Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods

Full text

Bridging environmental and Indigenous studies and drawing on critical
geography, spatial theory, new materialist theory, and decolonizing theory,
this dynamic volume examines the sometimes overlooked significance of
place in social science research. There are often important divergences and
even competing logics at work in these areas of research, some which may
indeed be incommensurable. This volume explores how researchers around
the globe are coming to terms—both theoretically and practically—with
place in the context of settler colonialism, globalization, and environmen-
tal degradation. McKenzie and Tuck outline a trajectory of critical place
inquiry that not only furthers empirical knowledge, but ethically imagines
new possibilities for collaboration and action.
Critical place inquiry can involve a range of research methodologies; this
volume argues that what matters is how the chosen methodology engages
conceptually with place in order to mobilize methods that enable data col-
lection and analyses that address place explicitly and politically. Unlike
other approaches that attempt to superficially tag on Indigenous concerns,
decolonizing conceptualizations of land and place and Indigenous methods
are central, not peripheral, to practices of critical place inquiry.
Marcia McKenzie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educa-
tional Foundations and Director of the Sustainability Education Research
Institute at the University of Saskatchewan.
Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordina-
tor of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New
Paltz.
Place in Research
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1 E-Research
Transformation in Scholarly Practice
Edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski
2 The Mutual Construction of
Statistics and Society
Edited by Ann Rudinow Sætnan,
Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein
Hammer
3 Multi-Sited Ethnography
Problems and Possibilities in the
Translocation of Research Methods
Edited by Simon Coleman and
Pauline von Hellermann
4 Research and Social Change
A Relational Constructionist
Approach
Sheila McNamee and Dian Marie
Hosking
5 Meta-Regression Analysis in
Economics and Business
T.D. Stanley and Hristos
Doucouliagos
6 Knowledge and Power in
Collaborative Research
A Reflexive Approach
Edited by Louise Phillips, Marianne
Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen and
Ewa Gunnarsson
7 The Emotional Politics of
Research Collaboration
Edited by Gabriele Griffin, Annelie
Bränström-Öhman and Hildur
Kalman
8 The Social Politics of Research
Collaboration
Edited by Gabriele Griffin, Katarina
Hamberg and Britta Lundgren
9 Place in Research
Theory, Methodology, and Methods
Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie
Routledge Advances in Research Methods
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Place in Research
Theory, Methodology, and Methods
Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie
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First published 2015
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
The right of Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tuck, Eve.
Place in research : theory, methodology, and methods / by Eve
Tuck and Marcia McKenzie.
pages cm. — (Routledge advances in research methods ; 9)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Space—Social aspects—Research. 2. Social sciences—Research.
I. McKenzie, Marcia. II. Title.
HM654.T83 2015
114—dc23
2014012806
ISBN: 978-0-415-62672-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76484-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
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For our Elders, the Land, and our Children
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Contents
Figures ix
Tables xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
1 Introduction to Place in Research 1
PART I
2 Conceptualizing Place 25
3 Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 48
PART II
4 Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 75
5 Methods of Critical Place Inquiry 97
6 Indigenous Methods of Critical Place Inquiry 126
7 Ethical Imperatives of Critical Place Inquiry 150
Author Biographies 167
References 169
Index 189
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Figures
5.1 “Photographs taken collectively by Miia, Alma, Ida and
Aino during our walk from school” (Kullman, 2012, p. 9). 105
5.2 “Thandizo’s favourite place representing hope (e.g., house
with iron roof, chimney; lady in fashionable clothes; truck;
girl milking cow) and despair (deforestation)” (Kayira, 2013,
p. 139). 108
5.3 “My drawing gives me a feeling of my life: I am standing,
thank God, and I am like the tree because I am trying to be
strong and connected to the ground although my branches
feel the wind” (Huss, 2008, p. 66). 122
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4.1 Paradigms and Their Epistemological, Ontological,
Axiological, and Methodological Orientations to Research 77
4.2 The Things We Do with Research 93
5.1 Themes and Aspects of Place Revealed with Different
Research Methods 100
5.2 Examples of Social Science Data Collection Methods
and Sample Works 119
Tables
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In Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), ethnographer Keith Basso tells the story
of visiting a particular place with two Apache men, hosts and informants
on a cultural geography research project in which participants helped to
collectively map Apache place-names near Cibecue. They were visiting a
circular swale, “ringed by willows and filled with luxuriant grass,” located
near a creek that flowed toward Cibecue (p. 8). It was Basso’s second day
of the study, and his second day of travel through Apache land with Charles
Henry, who was serving as Basso’s escort, showing him places, telling him
their proper Apache names, and sharing some about their significance,
and cultural and historical meanings. They were accompanied by Morley
Cromwell, Henry’s cousin, who translated between Apache and English.
Henry and Cromwell shared with Basso that the place is called Water Lies
With Mud In An Open Container, telling him the name in Apache. Basso
tried to repeat the name, in Apache, but fobbed it, apologizing. This had
become a running theme, even so early in their time together; Henry would
tell him the place-name, and Basso, with some embarrassment, would try to
repeat it, but he was defeated again and again. “I’m sorry, Charles,” Basso
said at the edge of the swale, “I can’t get it. I’ll work on it later, it’s in the
machine [referring to the voice recorder he was carrying]. It doesn’t matter”
(p. 10).
To this, Henry responded with frustration—because it did indeed matter—
with Cromwell quickly translating:
What he’s doing isn’t right. It’s not good. He seems to be in a hurry. Why
is he in a hurry? It’s disrespectful. Our ancestors made this name. They
made it just as it is. They made it for a reason. They spoke it first, a long
time ago! He’s repeating speech of our ancestors. He doesn’t know that.
Tell him he is repeating the speech of our ancestors. (p. 10)
Basso, taken aback and unsettled by the admonition, paused to allow the full
effect of the words to reach him.
But, before Basso could respond, Henry supposed aloud in a self-deprecating
gesture that the missed communications might have been his fault (joking
Preface
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xiv Preface
about his own missing teeth). With this generous act, Basso was invited to
try again to form the name in his mouth again, this time with a sense of the
seriousness that the words of ancestors require.
Basso continues to tell this story, and many other stories of his work with
Apache men and women to map the words of their ancestors for the places
they inhabit throughout the rest of the book. Explaining the need for such a
project, Basso contends that ethnographers, “much like everyone else, take
sense of place for granted, and ethnographic studies exploring their cultural
and social dimensions are in notably short supply” (1996, p. xiv). Calling
the project an ethnography of place-making, Basso uses the story of his own
learning about places’ names as the speech of ancestors to draw attention to
the multidimensional significance of place(s), as “durable symbols of distant
events and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them” (p. 7).
As we describe in Chapter 1, the book before you also seeks to draw
attention to the multidimensional significance of place(s) in social science
research, not just as “durable symbols or the distant past” (Basso, 1996,
p. 7), but as sites of presence, futurity, imagination, power, and knowing.
This is an important time to write about place, not just because social sci-
ence, in general practice, doesn’t give place its due, but because we write from
and into the overlapping contexts of globalization and neoliberalism, settler
colonialism, and environmental degradation. We do not see the practices of
social science and these overlapping contexts as disconnected. Rather, to use
Kim Tallbear’s (2013) term, they are coproduced, meaning science and soci-
ety are actively entangled with each other. They are mutually constitutive
in that “one loops back in to reinforce, shape, or disrupt the actions of the
other, although it should be understood that because power is held unevenly,
such multidirectional influences do not happen evenly” (p. 11).
As Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley observed,
Throughout the world many people are beginning to recognize sig-
nificant changes that are underway, be it with weather and climate
shifts, ecological contamination and disruptions, depletion of natural
resources, societal inequities with the rich getting richer and the impov-
erished growing in large numbers, population expansion among the
poor growing exponentially, and violence on the increase. The negative
effects of these changes are exacerbated by the hyper-consumerism of
Western society, which has perpetuated the impoverishment of many
Third World countries through exploitation of low production and
manufacturings costs. Recognition of these transformational factors in
many societies has contributed to people demanding changes in the way
we live and in our use of nature. (Kawagley, 2006, p. 123)
Coproduction of practices of social science, globalization and neoliberalism,
settler colonialism, and environmental degradation comprises both the bar-
rier and the possibility to making the changes needed for the sustainability
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Preface xv
of (human) life on the planet. As we suggest in Chapter 3, decolonization
may be something the land does on its own behalf, even if humans are too
deluded or delayed to make their own needed changes.
Our work together on critical place inquiry builds on our separate trajec-
tories and identities as an Unangan scholar (Eve Tuck) and as an environ-
mental scholar from Canada (Marcia McKenzie). Both of us work primarily
in Education, as it intersects with Indigenous studies (Eve) and environmen-
tal studies (Marcia). Though Education is the field in which we most often
do research and writing, we look to, read in, and think through work hap-
pening in other social science fields in order to inform our work. While we
may think of Education as an intellectual home base, this book is designed
to draw upon (and speak to) a variety of social science fields.
Working in our respective intersections, we met at a conference planning
meeting in Chicago in 2009. The theme of the conference we were helping to
plan included the language of “complex ecologies” to refer to the conditions
and systems of educational research and practice. We were mutually con-
cerned about the organization’s apparent imperviousness to environmental
and social issues suggested in the irony of using the language of ecology
without any mention of actual ecosystems. In our view, “complex ecologies”
was being employed as a metaphor, emptied of its connections to place,
land, and environment. Given the mounting pressures of climate change, oil
spills, and other environmental issues that are affecting the land and lives of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people around the globe, we saw a need to
draw attention to this problematic lack of attention at a conference suppos-
edly concerned with children, youth, and education.
In response to this concern, together with another colleague, Jillian Ford,
we designed a highlighted session on “demetaphorizing complex ecologies,”
featuring a mix of environmental and Indigenous scholars and practitioners,
some working locally and others based elsewhere. Our hope was that the
panel would be an opportunity to establish mutual concerns, but also would
identify gaps and challenges between these two fields. What initially seemed
a small but promising act of transdisciplinary collaboration and intervention
into institutional norms, however, became more complicated as speakers
from the distinct trajectories of environmental and Indigenous scholarship
mobilized contradictory language and understandings in their panel presen-
tations. The worldviews, epistemologies, and lexicons mobilized by environ-
mental scholars and Indigenous scholars were not only contradictory, but
perhaps even incommensurable.
