A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works.
The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.
Steven Hoelscher is Professor of American Studies and Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. He regularly teaches graduate seminars on the history of photography at the Harry Ransom Center, where he is Academic Curator of Photography. Hoelscher’s books include Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett’s Wisconsin Dells; Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies; and Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America’s Little Switzerland.
Karen E. Till is senior lecturer of geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and codirector of the Space and Place Research Collective at the Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota.