Place and identity

"The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can the 'form of the past' come to persist in the present? Furthermore, how can a region, or a place, make us 'feel' a certain way? Though there are really no ready answers here, let me draw your attention to Thursbitch (2004), a beautiful novel by Alan Garner which tells the story of the valley of the same name. Here, it seems that the landscape gathers together and somehow preserve the lives, thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that valley. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she does from a degenerative disease that causes short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a geologist, Sal can readily name and classify the valley's rocky outcrops and layers at first sight. Yet, there is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that "this place knows we're here". Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a "strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place".

Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic 'gathering' quality. In addition, many have tried to explicate the 'interanimation' of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian, taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, beg us to consider. For the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also "experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts." Interpretative archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places themselves, Tilley writes, "may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them".

Furthermore, particular objects and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of individuals and groups, "providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement." (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch too, where the high stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner and his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be honoured, "just so long as it's done proper, and we mind us manners". The question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the 'sentience' of the landscape.

In Place and Experience (1999), another philosopher of place, Jeff Malpas, demonstrates that place can be seen as a complex but unitary structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. He explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust's In Search of Lost Time to show how places have a fundamental role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in place, but in time also. As he writes, "Proust's achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the spatio-temporal unfolding of place."

My understanding of place has been largely influenced by Jeff Malpas and it makes sense to sketch out here some more of his position. For Malpas, place is definitely not to be regarded as simply a specific region of space, defined chiefly by its objective location. Neither however, is place to be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, that is (as some humanist geographers have at times implied) a personal response to a particular environment that one finds oneself in. Place does indeed have all of these as aspects, but is also so much more. "Places", he writes, "are established in relation to a complex of subjective, intersubjective and objective structures that are inseparably conjoined together within the overarching structure of place as such." In the book Place and Experience (1999), Malpas devotes many chapters of painstaking philosophical analysis, drawing on the likes of Martin Heidegger and Donald Davidson, to show how place possesses this complex but unitary structure. In essence, he argues that far from being grounded in subjectivity, place is itself the ground for all of our experience. In other words, the very nature of human being, of human thought, is established in place. Place, when understood in such a way, takes on an unprecedented significance as the following quotation clearly shows.

"...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a central role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.”

These are striking claims to be sure, and there are ones that I will no doubt come back to in future work. Speaking of which, it is now only a couple of weeks before I begin at university again, a change of place I am very much looking forward too!

References

Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. (1996) ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (Eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage

Malpas, J. E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg

Photo is by Flickr user Revo_1599 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Bringing geography home

I am now gearing up to begin my MRes and subsequent PhD at the Institute of Education in London this October. Here is a taster of some of the things that I will be working on...

"The geographer Tim Cresswell informs us that prospective geography undergraduates often arrive at his university for interview expressing an interest in places and the differences between them. However, this interest is rarely about a deeply theorised notion of what place is as a concept. Cresswell argues that if students at school were to engage with thinking more deeply about place then it might not only ease their transition to university geography, but their experience of studying geography could be enlivened and their understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues enhanced. I find this an appealing argument. The ideas of place, home, identity and belonging are often evoked in the media, and are part of young people's everyday experience. It would seem therefore to be important for them to develop the capacity to think about these issues carefully and critically, in order to take them beyond the 'everyday'. This is a crucial part of what has been termed 'geo-capability'. However, more research is required in order to how to see precisely how this conceptual approach might work in practice. In response to this perceived gap, my research project will be focusing on these two key questions:

• How can we teach and learn geography in way that fosters a richer and more critical understanding of place, home and belonging by drawing upon both the resource that is the academic subject of geography and the experiences of young people?

• What would a geography curriculum built upon and led by such concepts look like and what benefits would this would bring about for learners, in terms of their 'geo-capability'?

My intention is to carry out research with young people and teachers from three Sheffield schools representing considerably varied catchment areas. They will be involved in a project about place, home and belonging. The young people will be asked to keep a multi-media diary documenting personal and shared geographies of their 'home' city of Sheffield over the period of one year. Although the group will have a high degree of autonomy over their project, it is anticipated that they will use an experiential fieldwork approach that may include creative writing, photography and the use of digital media such as online mapping and Twitter. I aim to find an approach that allows young people's voices to speak honestly and freely. My methodology will be chiefly qualitative and will include a large ethnographic component, as I will be accompanying the young people as they carry out fieldwork and compile their diaries, thus being at once researcher and participant. Other techniques that I may employ include interviewing and the analysis of media that students produce during the project.

It is important to recognise that this research will also contribute to broader debates about the role of geography in the school curriculum. It has become commonplace to hear arguments about the irrelevance of 'traditional' school subjects in the information age and their inability to provide young people with the skills they require for the 21st century. However, David Lambert and John Morgan argue that the 'curriculum wars' here alluded to are based on a superficial reading on the relationship between subject knowledge and the curriculum. I agree, and my research is located in opposition to both the idea of a subject discipline as a 'transmittable' body of knowledge but also to the 'debilitating anti-intellectualism' that occurs when subject content is supplanted by a sole focus on educational processes and skills-building. I wish to contribute to an emerging vision for geography education that integrates student experience, teacher knowledge and skills, and the subject resource that is geography. I believe that my research will help clarify important distinctions between everyday experience, pedagogy and the school curriculum as well as contribute to academic discourse on place, home and belonging.."

Photo is by Flickr user Kirk Siang and is made available under a Creative Commons license

A Book of Migrations

This is a very nice book I am reading full of reflections on landscape, identity, migration, belonging and exile. It intertwines these musings in amongst accounts of Solnit's journey along the west coast of Ireland, in a narrative that is almost as winding and unhurried as the country tracks that this landscape itself contains. Strangely, although I was aware that Solnit is a good writer, this is one of those books that has been sat on a shelf for ages, ever since I picked it up cheap at a festival a two or three years ago. I'm glad I finally delved in. What follows, for example, is one intriguing reflection on home and attachment that she offers whilst discussing the rather ordinary and faceless suburb in which she grew up and the wild and beautiful Californian landscape that surrounded it:

The self in education

Photo by Flickr user Robotography

The idea that to be educated is to come to know oneself and one's place in the world (and to be initiated into that privileged world of human being) has a long and distinguished history. From Bildung, through progressive and child-centred education, to the liberal, analytical tradition that flourished with the pioneering work of Peters and Hirst, it would appear that a conscious, rational and autonomous self is a sine qua non of educational philosophy. Even highly conservative theorists have been able to find common ground with progressives on this point.

Place as possibility

Photo by Flickr user clazzi

Place has often been viewed as a sedentary, romantic and somewhat conservative concept and as such it is frequently regarded with great suspicion. The same goes for the notion of 'home'. In a recent thoughtful article on the matter, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting writes,

"The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps this explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding"

The article highlights a set of ideas that are currently refocusing attention on notions of home and the 'geography of our lives'. New localism and environmentalism are both identified as key to this recent re-engagement with place. Bunting goes on to reinterpret home and belonging as 'ongoing projects', the continuous result of a 'shared commitment' and not an allegiance to an unchanging common identity or homeland.