For example, in a paper by Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley (read by his close
friend and colleague, Ray Barnhardt), Kawagley observed, “We know that
Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture” (see also Kawagley,
2010, p. xiii). Environmental education scholars on the panel used the
forum to consider how humans might establish deeper relationships with
nature. Two powerful perspectives emerged from the discussion, and both
seemed to grapple with the same notion of the inseparability of humans
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xvi Preface
with nature. The first, expressed by Kawagley and other Indigenous scholars
on the panel, insisted that Indigenous peoples have always had relation-
ships to land that are distinct and sovereign from relationships imposed by
settlers. This perspective emphasized a recognition of the inseparability of
humans and nature as concomitant with Indigenous cosmologies and episte-
mologies. The other perspective, expressed by environmental scholars, was
that further environmental degradation could only be prevented through
more ethical and respectful relationships of humans to place. This perspec-
tive was notably silent on the claims of Indigenous peoples to have prior,
intact relationships to their land, but instead seemed to desire to form new
relationships to the very same territory, without recognition of those prior
claims. Audience members came away from the panel energized by the very
apparent disconnections, silences, and obvious contradictions, but still oth-
ers were offended, seeing some assertions made by both sides as exclusive
and even disrespectful.
A few years later, at the same conference, we organized another session
that brought Indigenous and settler scholars together to discuss the differ-
ences between settler colonial relations to place and Indigenous relations to
land. Here, too, some of the incommensurabilities between environmental
studies literatures and Indigenous studies literatures emerged. This time, the
incommensurabilities were not embodied by the panelists, as in the prior
panel, but instead were observed in the papers by panelists Megan Bang,
Troy Richardson, K. Wayne Yang, Dolores Calderon, and Kate McCoy.
Together, their papers pointed to the ways in which social sciences, when
not cognizant of settler colonial structures, can replicate some of the epis-
temic violences of settler colonialism and exhibit some of the tendencies of
that structure to accumulate at all costs (see also Tuck & Guishard, 2013).
Several years and several collaborations later, we have had more oppor-
tunities to become aware of the ways in which environmental research in
education, as in most other fields across the social sciences, continues to be
mired in assumptions and practices that perpetuate forms of colonialism
and racism, despite well-meaning intentions to the contrary. A recently co-
authored introduction to a special issue on “Land education: Indigenous,
postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental
education research” discusses this further in relation to the field of (envi-
ronmental) education (Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014).
Environmental and Indigenous concerns are not mutually exclusive
domains: on the contrary, they are necessarily entwined. This reality has
entered popular discourse and is strengthening social movements resisting
extractive and polluting industries; fighting for public access to clean water;
and responding to climate change, climate justice, and other social and envi-
ronmental issues affecting communities around the globe. However, with
the typical siloing of scholarly fields, to date there has been little discussion
across these domains in academia. As we have suggested, where there are
attempts, situated within historical blank spots and systemic oppression,
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Preface xvii
those working in these areas do not always effectively hear one another.
Steeped in challenges and more to be done, we are hopeful that the discus-
sions of this book will help contribute to broader engagement of the pos-
sibilities for contingent collaborations and valuable incommensurabilities
(Tuck & Yang, 2012) across these domains and their importance for consid-
ering place in social science research. As part of that, we also hope to con-
tribute to understandings that social science research that better addresses
place is one part of what is needed to redress the consequences of colonial-
ism and enable the sustainability of (human) life on the planet.
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Together we acknowledge St. Paul Island, Alaska; Cornwall and Hershey,
Pennsylvania; Brooklyn, New York; Cortlandt Manor, New York; Shabomeka
Lake, Ontario; and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
We acknowledge those who labored alongside us to make this book pos-
sible: Jean Kayira, Jeff Baker, Sofia Saiyed, Valerie Zink, Ranjan Datta, and
Mark Brigland-Pritchard. Thank you also to Nicola Chopin, Philip Vaughter,
Ranjan Datta, Jen McRuer, Kathleen Aikens, Heather Lake, Jeh Custerra,
and Kristin Hargis for the support and time needed to complete this project.
We acknowledge Max Novick, our expert editor at Routledge.
We acknowledge our collaborators, those who do this work with us,
who think with us on the walking, and who have helped inform our think-
ing towards this book: K. Wayne Yang, Monique Guishard, Kate McCoy,
Brian K. Jones, Kondwani Jackson, Mistinguette Smith and the Black/Land
Project, Joe Henderson, Alex Wilson, Jonas Greve Lysgaard, Karen McIver,
Hamish Ross, Alan Reid, and Randy Haluza-DeLay.
We acknowledge our colleagues and friends who encouraged us along
the way, including Sarah Buhler, Lise Kossick Kouri, Ellen Quigley, Danny
Beveridge, Janet McVittie, Dianne Miller, Bob Regnier, Leigh Patel, Kathleen
Nolan, Julie Gorlewski, Kate McCoy, Stephanie Waterman, Cindy Cruz, Ro
Millham, Jessica Bissett Perea, Kiersten Greene, Jen Jack Gieseking, Jenn
Milam, Beth Blue Swadener, JoAnn Schmier, Karanja Keita Carroll, and
Michael D. Smith.
Our families have our deepest recognition: Kevin, Kieran, Beverly, Melody,
John, Justin, Sarah, Masura, Lenore, Eugene, John, Kae, Dale, Jean, John,
Nancy, Gregory, and Helena.
Acknowledgments
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“What do people make of places? The question is as old as people
and places themselves, as old as human attachments to portions of the
earth.”
Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 1996, p. xiii
Social science research is always situated physically, in some instances in
particular locations, in others, across borders. Social science research is
always undertaken by researchers and participants embedded in places,
places that are both local and global, shaped by and constitutive of culture
and identity. Thus, research in the social sciences is always concerned with
epistemologies, questions, and methods that impact place and land, and
the human and natural communities that inhabit them. These realities of
research have been largely overlooked in many fields: as we detail in this
book, place is significant in research.
Our articulation of the practices and trajectories of place in research is
situated on the cusp of a renewed interested in “place” in the social sci-
ences, evident both in the increased attention to decolonizing research and
Indigenous methodologies, as well as in relation to “spatial” and “material”
turns in the social sciences more broadly. Although there is a renewed inter-
est in place, this does not always mean that place is engaged meaningfully.
Throughout this book, we aim to deepen readers’ considerations of place
to grapple not only the physical and spatial aspects of place in relation to
the social, but also more deeply with how places and our orientations to
them are informed by, and determinants of, history, empire, and culture. As
David Harvey (1989) has observed, “How we represent space and time in
theory matters, because it affects how we and others interpret and then act
with respect to the world” (p. 205). This book seeks to develop complex
and historicized orientations to place in research through providing social
science researchers with rationales, discourses, examples, and methods of
critical place inquiry, or in other words, research that more fully considers
the implications and significance of place in lived lives. Beyond the further-
ing of social science empirical knowledge, we advocate for theoretically and
Introduction to Place
in Research
1
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2 Place in Research
ethically responsive research in the context of the globalization of the planet,
its populations, and places. The chapters that follow will help readers under-
stand and make decisions about conducting research that critically engages
places and people’s relationships with them.
Thus, in this introduction and in the chapters that follow, we elaborate the-
orizations and practices of critical place inquiry in the social sciences. By this
we mean research that takes up critical questions and develops corresponding
methodological approaches that are informed by the embeddedness of social
life in and with places, and that seeks to be a form of action in responding to
critical place issues such as those of globalization and neoliberalism, settler
colonialism, and environmental degradation. In what follows, we examine
ways in which place is being deployed conceptually and empirically in social
science research, methodologies and methods through which meaningful
engagement of place can be undertaken, and the ethical and political implica-
tions and possibilities of critical place inquiries as public scholarship.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT NOW? INDIGENOUS
AND ENVIRONMENTAL COLLABORATIONS
An increased focus on place in critical research matters because it enables
greater attention to the ways in which land and environmental issues inter-
sect with social issues and social life. Just some examples of these intersec-
tions include the following:
• Issues of borders, displacement, and (re)place-making for diasporic
and refugee populations
• War and militarism in relation to territorial identification or expansion
• The role of spatial and place-based practices in colonialism and set-
tler colonialism, from practices of property ownership to those of the
environmental poisoning of fish and wildlife on Indigenous traditional
territories
• Access to healthy food, equitable education, or the uneven geographic
distribution of other social services within urban environments based
on racialization, gender, or economic disparities
• Municipal and regional inequities in the distribution of environmental
harms, such as the location of industrial or nuclear waste storage
• Global North-South inequities in which those regions and populations
hardest hit are those least responsible for climate change
• Human-caused harm and extinction of other forms of life
• Intergenerational injustices entailed in loss of places and species, and
the increasing possibility of human extinction due to climate change
The conditions for these and other interwoven social and environmen-
tal forms of injustice have been created by long histories of hierarchical
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Introduction to Place in Research 3
divisions among peoples, to other species, to the land. Legacies and
ongoing practices of Empire and globalization, racialization and privi-
lege, and destructive land management practices, exacerbated by indus-
trialization, capitalism, and increasing global mobility, have created
circumstances in which inequalities on almost all scales are increasing
(e.g., inequalities in financial wealth within most countries, global eco-
nomic inequalities between countries, interspecies injustice, intergenera-
tional injustice) (IPCC, 2013).
Neoliberalism, as a term used to describe currently dominant global and
globalizing governance systems, promotes “free-market” conditions that
prioritize corporations and economic growth over considerations of social
equity or environmental protection. As Peck (2013) suggests, neoliberal-
ization processes should be viewed as operating alongside other dominant
trajectories, such as those of globalization, as well as taking hybrid forms in
relation to more localized histories and priorities. While variegated across
nations and social contexts, various formations of neoliberalism can be
understood to share an emphasis on privatization, public-sector austerity,
tax cuts, and regulatory restraint. For our discussions here, we particularly
want to point out a less articulated characteristic of neoliberalism as a cur-
rent formation of capitalism and Empire, which is the reliance on territory
and the natural environment to fuel unsustainable and colonialist economies.
One component of this largely absent analysis of political systems in
relation to land is the relationship between capitalism and the biophysical.
