Emplacing the Local (Spring 2013)

In an era of globalization, where new media connects us in an instant around the world with communities linked only in cyber-space, it would seem that our lives are lived less and less through emplacing ourselves within the spaces we regularly inhabit, and engaging in place-making; that is, seeing ourselves as engaged in the spaces within which we interact and form communities with those around us.  In contrast to such pessimistic predictions, a number of scholars have articulated the ongoing importance of place as part of socially constructed spatialities of postmodernity and neoliberal capitalism at a subjective and community level.  Additionally, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have been drawn away from the easy identification of subjects who are embedded in the time-space compression and increasing kinesis of the contemporary world to the importance of the local and of ongoing, situated practices of creating significance and history.  Foregrounding the matter of place makes way for critical appraisal of questions of local importance, asking how research can and should be engaged, as praxis, with local politics, histories, environments, and arts.