interdisciplinary framework for understanding ‘practicing place’ as a research paradigm, that emerges from a consistent practice-theoretical conception of topology. For example, focusing on place as practiced dissolves the static dualism between subjectivity and objectivity by shifting the focus from ‘who acts?’ to ‘what is being bound?’ By exploiting the linguistic doubling of ‘bound’ – serving both as the present perfect of ‘to bind’ (integration) and the root of the verb ‘to bound’ (delimitation) – practicing place can be understood as the simultaneous binding and bounding of experience (phenomenologically) or of situations (pragmatically). Practices are not limited to what is commonly understood as “social action” but include a much wider range of “doings and sayings”[5], including narration and imagination as ensembles of discursive and affective practices.
We are looking for contributions from a variety of disciplines across the social sciences, geography, humanities, cultural studies and philosophy. We request submissions that combine particular case studies of practicing place with theoretical explorations of practices such as emplacement, replacement, displacement and de-placement, both in terms of binding (inclusion) and bounding (exclusion). We particularly welcome contributions focused on conflictuality, imaginaries and “more-than-human” practice-constellations.
References:
[1] Schatzki, T. (2002): The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, University Park: Penn State University Press.
[2] Bourdieu, P. (2000): Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press, p.131.
[3] Earnshaw, Sarah, editor. Cultural Practices of Place: A Sense of Placing. Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave 2025.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-96848-8 
[4] Gutierrez Hernandez, Gustavo and Ulla Stackmann, editors. Practicing and Placing Imaginaries: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Conceptual Ideas, and Case Studies. transcript, 2025. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7585-6/practicing-and-placing-imaginaries/?c=311000198&number=978-3-8394-7585-0
[5] Schatzki, T. (1996): Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social, New York: Cambridge University Press.
The journal is hosted by the Lancaster University Library and part of the Centre for Practice Theory at Lancaster University.