This comprises a focus in Neil Smith’s (2008) book Uneven Development:
Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, which Noel Castree (2007)
summarizes as follows:
Smith argues that the biophysical world is both a condition of, and pro-
pellant to, capital’s uneven development in space and time. This is true
not only in the case of nature-dependent industries and areas (think of
agricultural, forestry and mining districts, or fisheries communities). It
is more generally true for capital writ-large, since ultimately all aspects
of capitalist society are nature-dependent in some way, shape or form:
the making, moving, selling, servicing, consuming and disposal of any
and all commodities necessarily requires raw materials, energy sources,
physical spaces and waste disposal opportunities. It follows, for Smith,
that uneven development is simultaneously a political economic and
biophysical process. Capital’s restless search for new investment oppor-
tunities and new markets routinely entails: (i) the abandonment of no
longer productive zones (where the conditions of production may be
deteriorating and too costly or risky to fix); (ii) biophysical changes
in ‘virgin’ territories because new energy- and raw-material intensive
infrastructures may emerge combined with new productive activities
that may themselves make large biophysical demands; and (iii) the use
of these territories as absorption zones for surplus capital from growth
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4 Place in Research
regions, including myriad resource-commodities like trees, foodstuffs
and minerals in search of market opportunities. At moments of crisis—
economic, political and reproductive—environmental problems in one
area can become the impetus for new rounds of biophysical transforma-
tion elsewhere as capital switches (often speculatively) into new growth
areas. But even in non-crisis conditions, Smith argues, the compulsion
to work existing biophysical assets harder and seek-out new ones is
part-and-parcel of capitalism’s normal functioning. (pp. 32–33)
However, despite (neoliberal) capitalism’s reliance on the biophysical, Cas-
tree (2007) suggests that most recent assessments of neoliberalism, such as
David Harvey’s (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, or Andrew Glyn’s
(2006) Capitalism Unleashed, pay little attention to associated consider-
ations of climate change, water resource management, biodiversity loss, or
other biophysical issues, focusing instead on topics such as employment,
trade, and welfare provision. Going beyond these macro-analyses to con-
sider more specialized books, journals, and working papers, Castree found
that the majority of the critical literature on neoliberalism was dispropor-
tionately focused on issues other than environmental ones:
For instance, a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge at the time of writing
reveals over 500 peer review publications containing the world ‘neolib-
eralism’ as a title or keyword. However, a search using additional terms
such as agriculture, farming, fisheries, forestry, water resources, mining
and so on reveals that only about one fifth of these writings focus on the
relationship to the non-human world in some way, shape or form. (p. 9)
Our more recent searches for this book indicate a maintained relative lack
of focus on the relationships between neoliberalism or capitalism and land
or environment, particularly in meta-analytic discussions.
A second aspect of problematic relationships between dominant political
systems and the land are the historical and ongoing land-based practices of
colonialism and, in particular, settler colonialism. As will be described at
length in Chapter 3, the legacies of the spatial practices of European colo-
nization over the past 500 years in many parts of the globe continue to be
supported by governments, but also social practices more generally, which
establish and reify hierarchies of settler over Indigenous. Seeking to uncover
the traces and effects of (settler) colonialism, scholarship in settler colonial-
ism is quickly growing in scope and impact, and we draw on it extensively
in this volume to problematize settler relations to land as they affect Indig-
enous peoples, land, and other life forms, including as linked to current
environmental devastation and curtailed possibilities for future generations.
Settler and colonial futurities based on expansionist, capitalist, and racist
assumptions necessitate practices of decolonization in order to re-prioritize
Indigenous and land-based futurities (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
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Introduction to Place in Research 5
Based in these intersecting absences in much social science research, this
book highlights research that does elaborate and address the embeddedness
of social life, including economic policy, with land and environment. This
includes work on global mobilities and post-carbon social theory (Elliot &
Urry, 2010), power geometries and politics of place (Katz, 2004; Massey,
2005), the land-based mechanisms of settler colonialism (Byrd, 2011; Wolfe,
1999), and the political contexts of environmental injustice (Walker, 2012).
We draw on these and other examples of research theorizing place, as well
as those discussing implications for methodologies and methods of critical
research, in order to advocate for greater consideration of place in social
science research, particularly at this critical juncture of human and planetary
history.
Thus, this book seeks to convince readers to take place more seriously
in social science inquiry in order to further research and associated action
on human and land-based injustice, to current and future generations. The
entire volume is dedicated to providing rationales, exemplars, and looks to
the future for making place (more) significant in social science inquiry. We
highlight examples from across social science research that take up place not
only as the topic of the research in many cases, but as central to the process of
making research-based knowledge and action. Throughout the volume we
attend to theories and conceptualizations of place, methodologies of place,
and methods of place. Our hope is that in these pages, readers will find
inspiration and guidance in designing social science research that engages
place meaningfully.
The approach of this book is uncommon because it seeks to bring decolo-
nizing Indigenous studies, environmental scholarship, and related critical
areas concerned with place into conversation with one another. These com-
prise areas of study that address many similar topics, but that remain quite
distinct in epistemology, discourse, and practice. There are often important
divergences and even competing logics at work in these areas of research,
some that may indeed be incommensurable. The book brings these areas
into conversation, without papering over the differences, but also without
maintaining false dichotomies. Instead, as collaborating authors located in
environmental and Indigenous studies, we bridge these and related domains
to examine place in social science research, and in doing so, define and con-
tribute to the emerging area of critical place inquiry.
This book seeks to offer cross-disciplinary insight into how researchers
around the globe are theoretically and empirically engaging, or re-engaging,
place in social science research. The book maps the emergence of what we call
critical place inquiry; marks the historical, economic, colonial, and ecological
conditions that necessitate such inquiry; offers new directions for methodolo-
gies and methods of place inquiry; and highlights research efforts around
the world that inform how one can understand and inhabit place through
research. In so doing, the book examines and provides insight into the why,
what, and how of developing critical place research in the social sciences.
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6 Place in Research
UNDERSTANDING PLACE
Although it may at first seem self-evident, place is a complex concept, and
most often is defined in relation to space. Agnew (2011) suggests that space,
“is regarded largely as a dimension within which matter is located or a grid
within which substantive items are contained” (p. 317). Karen Barad (2007)
observes,
The view of space as container or context for matter in motion—spa-
tial coordinates mapped via projections along axes that set up a met-
ric for tracking the locations of the inhabitants of the container, and
time divided into evenly spaced increments marking a progression of
events—pervades much of Western epistemology. (p. 223)
The Western philosophical tradition of the term space, as it is used now,
arose in the seventeenth century, emerging from Newtonian and Leibnizian
conceptualizations. In the Newtonian conceptualization, space is itself an
independent entity, no matter what or if it is occupied by objects or events
(Agnew, 2011, p. 318). In this view, space is concrete, and indeed it is this
concreteness that makes it real. In contrast, in the Leibnizian conceptual-
ization, space is relational and dependent, holding no powers itself. In this
view, space is active, yet “entirely parasitic on the relations between objects
and events occupying places” (Agnew, 2011, p. 319).
Donna Haraway’s (1997) critique of models of spatialization updates the
Leibnizian construction:
Spatialization as a never-ending, power-laced process engaged by
a motley array of beings can be fetishized as a series of maps whose
grids nontropically located naturally bounded bodies (land, people,
resources—and genes) inside “absolute” dimensions such as space and
time. The maps are fetishes in so far as they enable a specific kind of
mistake that turns process into nontropic, real, literal things inside con-
tainers. (p. 136)
The description of spatialization offered by Haraway is an extension of the
Leibnizian construction of space because it does not characterize space as
static or concrete or absolute, but instead as dynamic, interactive, indeed,
as a process. Haraway’s updating of the Leibnizian construction depicts it
as power-laced rather than as having no powers of its own; this rejoinder
allows for analyses of how power and place are coproduced. Haraway’s and
others’ extensions of Leibnizian constructions of space have inspired much
of contemporary spatial theory, especially theories that expound upon rela-
tional and shifting aspects of space.
“Place,” although used in multiple ways in the English language (as rank,
as temporality, as position), is perhaps most importantly used to convey
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Introduction to Place in Research 7
geographic meaning (Agnew, 2011, p. 318). In many Western definitions of
place(s), the focus is on its/their specificity—either by singular spatial met-
ric (latitude-longitude, elevation), or the non-exchangeability of one place
with another (Farinelli, 2000). Agnew (2011) explains that after many years
of regard and dis-regard as a static concept, place underwent a significant
revival in the field of geography in the 1970s and 1980s (p. 320). In part,
this was a response to positivism, and was made possible by the insight that
“the term place carries with it not only the meaning of spatial location but
also those of social position and moral order” (Agnew, 2011, p. 322; see
also Tuan, 1974; Barad, 2007). Michael Curry (1998) express the insights
of this revival as follows:
The relationship between an object and where it belongs is not simply
fortuitous, or a matter of causal forces, but it is rather intrinsic or inter-
nal, a matter of what that thing actually is. When things are not where
they belong, they cannot truly be themselves. (p. 48)
Thus, the revival of conceptualizations of place that occurred in the 1970s
and 1980s was concerned with the mediating role of place in social rela-
tions and in meaning-making (Massey, 1984). This revival has had many
ripple effects in the field of geography, but Agnew laments that this “socially
and morally inflected sense of place” has not been substantively engaged in
fields beyond geography (2011, p. 322).
Although there has been this intensified interest in the physical locations
of social life and research, at the same time, theorizations of identity and
globalization have led to critiques of terminology and theorizations of place
in social research (e.g., Massey, 1994; Rose, 1993). Considering the ways in
which factors such as gender, racialization, nationality, or access to finan-
cial or technological resources affects people’s access to, mobility across,
and experiences of place, some scholars have suggested that the defining
of places is problematic. Or in other words, “the terminology of ‘place’
is seen by some as ignoring process, power relations, and remaining too
bounded” (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, p. 9). In addition, Agnew (2011)
argues that other social sciences still adopt the view of the nation-state, not
the community or place, as the main geographic unit of account or concern.
He contends that social sciences problematically rely on evolutionary or
linear understandings of human history, in which community-place has been
superseded by notions of nation-space, putting false weight in narratives of
(civilized) society and modernity.
As a final point on Agnew’s (2011) work on space and place, he observes
that current notions of the world as increasingly “flat” or “placeless” (e.g.,
Friedman, 2005) are ignorant of deeper meanings of both space and place.
In views of the world as flat—primarily yielded through commentaries on
globalization—new technologies, the internet, cellular phones, seem to
make place(s) obsolete (Agnew, 2011, p. 317). Globalization, as represented
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8 Place in Research
by big-box chain stores that dot the landscape of otherwise very different
places, makes it seem that place matters far less than it used to matter.
