When considering place, both individual places and the notion of place itself demand attention. Regional geographic studies of the particularity of places and social constructionist understandings of place as revelatory of deeper process have to be combined with a phenomenological appreciation of Place in the abstract, as a possible precondition of meaning and society. To understand how these appr
oaches are interlaced, it is essential to have multiple disciplines working together. Human and spatial geographies, political, social, military and economic histories, and artistic production and reproduction must all be considered in light of their imbrication. The ‘Taking Place’ research group proposes to continue studying these interactions, with an increased emphasis on the ways in which understandings of a place compliment and contradict one another. Coming together in a place might stimulate creative discourse, but can also lead to violent confrontation, as a place becomes a site of contention. One key understanding of place is as a space in which meaning is dynamically generated in a context of power; local meaning is inflected by factors such as age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. As Tim Cresswell argues in In Place/Out of Place (1996), a sense of place can both engender community and lead to exclusion. A sense of one’s place can create a feeling of belonging, but might equally lead to a heightened fear of change, and the development of an exclusionary politics. This aspect of place has come increasingly to the fore over the course of the first year of Taking Place seminars, in which debates over heritage and monumentality have resulted in fruitful enquiries into what Ivan Karp & Steven D. Lavine describe as the ‘ownership of culture and how it is defined’ (Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, 1991). In light of this, our theme for the 2012–13 academic year is ‘Contested Places’. Exploring acts of appropriation and resistance implicit in ‘Taking Place’, the theme allows for the exploration of crucial contemporary debates concerning the intersection of place and society, from concerns over the Olympic site (raised by Iain Sinclair in last year’s Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project) to the imminent public acts of retrospection marking the centenary of the First World War. Over a series of talks, panels, reading groups and field trips, the group aims to expand discussion of what occurs when there are different takes on a place, or when a place is taken. This thematic development represents a focusing of the foundational investigations carried out in the well-attended opening sessions of the Taking Place research group, and provides a prismatic opening onto the current CRASSH research theme of transregionalism. Recent scholarship on place (Ansi Paasi, ‘Place and Region: Regional Worlds and Words’, 2002) has explored how regions are politically produced, rather than simply identified. We intend to take this further, through an analysis of how this operates across, though, and beyond regional boundaries.
