Date
Image
The human experience of and within a landscape guides our sense of place. “Place” can be the political or social boundaries shaped by geography; the activities and livelihoods framed by the environment; the cultural values or affective bond that link a community to a physical setting.
Within a scholarly context, place “informs and structures the ways we teach, undertake, research, and communicate about environmental problems,” explain Brandn Green, Director of the Place Studies Program of the Bucknell Center for Sustainability & the Environment, and Kristal Jones, Food Systems Research Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), in the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (JESS).
The special issue—“Understanding Place: A Multidisciplinary Symposium”—was born of a semester-long lecture series at Bucknell University and two sessions at the 2014 Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) conference. Lecture and session participants were recruited to contribute to the special issue, a diverse collection of essays on place as a descriptive and analytical concept.
One of the essays, “Hot and dry: stability and simplicity in dormancy and austerity” authored by Jones, explores how the human experience of heat can provide insight into the persistence of human systems as temperatures rise. The essay reflects on the characteristics of hot, dry places that help to illuminate unique elements of human–environment interactions within them. Jones writes with a particular focus on dormancy—which, she says, characterizes “the rhythm of life in hot, dry places.”
Jones says the goal of the special issue was to investigate how place functions in different disciplinary traditions or in different research programs.
“We were interested in exploring how using ‘place’ as a conceptual or analytical framework moves forward someone’s research agenda within environmental studies and sciences,” she says. “For example, hot is a scientific characteristic of the climate or physical environment. But hot places are what people make of them—a combination of the physical environment and human interactions with that environment.”
The print edition of Understanding Place: A Multidisciplinary Symposium will be available in September 2015. Online access to essays is available through the journal website.
The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, funded through an award to the University of Maryland from the National Science Foundation, is a research center dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems. Visit us online at www.sesync.org and follow us on Twitter @SESYNC.
Top image: Arid soils in Mauritania, West Africa, courtesy Pablo Tosco/Oxfam via Flickr/Creative Commons.
Share