Indeed, writing about place in the social sciences may seem almost quaint, or
even passé (Casey, 2009). Talking about the impacts of these circumstances
on the field of anthropology, Coleman and Collins (2006) write about the
“simultaneous prominence and disappearance of place in contemporary eth-
nography,” explaining the following:
In a curious sense places have disappeared—or at the least the bound-
aries around them have become deeply problematized as connections
between culture and territory, identity and fixed community, are chal-
lenged. It may be a sign of the times that a recent textbook on “key
concepts” in social and cultural anthropology by Rapport and Overing
(2000) lacks an entry on the concept of place, but does have one on
non-places. (see Augé, 1995, p. 2)
Thus, theorists and researchers attendant to issues of space and place must
work against the seemingly common-sense conclusions of popular analyses
of globalization, which, not operating from a complex conceptualization of
space and place, attempt to foretell the end of place. As Edward S. Casey
insists,
We do not live in space. Instead, we live in places. So it behooves us
to understand what such place-bound and place-specific living consists
in. However lost we may become by gliding rapidly between places,
however oblivious to place we may be in our thought and theory, and
however much we may prefer to think of what happens in a place rather
than of the place itself, we are tied to place undetachably and without
reprieve. (Casey, 2009, p. xiii, italics original)
Beyond the under-theorizing of place, it is typical for place to be superfi-
cially addressed in social science inquiry. Many social science professional
mores require researchers to clearly define what was learned and how it
was learned. When is important too, especially in fields in which the most
cutting-edge and recent research is given favor, and others in which longitu-
dinal studies are valued. Where, however, is not always given much atten-
tion, beyond a few notes at the outset of a dissertation or publication, and
then usually only by place name. Basso (1996) writes,
Places, to be sure, are frequently mentioned in anthropological texts
(“The people of X . . . ,” “The hamlet of Y . . .” “The market-place
at Z . . .”), but largely in passing, typically early on, and chiefly as a
means of locating the texts themselves, grounding them, as it were, in
settings around the world. And with that task accomplished the texts
move ahead, with scarcely a backward glance, to take up other matters.
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Introduction to Place in Research 9
Practicing ethnographers, much like everyone else, take sense of place
for granted, and ethnographic studies exploring their cultural and social
dimensions are in notably short supply. Human attachments to places,
as various and diverse as the places to which they attach, remain, in
their way, an enigma. (p. xiv)
Thus, in much social science research, place is just the surface upon which
life happens (and from which data are collected) (Massey, 1994). If men-
tioned at all, it is usually as the backdrop of the inquiry, described briefly
beneath headings like “the research site,” or “the research context.” Con-
sider the number of studies that use designations such as “urban,” “rural,”
“Southern,” or “small,” to describe where the work has taken place. Such
terms are used frequently, but rarely are further examined through the
research.
Thus we suggest that discussions of place are located on the periphery in
most social science inquiry, not as core components of the analysis or in the
selection and development of a research methodology and methods of data
collection and analysis. If place is mentioned at all, it is typically inserted at
the outset in discussion of the research site, rather than engaged as part of
the analysis or considered in terms of the specifics of research methodology
or methods. Although much work has been done to bring concepts of place
and space forth from their earlier seventeenth-century conceptualizations,
it is those conceptualizations and not their revivals that are still employed
most commonly in social science research (Agnew, 2011). This has implica-
tions for the richness of theories of space and place engaged in social science
research, but also for how the relationships between space and place are
usually understood.
RECENT TURNS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
Although Agnew (2003, 2011) worries over the minimal engagement of
disciplines outside of geography in issues of space and place, there have been
important “turns” in social sciences that somewhat unsettle his assessment.
Here, and returned to throughout this volume, we discuss the increasing
influence of Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives, the spatial turn, and
the new materialist or ontological turn.
Indigenous and Decolonizing Perspectives
and Methodologies
In recent decades, perspectives of Indigenous scholars have found their way
to greater numbers of readers, achieving more and more influence. This
trend is evident in the wide circulation and use of books like Linda Tuhiwai
Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999/2012); Denzin, Lincoln, and
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10 Place in Research
L. T. Smith’s Handbook on Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (2008);
and the creation of numerous professional associations, graduate programs,
and academic journals on Indigenous studies around the globe in the past
15 years.
Shawn Wilson (2008) emphasizes the ways in which Indigenous method-
ologies are typified by a kind of internal consistency, meaning Indigenous
cosmologies, cosmogonies, worldviews, and ethical beliefs are evident in
every aspect in Indigenous inquiry. In Indigenous approaches, it is the people
who decide what should be studied, and researchers are held accountable
not only to developing useful knowledge, but also to adhering to cultural
expectations and to fostering ethical relationships along the way. In part,
this is because of the long history that Indigenous peoples have had with
unethical researchers, but also the unethical ways that Indigenous materi-
als, samples, stories, and intellectual property have been improperly han-
dled and dispersed in academe (see also L. T. Smith, 1999/2012; Tuck &
Guishard, 2013).
Although many historians and other observers have characterized Indig-
enous intellectual traditions as almost exclusively oral traditions, recent
works (Brooks, 2008; Erdrich, 2003) have tried to dislodge that narrative,
insisting instead that there have always been intimate, synthesizing relation-
ships between oral and written and image-based meaning-making (called
knowledge production, in the academy). Indeed as Erdrich (2003) has
noted, the words for book and rock painting are almost the same in Ojibwe
language, and as Brooks (2008) has noted, the words for draw, write, and
map have the same root in Abenaki language; through tracing the roots of
the words in Abenaki, Brooks is able to conclude that the book and the map
are the same thing (2008, p. xx–xxii).
Looking to Indigenous languages helps to demonstrate the differences
between understandings of space and place (and time) that exist between
Western/colonial frameworks and Indigenous knowledge systems. Linda
Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2012) observes that,
The Maori word for time or space is the same. Other indigenous lan-
guages have no related word for either space or time, having instead a
series of very precise terms for parts of these ideas, or for relationships
between the idea and something else in the environment. (p. 52)
In contrast to the diversity of understandings of space, place, and time in
Indigenous knowledge systems, Smith depicts Western philosophies of space
as being divorced from time. This separation,
is particularly relevant in relation to colonialism. The establishment of
military, missionary or trading stations, the building of roads, ports,
and bridges, the clearing and the mining of minerals all involved pro-
cesses of marking, defining, and controlling space. There is a very
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Introduction to Place in Research 11
specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled
around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the center, and (3) the outside.
The ‘line’ is important because it was used to map territory, to survey
land, to establish boundaries, and to mark the limits of colonial power.
The ‘center’ is important because orientation to the center was an ori-
entation to the system of power. The ‘outside is important because it
positioned territory and people in an oppositional relation to the colo-
nial center. (p. 55)
Thus, one major outgrowth of the increased attention to Indigenous per-
spectives and methodologies in academic discourse is the recognition
that alternative, long-held, comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated
understandings of place exist outside, alongside, against, and within the
domain of the Western philosophical tradition. These understandings of
place, often framed in terms of land, derive from entirely different episte-
mological and cosmological foundations and, thus, cannot be easily com-
bined or absorbed into Western argumentations. They come from, and go
to, a different place.
This is not an assertion that Indigenous conceptualizations of land are
pristine, devoid of Western philosophical influence, or even that keeping
Indigenous theory pristine from colonial and settler influences is possible
or most desirable (Smith, 2012). But the persistence/existence of Indigenous
theorizations and methodologies of land serve as rejoinder to Western theo-
rizations of place, to mark how theories of the West have also been shaped
by its colonial and settler histories and current pursuits.
As we discuss more fully in Chapters 2 and 3, Indigenous conceptualiza-
tions of land are diverse, specific, and particular. They often derive from
Indigenous cosmologies, meaning Indigenous conceptualizations of land are
abundant with aspects of relationships to and within the universe.
Scott Morgensen (2011) asserts that Indigenous methodologies are tied
to a larger project of Indigenous decolonization; they do not merely model
Indigenous research, but “denaturalize power within settler societies and
ground knowledge production in decolonization” (p. 805). Decolonizing
perspectives, informed by Indigenous perspectives, seek to undo the real and
symbolic violences of colonialism. Decolonization is determined to thwart
colonial apparatuses, recover Indigenous land and life, and shape a new
structure and future for all life. Like colonization, which has shared com-
ponents and instruments across sites but is uniquely implemented in each
setting, decolonization requires unique theories and enactments across sites.
Thus, decolonization is always historically specific, context specific, and
place specific (Fanon, 1961; Tuck & Yang, 2012). As Elizabeth Povinelli
(2011) has observed, “potentiality and its perpetual variations never occur
in a general way, but in specific arrangement of connecting concepts, materi-
als, and forces that make a common compositional unity” (p. 16). Decolo-
nization is always about land (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
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12 Place in Research
The Spatial Turn
Edward Soja (2010) observes that social scientists have long prioritized his-
torical and sociological perspectives and have overlooked spatial and geo-
graphical perspectives. Attention is paid to how processes and personhood
develop over time rather than in relation to space. The spatial dimension
has been treated as fixed, as having some influence, but quite external from
human processes and consciousness (p. 2). Yet, Soja notes that a spatial turn,
“an unprecedented diffusion of critical spatial thinking across an unusually
broad spectrum of subject areas,” is underway.
Often these applications of a spatial perspective are superficial, involv-
ing little more than a few pertinent spatial metaphors such as mapping
this or that or using such words as cartography, region, or landscape to
appear to be moving with the times. In some fields, however, such as in
current debates in urban archaeology and development economics, rad-
ically new ideas have been emerging from an understanding of socio-
spatial causality, the powerful forces that arise from social produced
spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies.
(Soja, 2010, p. 14)
Soja suggests that the spatial turn is poised to profoundly change all aspects of
inquiry, including ontological and epistemological considerations, theory for-
mation, empirical research, and applied knowledge (p. 15). However, it has
also met some resistance from scholars who find historical and sociological
perspectives to be superior, as well as scholars who seemingly adopt a critical
spatial perspective but ultimately lack “the rigor and depth of their own well-
developed . . . ways of thinking and writing about space,” and tend to “give
greater stress to how social processes such as class formation, social stratifica-
tion, or racist or masculinist practices shape geographies than to how geog-
raphies actively affect these social processes and forms” (Soja, 2010, p. 4).
Exciting examples of how the spatial turn has been taken up in other
fields include George Lipsitz’s (2011) How Racism Takes Place in American
Studies/Black Studies, and Pauline Lipman’s (2011) The New Political Econ-
omy of Urban Education in Educational Studies. Both engage a political
economy approach, but the influence of spatial theorizing makes a dynamic
contribution. Lipsitz, informed by geographer Laura Pulido’s (2000) work,
observes the place-bound nature of white identity in the United States and
how “practices that racialize space and spatialize race” shape almost every
aspect of urban life (2011, p. 6). Lipman’s (2011) work traces how Harvey’s
(2003) notion of accumulation by dispossession is spatialized through real-
estate driven educational reform that closes schools in Black neighborhoods
and paves the way for gentrification.
