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ARC Discovery Grant 2006-2008 – DP 0663798
Investigators:
Our research question about how children and adults learn about place is fundamental to the research priority goal of achieving ‘An Environmentally Sustainable Australia’. While it is commonly understood that human interventions in ecological systems are the cause of environmental problems, there has been a disproportionate focus on scientific research and a lack of research on social interactions with the environment.
Place studies has recently emerged as a new interdisciplinary field reconceptualizing the work of early place theorists. Place is productive as a framework because it occupies the space between grounded physical reality and the metaphysical space of representation, facilitating conversations across disciplinary boundaries, conversations which are imperative in addressing questions about human interventions in ecological systems. Place is also profoundly pedagogical, ‘as centers of experience, places teach us about how the world works, and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy. Further, places make us: As occupants of particular places with particular attributes, our identity and our possibilities are shaped’ (David Gruenewald, Foundations of Place, AERJ 40(3)).
Three key concepts
The following key concepts contribute to the conceptual framework of this study:
- Our relationship to places is constructed in stories and other representations.
Place stories can be expressed in a range of ways, including visually in photos, drawings, maps, tables and charts, and in different genres of writing such as scientific and agricultural writing but also poems, novels and other literary forms.
The analytical strategy of storylines, as developed in feminist poststructuralism can be used deconstructively to analyse how stories function to shape places. Changing our relationship to places means changing the stories we tell about places. According to Rose (2004) the major shift in ‘ecological humanities’ has been to introduce new storylines of embodied connection to places.
- Placing the body/embodiment at the centre of place pedagogy research
An important dimension of ecological connectivity is embodiment in place. Ideas about the significance of centering the body in place have been noted in many philosophical approaches. The development of body/place writing is a different version of field notes based on the sensory experience of body-in-place at any particular moment is central. An aspect of this body/place writing is to write the experience of (re)inhabiting place through a series of journal reflections on ordinary states of embodiment through the rhythms of a day in an alternative phenomenology of the body-in-place . Methodologically, the body as a meta-category can be used to identify absences in dominant storylines (decolonisation) and to write new stories of place (reinhabitation).
- Contact zone
The characteristic of place as providing a space for the intersection of different stories is most significant in the relationship between indigenous and other subjugated knowledges and Western academic thought. This in-between space has been described as a ‘contact zone’ and noted as a space of transformative potential. Specific local places offer a material and metaphysical in-between space of cultural exchange described as the contact zone. Paul Carter maintains that the main function of the in-between space of the contact zone is to preserve differences, even to the point of suspending meaning (Carter, 1987). Research about place participates in the contact zone and this means a researcher is required to continually engage with the difficult questions, to move beyond their comfort zone, to refuse easy answers, in order to engage with a critical pedagogy of place.
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