In For Space, Doreen Massey insists that how we imagine space has con-
sequences: seeing space as commensurate with voyages and discovery, as
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Introduction to Place in Research 13
something to be traversed, as the same as the land and oceans, as a surface,
as given, will have ramifications (2005). In imagining space as a surface
upon which human life happens, it becomes possible to view other varia-
tions of human life as simply phenomena atop this benign surface; this may
not at first appear to be problematic, but it is insofar as phenomena on the
surface may be seen to be waiting to be discovered, conquered (p. 4), but
also managed, exploited, rescued, pathologized.
One invisibilized trick of globalization, Massey (2005) observes, is that
via frames of development, openness, and (soon to be) new markets, it
prompts a sleight of hand with regard to space and time, in which geography
is turned into history, and space into time (p. 5). Thus, what a contemporary
spatial analysis seeks to do, is to “refuse to convene space into time” (p. 5).
The abiding question of the turn to spatial analysis is how to think about
space more explicitly (p. 7).
There are three propositions that are central to Massey’s (2005) argument
for space: (1) Space is constituted through interactions; (2) Without space
there is no multiplicity, without multiplicity there is no space; and (3) Space
is always under construction (p. 9). As a whole, Massey makes some impor-
tant conceptual moves that help to explain the overarching project of the
spatial turn. These conceptual moves include
• Remaking space as multiplicity, as much more than a surface
• Rethinking relationships between space and time
• Articulating the significance of space
• Considering the consequences of lack of depth in theorizing space
• Pushing back against the false inevitability of globalization
• Identifying possibilities for spatial justice (Soja, 2010), particularly
through geographies of care. (Massey, 2005)
The project of the spatial turn is one that presses against prior ways of tak-
ing up social science questions, not because space is less challenging than
time, but because space presents us with the
challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness—and thus our collective
implication in the outcomes of the interrelatedness; the radical contem-
poraneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and nonhuman;
and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which
that sociability is to be configured. (Massey, 2005, p. 195)
Still, in our view, there are some descriptions of the spatial turn in which
arguments for the primacy of space in social science inquiry offer problem-
atic characterizations of place. For example, in a generally very considered
volume titled Education and the Spatial Turn: Policy and Geography Mat-
ters, editors Gulson and Symes (2007) write the following about the differ-
ences between space and place,
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14 Place in Research
Places generally have names; they figure on maps, have boundaries and
parameters—there is an element of fixity pertaining to them. Place lends
itself to more ‘objective,’ scientific accounts of space—even though
what constitutes a place is itself a construct, subject to myriad judge-
ments as to where its boundaries and populations begin and end. (p. 2)
Gulson and Symes continue that “places do not have practices in quite the
same way [that spaces do]. Space in this sense is more of a verb than a noun”
(2007, p. 2). These observations come from the introduction to Gulson and
Symes’s (2007) edited volume. In it, they are introducing readers to the
central premise of the book: theories of space and spatiality have much to
offer analyses of education, including in terms of policy, social inequality,
and cultural practices. Of course, we recognize that, by way of introducing
theories of space to readers unfamiliar with the field, Gulson and Symes are
working to articulate and differentiate space from place—as authors such
as Agnew, 2005; Harvey, 1996; and Massey, 2005, did before them. Our
contention is that place is not adequately described in this contrast. Places
are not always named, and not always justly named. They do not always
appear on maps; they do not have agreed-upon boundaries. They are not
fixed. Places are not more readily understood by objective accounts. Finally
and most importantly, places have practices. In some definitions, places are
practices (see Deyhle, 2009).
The New Materialist Turn
The recent new materialist, neo-materialist, or ontological turn has emerged
through orientations that object to the hegemony of the linguistic paradigm
in poststructuralism, “stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality
of bodies in social relations of power” (Braidotti in Dolphijn & van der Tuin,
2012, p. 21). Building on interdisciplinary scholarship on non-representa-
tional theory (e.g., Thrift, 2008), actor network theory (e.g., Latour, 2005;
Law, 2004), feminist ontologies (e.g., Haraway, 1985; Grosz, 1994), and
other trajectories of critical materialism (e.g., Harvey, 2000; Žižek, 2010),
nearly all social science disciplines are now experiencing a renewed interest
in “the world,” in its physical or material manifestations (Burns & Smith,
2011; Coole & Frost, 2010). Despite the variations across these approaches,
particularly in whether they attend to the political or are “critical,” most
gather place or land into broader categorizations of actors or objects that
are viewed as also influencing and influenced by social life (e.g., technology,
institutions, animals, other humans). As an aggregate, new materialism is
strongly interdisciplinary, with intellectual roots in Continental philosophy
and Anglo-American thought (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 89). One
of its major impulses, in no small part due to the influence of feminist phi-
losophy, is to reject dualistic separations of the mind from the body, and of
nature from culture (p. 21).
AuQ1
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Introduction to Place in Research 15
Prominent new materialist theorist Karen Barad (2007), following Ruth
Wilson Gilmore’s (1999) suggestion to replace a politics of location with a
“politics of possibilities,” seeks to
dislocate the container model of space, the spatialization of time, and
the reification of matter by reconceptualizing the notions of space, time,
and matter using an alternative framework that shakes loose the foun-
dational character of notions such as location and opens up a space of
agency in which the dynamic intra-play of indeterminacy and deter-
minacy reconfigures the possibilities and impossibilities of the world’s
becoming such that indeterminacies, contingencies, and ambiguities
coexist with causality. (p. 225)
This serves as a cogent definition of the spatialization project of new mate-
rialism. The refusal of space as an “Euclidean grid of identification” (Barad,
2007, p. 240), is a generative move toward a topological analysis and repre-
sentation of changing dynamics of space, time, and matter.
In their introduction to an edited volume on New Materialisms (2010),
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost posit that the “massive materiality” of
human existence is often taken for granted, perhaps in part because once
we begin to think about matter, “we seem to distance ourselves from it, and
within that space that opens up, a host of immaterial things seems to emerge:
language, consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, soul; also imagination,
emotions, values, meaning, and so on” (p. 2). New materialism is concerned
with how matter comes to matter: “Materiality itself is always already a
desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing,
enlivened and enlivening” (Barad in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 59).
In response to the focus on subjectivity that has typified much of the
social sciences in recent decades, Coole and Frost (2010) call for a reap-
praisal of material reality, material causality, and the significance of corpo-
reality. They wonder if the recent proliferation of new ways to theorize and
research material reality in fields like geography, political science, econom-
ics, anthropology, and sociology are evidence of the inadequacies of text-
based approaches encumbered within the prior so-called “cultural turn”
(pp. 2–3). Indeed, Coole and Frost see the reconfiguring of understandings
of matter as a prerequisite “for any plausible account of coexistence and its
conditions in the twenty-first century” (p. 2).
Discussing the influence of feminist philosophies on new materialism,
Rosi Braidotti (in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) highlights the centrality
of corporeality in this frame: “The body or the embodiment of the subject
is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but
rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic, and the
sociological” (p. 33). The turn to new materialisms coincides with theorems
and findings in post-classical physics, which indicate the ways in which mat-
ter and its defining are elusive (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 5). Unanswered and
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16 Place in Research
perhaps unanswerable questions that abound in post-classical physics and
post-classical natural sciences parallel a reinvigorated discussion of ontol-
ogy in the social sciences—discussions that pertain to the underlying beliefs
about being and existence, about relationships and meaning.
The new materialist turn also reflects the emergence of “pressing and
ethical political concerns that accompany the scientific and technological
advances predicated on new scientific models of matter and, in particular,
living matter” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 5). Coole and Frost continue,
From our understanding of the boundary between life and death and
our everyday work practices to the way we feed ourselves and recreate
or procreate, we are finding our environment materially and conceptu-
ally reconstituted in ways that pose profound and unprecedented nor-
mative questions. In addressing them, we unavoidably find ourselves
having to think in new ways about the nature of matter and the matter
of nature, about the elements of life, the resilience of the planet, and
other distinctiveness of the human. (p. 5)
An important characteristic of new materialists that differentiates them
from the historical materialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
is their emphasis on active processes of materialization, particularly the
active role that humans (and human bodies) and non-humans play in mate-
rialization, undoing the barriers established through Cartesianism (p. 8).
Matter, of which human beings are both part and cogenerate, is agentic,
with its own modes of self-transformation, self-organization, and directed-
ness (p. 10).
Finally, theory formation in new materialism is concerned with cartog-
raphy rather than classification. Classification is avoided because it is “ter-
ritorial and fully dualistic,” whereas cartography allows for the unfolding of
cultural theory, nonlinear coding practices, cutting across matter and signi-
fication (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 111). Not primarily interested
in representation, signification, and disciplinarity, new materialism is fasci-
nated by affect, force, and movement as it travels in all directions. “New
materialism argues that we know nothing of the (social) body until we know
what it can do” (p. 113, parenthesis original).
With regard to how the materialist turn approaches theories of space and
time, we heed Barad’s warnings away from geometrical considerations of
place, instead attending to topological questions of boundary, connectivity,
interiority, and exteriority (2007, p. 244):
Analyzing the multidimensional, multiply connected heterogenous geo-
political-economic-social-cultural “landscape” on the basis of geometri-
cal considerations will not suffice. Not even if what is meant by geometry
is retrofitted for postmodern sensibilities by insisting on the relative and
socially constructed nature of presumably geometrical terms (e.g. scale).
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Introduction to Place in Research 17
Nor is it sufficient to figure responsibility in terms of positionality or
other efforts to locate oneself within the relevant social horizon. The
inadequacy of geometrical analysis in isolation from topological consid-
erations lies in the very nature of “construction.” (2007, p. 245)
We wholly agree that “geometric” understandings of space and place are
reductive, and, like Massey’s (2005) critique of those who see space as a
“surface” upon which human life takes place, we press back against theo-
rizations of space as given, as static, as passive, as backdrop. Yet, Barad
dismisses the entirety of discussions of space and place as though all of them
adhere to geometrical constructions. We also see that there are very different
discussions of place emerging from Indigenous literatures on material land
and sovereignty. Thus, we take Barad’s critique of geometrical constructions
of space seriously, but are not yet willing to cede the notions of place and
land for topology.
WHEN TURNS BECOME TRENDS: BARRIERS
TO CRITICAL PLACE INQUIRY
The increasing influence of Indigenous and decolonizing scholarship, spatial
theories, and new materialism on the theories, methodologies, and methods
of social science cannot be disputed. However, although one might sup-
pose that such innovations and recalibrations might prompt a more robust
discussion of place in the social sciences, this is not often the case. In many
cases, flattened ontological or materialist frameworks de-emphasize the
agency of people and politics in attempting to better attend to the inter-
connected “networks” or “mangles” of practice in researching social life;
while the spatial turn has emphasized global flows of people, information,
and products, in many instances this has resulted in a turning away from
a focus on place in theoretical or empirical study. In contrast, Indigenous
intellectual contributions rarely fail to engage in issues of land and place—
especially via conceptualizations of tribal identity, sovereignty, and treaty
rights—yet when these discussions are taken up by non-Indigenous and set-
tler scholars, the saliency of land/place is frequently left out of the picture.
Thus, it is our view that scholars influenced by these turns often do not
go far enough to attend to place. Although there are rich theorizations of
place that throb at the center of each of these turns in social science, in their
wider adoption and redaction, place gets reduced and reified. There are
important exceptions to each of these characterizations, of course, but ironi-
cally, works across social science that now are attending to issues of being
and existence can rely upon conceptualizations of place that are markedly
shallow or emptied. The challenge is to get rich theorizations (and method-
ologies and methods) of place to travel within and alongside the adoption
and adaptation of these turns, and other turns now forming and emerging.
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18 Place in Research
In addition, another barrier to more hearty conceptualizations/articula-
tions of place in social science research was identified more than 20 years
ago by Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, who argued against haphazard use of
metaphors, specifically spatial metaphors. Writing about the wider adop-
tion of the poststructural turn (via the works of Deleuze and Guattari, for
example), Smith and Katz (1993) cautioned social scientists about the meta-
phors we use, and how those metaphors are translated in our discussions
(see also Simonsen, 2004).
We argue that many current spatial metaphors, such as ‘positionality’,
‘locality’, grounding’, ‘displacement’, ‘territory’, ‘nomadism’, and so
forth require urgent critical scrutiny. The appeal of these spatial meta-
phors lies precisely in the new meaning they impart, but it is increas-
ingly evident that these metaphors depend overwhelmingly on a very
specific and contested conception of space and that they embody often
unintended political conception. (Smith & Katz, 1993, p. 68)
Metaphors, Smith and Katz argue, are never politically neutral nor benign;
they are never empty of significance. Use of place- and space-derived meta-
phors does little to attend more responsibly to issues of place. Instead, meta-
phorical representations of place invoke place superficially, too easily.
DESCRIBING CRITICAL PLACE INQUIRY
In thinking about critical engagements with place in research, we draw on
the developments of postmodern, spatial, new materialist, and other “turns”
of the social sciences for their insights on the movement and relationality
of place. As is detailed further in Chapters 2 and 3 on conceptualizing and
practicing place, we suggest we need to move beyond understandings of
place as neutral backdrop, or as a bounded and antiquated concept, or as
only physical landscape, to instead theorize and practice place more deeply
in social science research. Critical place inquiry can involve and include a
range of research methodologies, as we discuss in Chapter 4, from textual
analysis to ethnography to Indigenous approaches to mixed and strategic
methodologies; what is central is the way the chosen methodology engages
conceptually with place in order to mobilize methods that enable data col-
lection and analyses that also engage place explicitly and politically.
Likewise, as we discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, a range of data collection
and analyses methods can be used, with promising new directions in the
ways in which data from land and other species, as well as emplaced and
embodied data from humans, are being collected and considered; as well as
mobilized towards more ethical and responsible relations on and with place.
Research methodology and methods should be selected in relationship to
the specifics of place and research participants and aims. One question that
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Introduction to Place in Research 19
emerges from discussions in Chapters 3 and 6 is the extent to which the
aims of decolonizing conceptualizations of land and place and Indigenous
methods are central and not peripheral to practices of critical place inquiry.
While critical place inquiry (like all inquiry) is performative, it is also repre-
sentative; we cannot escape mental processes of thought and language in data
collection or analyses. Efforts to get beyond representation are in danger of
being solipsistic and apolitical, and seemingly impossible. Instead, as we dis-
cuss in Chapter 7, the legitimacy of critical place research can be established
by reference to its relational validity, or in other words, its grounding and
implications for relations to land, to social context, and to future generations.
Critical place inquiry
• Understands places as themselves mobile, shifting over time and space
and through interactions with flows of people, other species, social
practices
• Entails, at a more localized level, understanding places as both influ-
encing social practices as well as being performed and (re)shaped
through practices and movements of individuals and collectives.
• Conceptualizes place as interactive and dynamic due to these time-
space characteristics
• Recognizes that disparate realities determine not only how place is
experienced but also how it is understood and practiced in turn (e.g.,
in relation to culture, geography, gender, race, sexuality, age, or other
identifications and experiences)
• Addresses spatialized and place-based processes of colonization and
settler colonization, and works against their further erasure or neutral-
ization through social science research
• Extends beyond considerations of the social to more deeply consider
the land itself and its nonhuman inhabitants and characteristics as they
determine and manifest place
• Aims to further generative and critical politics of places through such
conceptualizations/practices and via a relational ethics of accountabil-
ity to people and place
In outlining these considerations of critical place inquiry, the goals or
aims of the book are as follows:
1) To render a cross- and transdisciplinary discussion of theory, meth-
odology, and methods of place. Although it is not the dominant per-
spective, scholars in particular disciplines have been advocating for
increased attention to place for several decades. We have read across
disciplinary literatures in order to bring together arguments and jus-
tifications for the significance of place in social science inquiry. Thus,
a contribution this book makes is to bring together discussions from
several disciplines, including environmental scholarship, Indigenous
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20 Place in Research
studies, and geography, to see what is said across these and other
domains, what is said with disciplinary specificity, and what may be
incommensurable among these approaches.
2) To offer a discussion of the implications of place theorizing for the more
applied activities of determining research methodology and methods.
Much of the existing literature focuses on conceptual articulations of
place and space, which leave it to the reader to determine avenues for
application in empirical research. This volume provides examples and
discussion of theories, methodologies, and methods of critical place
inquiry from across disciplines and across places. Although not pro-
viding explicit instruction on how to do critical place inquiry (because
such a task would always be incomplete and because critical place
inquiry is always specific to place), the volume provides readers ample
points of inspiration for considering ways to elevate the significance of
place in their inquiry projects at multiple dimensions and junctures.
3) To take seriously the conceptual and empirical contributions of
Indigenous epistemologies in critical place inquiry. In recent years,
important moves have been made to critique the gaps between criti-
cal approaches and Indigenous approaches to knowing and research
(Grande, 2004; L.T. Smith, 1999/2012) and to bridge those gaps, at
least by placing Indigenous theories alongside critical theories and
methodologies (Denzin, Lincoln, & L. T. Smith, 2008). Yet, much of
critical theory remains unresponsive to the critiques raised by Indig-
enous scholars (see Grande, 2004; Tuck & Fine, 2007; Tuck & Gaz-
tambide-Fernández, 2013, for more discussion on this). This book
forwards a framework of critical place inquiry that places Indigenous
theories, methodologies, and methods at the center, not on the periph-
ery. It does this not by simply incorporating Indigenous work, as is
often done in liberal multicultural discourse; instead, it engages Indig-
enous work on its own terms, in adherence to its own commitments
and conditions. Rather than simply pasting Indigenous work on to an
existing framework, this book builds the framework to respond and
attend to Indigenous work.
4) As a point of minor contribution, this book makes an accumulative argu-
ment for the saliency of place over space. The prominence of the philo-
sophical differentiation between space and place arose in the nineteenth
century. Space is more preferred right now in social science discourse
because, as outlined, typically space is conflated with global, modern,
and progressive, whereas place is conflated with local, traditional, and
nostalgic. (Agnew, 2011, p. xx; Jessop, Brenner, & Jones, 2008)
Place is the setting for social rootedness and landscape continuity. Location/
space represents the transcending of the past by overcoming the rootedness
of social relations and landscape in place through mobility and the increased
similarity of everyday life from place to place. (Agnew, 2011, p. xx)
AuQ2
AuQ3
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Introduction to Place in Research 21
As we make clear throughout this volume, it is the specificity, the rootedness
of place, that makes it so important in social science and in human imagi-
nation. We urge readers and colleagues to reconsider place and its implica-
tions, not because it offers a generalizable theory or universal interpretation,
but because generalizability and universality are impossibilities anyway, in
no small part because place matters and place is always specific. Finally,
as we discuss throughout this volume, the environmental consequences of
deluding ourselves into believing that place no longer matters are stark and
creeping.
OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK
The remainder of the book is divided into two major sections: one on con-
ceptualizations of place (Chapters 2 and 3), and one on methodologies and
methods of critical place inquiry (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). The closing chapter
of the book (Chapter 7) discusses the ethical implications and imperatives
of critical place inquiry.
In the first section, Chapter 2 discusses and provides a commentary on
some of the theories or conceptualizations of place that are being engaged
in critical social science research on “place,” broadly understood, including
drawing from Indigenous perspectives and the spatial and new materialist
turns. Chapter 3 elaborates conceptualizations of place understood as land,
drawing on decolonizing Indigenous studies to emphasize the importance of
critical place researchers addressing the colonial and settler colonial loca-
tions of their research.
The second section of the book discusses the ways in which these con-
ceptualizations of place are being operationalized in the methodologies
and methods of critical scholarship on and in place. Chapter 4 discusses a
range of possible methodologies of critical place studies, including archival
research; narrative research; phenomenology; ethnography; “post,” experi-
mental, and strategic approaches; and Indigenous methodologies. In Chap-
ter 5 we then discuss the possibilities of specific methods of data collection
and analysis as used across approaches to critical research on place. We
highlight several issues that cut across various methods: These include the
“where” of the methods, other embodied aspects of data and data collec-
tion and analysis processes, and the participatory and performative aspects
of methods and what is learned and done through the research process. The
chapter also discusses specifics of data collection and analysis methods that
are being engaged in critical research in place, including oral, digital, map-
ping, and textual methods. Chapter 6 zooms in specifically on Indigenous
methods of critical place inquiry.
The final chapter of the book, Chapter 7, focuses in on ethical consid-
erations of critical place inquiry, including what the research “does,” both
through the research process as well as its potential end products. Included
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22 Place in Research
in this discussion are considerations of research with the populations that
live in relation to place, including considerations of research as relation. We
discuss how considerations of theory, methodology, and methods of place in
research may enable us to respond more ethically and urgently to the priori-
ties of accountability to land, people across places, and future generations.
Enduring questions of this volume include the following: What might
change if place were taken more seriously in social science research? How
might we reconceive the expected practices of social science so that, if place is
not addressed with depth, the work seems incomplete? What might become
possible if Indigenous understandings of place were engaged more fully by
social scientists across other fields? And what would it mean to do critical
place inquiry that interrogates ongoing structures of settler colonialism and
other forms of spatialized oppression? These questions are posed through-
out this book, and different possibilities arise in response. What we know,
though, is that these questions must be asked in graduate courses, among
research collaborations and partnerships, in conference sessions, and all the
places in which we learn to do inquiry. There is a crucial disconnect between
the looming consequences of ignoring place and the practices of social sci-
ence that diminish place; a disconnection that has been fostered over genera-
tions of settler colonialism and social science research. Place is significant,
and our inquiries will become more significant through this recognition.
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Part I
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6244-0338-PI-002.indd 24 6/9/2014 8:21:39 PM

Daniel Miller’s (2008) The Comfort of Things presents thirty portraits of
thirty people who all live on the same street in South London. The por-
traits focus on how the individuals know and express themselves through
the material objects that fill their homes. Miller observes that contemporary
life is brimming with ever more stuff, shopping, consumption, and posses-
sions. Miller’s project is to determine whether all of the stuff of modern life
really does mean that we are more materialistic and less connected to other
humans, as has been assumed.
Miller proposes that although London is increasingly culturally diverse,
much of living takes place behind the closed doors of private homes. The
way that he and his colleague Fiona Parrott set about learning more about
what happens behind those closed doors was to knock on them and ask
their inhabitants, not about their lives or personhood, but about their stuff
(2008, p. 1–2). Miller writes in the appendix,
There is absolutely nothing special about this South London street,
where Fiona Parrott and I carried out research for a year and a half. It’s
a slightly odd task to look for a place which has no particular features
and offers you no reason to choose it. But not a hard one. Most streets
in London appear from the outside to be pretty ordinary.
Miller goes on to explain the factors of their choice of “Stuart Street”: it
was convenient for both of them to travel to, it seemed to house people liv-
ing within a mix of incomes, it showed signs of gentrification, it had diverse
sorts of housing, it was somewhat long. While at first “cold” knocking on
the doors and asking to interview strangers was difficult, Miller and Par-
rott soon came to know more and more people on the street so that they
“couldn’t walk for five minutes without meeting people we knew and stop-
ping for a chat” (p. 299).
(A)fter seventeen months even the local corner shopkeepers admit-
ted that we seemed to know more people on the street than they did,
and we felt we had been able to achieve the kind of relationship which
Conceptualizing Place2
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26 Place in Research
approximates to the anthropological ideal: an ethnographic study of
an area. Yet the street hardly features in this book. Each portrait seems
to be a separate encounter with a separate household. This is because,
while we may have come to know a great many people that lived on
the street, in the main they did not know each other. They just lived by
juxtaposition. (Miller, 2008, pp. 299–300)
BEYOND GEOGRAPHY?
We find Miller’s method, of studying a single street, to be quite compelling.
We can see how this approach might inspire other works of social science,
across disciplines. The portraits that emerged from the project do indeed
provide insight about how participants expressed themselves through their
belongings, but also insights about how things do and do not get in the way
of human relationships.
Yet, as we delve more deeply into the discussions of this book, what are
we to make of the account that Miller provides of this study? What does it
mean to say that this supposedly place-based method revealed little about
the street itself?
Putting aside these questions for a moment, it makes sense to point out
that much of social science takes place in a place—a neighborhood, a school,
a city, a hospital, a village. Yet, those places rarely are heavily featured in
the articles, reports, and books that emerge from those studies. One of the
driving preoccupations of this book is to wonder why this is the case, but
also to consider the ways in which social science has been constructed to
ignore place.
To these wonderings, Miller (2008) observes,
Social science, whether consciously or not, aimed not only to explore
but also enact the Durkheimian view of the world. The phrase ‘social
science’ affirms the existence of something called society, which can be
the subject of scientific study. Durkheim himself was concerned that,
if modern life was lived under the conditions of Nietzche’s death of
God, then people needed to keep faith with some alternative transcen-
dent object—ideally, society itself. Otherwise, as is implied by his study
of suicide, there was a danger that life itself would seem, and indeed
become, pointless. (p. 283)
In its very name, social science is, obviously, focused on the social as the
most important frame. Place is but one of many subjects of study that are
underserved by the somewhat artificial and arbitrary division between sci-
ence, social science, and humanities domains. From this, Miller draws some
interesting rationales for why “the street” or community (or place) didn’t
figure more prominently in the findings of this project. We quote him at
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Conceptualizing Place 27
length because he speaks to an experiential component of globalization that
is rarely articulated so fully.
The street presented in this book does not, however, suggest that con-
cepts such as society or community play much of an immediate role in
the lives of people who reside in a modern metropolis such as contempo-
rary London. In a way, the state operates too efficiently. The underlying
forces which provide basic education, health services, public order, the
media and the condition for the development of an economy can deliver
our daily goods without us having to know anything much about how
this came to be. . . . We do not seem to require any active allegiance to,
or alignment with, some abstract image of society or community, which
lies closer to our daily lives . . . On the smaller side-streets, households
give at least the impression that people know each other, while on Stu-
art Street itself this is rare. We need to face up to the degree to which in
contemporary London, people do not live their lives in order to accord
either with the cosmology of a religion or with the cosmology of a belief
in society. For the most part, these are the random juxtapositions of
households, as determined by forces such as house prices, transport sys-
tems and proximity to work, school, and leisure. The political economy
determines these circumstances, but not how people live within them.
(p. 284)
Again, Miller’s account of the epistemic and experiential side-effects of glo-
balization are provocative. His positing that the “state operates too effi-
ciently” so that building community is no longer thought necessary has its
parallels in ways that the significance of place has been characterized in the
literature as less important now than in the past due to globalization.
The World Is Flat is the title of a 2005, then 2006, then 2007 runaway
international bestseller by Thomas Friedman that promises in the subtitle a
brief history of the twenty-first century. In insisting that the world is flat,
Friedman references the discourse of discovery of a new world to describe
how globalization and technology have reshaped the global labor market.
To say that the world is flat is to say that it has none of the prior time and
space barriers to labor and commerce of prior generations. Ultimately, the
book argues that access to technology is equalizing global commerce and
that employees, companies, and nation-states will struggle to remain rel-
evant as the significance of geographical borders diminishes. Friedman goes
to Columbus himself to narrate his own realization of this new world order:
Columbus was happy to make the Indians he met his slaves, a pool
of free manual labor. I [Friedman] just wanted to understand why the
Indians [in India] I met were taking our work [jobs that used to be in
the United States but are now located in India] . . . Columbus reported
to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in
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28 Place in Research
history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and
shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in a whisper.
“Honey,” I confided, “I think the world is flat.1” (Friedman, 2007, p. 5)
Friedman is trying to be cute and clever here. There is no irony at all in
Friedman’s neocolonial employment of the discovery narrative, or when he
proclaims that Bangalore is a suburb of Boston and that Canton, Ohio, may
as well be Canton, China. These are but two examples of how a theorist
(Miller) and a social commentator (Friedman) have interpreted globaliza-
tion and its implications for the significance of place.
Yet, as Neil Smith wrote in the first edition of Uneven Development:
Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space in 1984 (20 years before
Friedman’s Columbus-like epiphany), globalization has made space and
place more significant, not less. Globalization has meant deindustrialization
and regional destabilization in some parts of the world, and industrializa-
tion in other parts of the world. It has meant a new international division of
labor, observable at the scale of the globe and the nation-state. It has meant
an intensification of nationalism and a new geopolitics of war:
The popular geographical wisdom is that we live in a shrinking world,
that cheap and sophisticated transportation systems have diminished the
importance of geographical space and geographical differentiation, that
traditional regional identities are being evened out—in short, that we are
somehow beyond geography. What I argue here is the derivation of the
theory of uneven development is that whatever the partial truths conveyed
by the popular wisdom, the contrary is true. Geographical space is on the
economic and political agenda as never before. (N. Smith, 1984/2008, p. 4)
Smith observes that (Western) theorists have struggled to make more evident
the role of space in society, whereas capital seems to have achieved it in
practice on a daily basis (p. 7).
No matter how badly Friedman wants to declare it, the world is not flat, per-
haps especially within the uneven power topologies of globalization. Miller’s
(2008) more carefully constructed interpretation that place is somehow now
less significant than in prior generations still bears little resemblance to the
world that we see, in which place matters more and more. Globalization,
specifically its unevenness, makes considerations of place more important,
not less (see also Katz, 2004; Casey, 2009). Friedman and Miller, although
offering dramatically differently constructed arguments and justifications,
represent the range of undertheorizations of place that dominate the popu-
lar and scholarly discourses on globalization. Such undertheorizations can
have stark consequences with regard to continued forms of colonial violence
(e.g., the U.S.’s now frequent use of drone attacks orchestrated by soldiers
holding video game controllers from another continent) and environmental
violence (e.g., the destruction of earth and water through the extraction of
bitumen from tar sands in Canada).
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Conceptualizing Place 29
Within the context of Smith’s discussions of the geographic imperatives
of globalization, the remainder of this chapter examines considerations of
reconceptualized and renewed understandings of place, as grounded and
relational, and as providing roots for politics that are deeply specific to
place and yet connected to other places. These considerations are drawn
from new and renewed trajectories of materialist and spatial scholarship; as
well as from longer trajectories of decolonizing and Indigenous scholarship
and practice. Through this discussion, we trace and elaborate some of the
possibilities for theorizing in and through critical place inquiry. Our hope
here is not necessarily for a coherent whole—conceptualizations featured in
this chapter overlap and juxtapose with each other. Instead, we aim to draw
attention to the compelling ways in which geographers and other social sci-
entists are conceptualizing place and space in order to provide inspiration to
readers wanting to develop the same in their work.
We also point to the work of Raewyn Connell (2007) who has empha-
sized the importance of the place-based aspects of theory. Connell suggests
how “Northern theory” typically informs social science research, resulting in
viewpoints and problems of “metropolitan society, while presenting itself as
universal knowledge” (p. vii). “Social thought happens in particular places,”
and as a result, attention also needs to be drawn to the “periphery-centre”
relations embedded in much social science research (p. ix). In elaborating
this, Connell discusses “Southern” social theorizing that has developed in
four locations where colonial relations have been challenged: postcolonial
Africa, modernizing Iran, post–Second World War Latin America, and India
post-1970s. While many of the conceptualizations of place that follow in this
chapter come from Anglo-American and Continental theories, or, in other
words, are of “the metropole,” we also explicitly center Indigenous per-
spectives and scholarship throughout the volume. Connell’s point regarding
which theories are prioritized in social science, where they originate from,
and what legacies are tied to those theories is a crucial one for critical place
inquiry. The place-based theory, methodology, and methods of research one
mobilizes require ongoing scrutiny for their inherent legacies and effects.
Discussed in this chapter alongside other theories, in the following chapter
we focus specifically on elaborating decolonizing conceptualizations of place.
In part this is because our volume seeks to interface spatial theories, method-
ologies, and methods with Indigenous theories, methodologies, and methods.
The challenge is to formulate a description of the theoretical foundations of
critical place inquiry that are accountable to Indigenous peoples and futurity.
MOBILITY AND PLACE
With new technology and social media connecting people across distances,
increased travel and migration, and associated global circulations of every-
thing from entertainment to social and economic policy, it is clear that the
world is increasingly globally connected and that this suggests the significance
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30 Place in Research
of space and scale. Thus, growing emphasis has been placed across the social
sciences on understanding, tracking, critiquing, and otherwise examining
the flows of people and information through and across these “scapes” or
spheres of social life (Appadurai, 1996). Sub-areas such as mobility stud-
ies have focused more broadly on the movements and implications of this
global fluidity (e.g., Urry, 2007), whereas other work has attended to the
impacts on and associated characteristics of particular locations through, for
example, the study of “global cities” (e.g., Sassen, 1991) or of “non-places,”
such as airports, store chains, or other replicating and anonymous environ-
ments (e.g., Augé, 1995).
Still others have focused on historical mobilities and diasporas, which
figure metaphorically and literally in the coproduction of identity, time, and
place. Katherine McKittrick (2006), in her work to counter-narrate “ungeo-
graphic” narrations of Black women’s bodies and experiences, writes,
The ships of transatlantic slavery moving across the middle passage, trans-
porting humans for free labor into “newer worlds” do not only site mod-
ern technological progression, which materially moved diasporic subjects
through space, that is, on and across the ocean, and on and across land-
masses such as Canada, the United States, the Caribbean; these vessels
also expose a very meaningful struggle for freedom in place. Technologies
of transportation, in this case the ship, while materially and ideologically
enclosing black subjects—economic objects inside and often bound to the
ship’s walls—also contribute to the formation of an oppositional geogra-
phy; the ship as a location of black subjectivity and human terror, black
resistance, and in some cases, black possession. (p. xi)
Attending to instances of “time-space compression,” or the relative collapsing
of space and time through increased mobility of people and information, has
become a compelling trope in framing and understanding social analyses.
“Place,” understood as more localized enactments of social and mate-
rial practice, has in some ways also received more attention as a contrary
alternative (Harvey, 1996). Viewed as providing stability and familiarity in
the face of globalizing forces, place is made distinct from space (as well as
mobility) in popular experience as well as in much scholarly work. Over the
past several decades we thus see references to place in contrast and some-
times as remedy to globalizing spatial flows (Cresswell, 2004). However,
with such engagements with place sometimes seen as outdated or reactionary
in the scholarly literature, there has been relatively little deeper theorizing and
discussion of place as others have pointed out previously (e.g., Coleman &
Collins, 2006; Nayak, 2003; Casey, 2009).
Of those who have theorized place more deeply, Doreen Massey’s work is
helpful in her critiques of the oversimplified division of space from place and
in considering why and how “place” is an important and useful framing for
politics and thus for critical social science research, as will be discussed later
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Conceptualizing Place 31
in the chapter. Suggesting that her 1991 essay on “a global sense of place”
has been taken up as advocating for the concept of place to be abandoned,
Massey (2009) clarifies that her position has been different than those that
suggest that “everything is now flow.” For example, “Hardt and Negri say
that you can’t have a concept of place that doesn’t have boundaries. There-
fore it is one of those old, modernist containments that we must abandon,
because it divides global humanity, it divides the global multitude . . . I would
say . . . there never was place that was a container” (p. 416). Massey instead
articulates an orientation to place that acknowledges the connections across
local places and their influences on global circulations of knowledge and
practice:
“how can we resolve the binary between place and space?” Well one
way is precisely by integrating them relationally. But if you do that then
it means you have to accept the implication of the local in the construc-
tion of the global. The global doesn’t just exist ‘up there’. It is made in
places and there is hardly a place on the planet that in some ways isn’t
party to that making. (p. 412)
Massey (2005) also suggests the ways in which places are themselves
moving and changing over time, whether through connections with other
places and the global or through physical processes, from shifting tectonic
plates to climate change. Using the example of the 3,000-foot-high rock
block of Skiddaw in the Lake District in England, Massey discusses how
natural landscapes that we often think of as timeless and fixed have been
formed through history as well as geography. The rocks of Skiddaw were
originally placed in the sea in the southern hemisphere around 500 million
years ago. Over time they have migrated north, changing their form into a
“mountain,” a relatively recently 10 million years ago. Not at all static over
time or space, ‘Skiddaw’ continues to migrate and change form. Asking
where ‘here’ is if there are no fixed points, Massey (2005) responds that “It
won’t be the same ‘here’ when it is no longer now” (p. 139). This is certainly
also a poignant realization as we face human-induced climate change and
learn of the projected transformations in ecosystems, species, and human
patterns and practices in the places we know and perhaps cherish, within
the much more rapid timeframe of our own lifetimes.
Such a relational understanding of place to space, and of place to time,
suggests the ways in which what we think of as particular ‘places’ can be
understood as articulations of time-space, or of the interweaving of history
and geography (Massey, 1994; L.T. Smith, 1999/2012; Byrd, 2011). This
is an understanding of place as open, “as a particular constellation within
the wider topographies of space, and as in process, an unfinished business”
(Massey, 2005, p. 131).
“Mobility” then is integral to place, as flows of people, technology and
other human practices, and other species move through places, as well as
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32 Place in Research
in how the places themselves, with a long view, can also be understood to
be moving. As the next section elaborates, more localized mobilities with
specific places are also means through which these places are understood,
formed, upheld, and resisted.
PRACTICE AND PLACE
Understanding place as lived space (Soja, 1999), meeting place (Massey, 2005),
site of social reproduction (Katz, 2004), or as personality (Deloria & Wildcat,
2001; see also Chapter 3, this volume) suggests the variety of considerations
of relationships between place and social practice, across disciplines and
epistemological frames. Neil Smith observes of (Western) philosophies, “We
are used to conceiving of nature as external to society, pristine and pre-
human, or else as a grand universal in which human beings are but small
and simple cogs. But here again our concepts have not caught up with reality”
(1984/2008, p. 7). In both of these (Western) constructions—nature as out-
side, or humans as simple cogs—humans do not perceive themselves as part
of/as shaped by place, or vice versa, as shaping place through our everyday
social practices.2 In this section, we discuss how our embodied and emplaced
practices of movement, and stillness, are among the ways that place shapes
us individually and collectively, and in turn, through which we shape and
reshape place (see also Cajete, 2000, p. 185, on the human body as a meta-
phor for landscape).
Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete (1994) writes, “Mitakuye Oyasin (we are all
related) is a Lakota phrase that . . . reflects the understanding that our lives
are truly and profoundly connected to other people and the physical world . . .
knowledge gained from first-hand experience in the world is transmitted or
explored through ritual, ceremony, art, and appropriate technology” (p. 26).
These positings of nature and land as not external, indeed as ultra-connected
to human life, emphasize how land with its physical features, climate, other
species, and other aspects can act on and in conjunction with social his-
tories and introduced influences to form current human practices of ritual
and ceremony; architecture, planning, and design; educational traditions;
and leisure pastimes. The specificity of social practice as aligned with the
time-space considerations of specific places was well documented through
the twentieth century in a range of fields of study (e.g., Cresswell, 2004;
Harvey, 2001; Ingold, 2000, 2011; N. Smith, 1984/2008; Wilson, 2008). As
we have already noted, while the practices of globalization may have in some
ways eroded the place-specific aspects of social practice, increasingly both
communities and scholarly research are emphasizing the ways in which iden-
tities and social practices remain significantly determined by place-specific
considerations (e.g., Katz, 2004; Nayak, 2003; N. Smith, 1984/2008).
Inasmuch as place influences social practice, likewise social practice can
be understood to influence place. More obvious instances of this include the
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Conceptualizing Place 33
ways that environmental, planning, or other social policies or lack thereof,
influence the ways that humans shape the places in which they live and
work. In Canada, for instance, in 2012 federal omnibus budget bills C-38
and C-45 were passed changing more than 130 federal laws without par-
liamentary debate or First Nations consultation, causing 99% of Canada’s
waterways to lose their protection via navigation and environmental assess-
ment standards (e.g., 32,000 protected lakes to just 97, and from 2.25 million
protected rivers to just 62) (Land, 2013). These conditions led to the instiga-
tion of the initially localized and then global “Idle No More” Indigenous
sovereignty and environmental movement, as exemplar of a different genre of
social practice that influences decisions and actions on and about land.
In another example, Cindi Katz (2004) has elegantly documented the
ways in which “development” practices and policies shape the places and
everyday lives of young women as they come of age in a village in central
eastern Sudan. Katz’s ‘countertopography’ creates a parallax with Har-
lem, New York City, to illustrate the simultaneous disruptions of place and
everyday life afforded by development practices, or “refusing to let geogra-
phy hide consequences” (p. 259), but also to push against the abstractions
of globalization with a place-based political imagination (p. xiv).
In focusing on Sudan with the insistent counterpoint of New York,
I have tried to make clear that the increasingly globalized expression
of capitalist relations of production, the tenor of neoliberal global
economic restructuring, and the broad retreats from the social wage
that have been associated with them have common local and regional
effects, such as deskilling, community destabilization, and a reordered
relationship between production and reproduction. (p. 259)
Katz’s work goes on to illuminate how our individual and collective daily
lives thus influence place through the social practices we maintain, support,
resist, and build. This includes our interactions with material aspects of the
world such as what we literally mow, plant, dismantle, obstruct, build, walk
around, or walk through.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) explores
the “ways of making” enabled through everyday practices such as walking.
While the spatial order is organized into places in which one can move as
well as walls or barriers that prevent passage, he suggests it is the walker that
actualizes some of these possibilities but also moves around them, inventing
other pathways, crossing, drifting, improvising. De Certeau thus explores
the ways in which people’s everyday practices or “ways of operating” are
relationally determined and guided by established rules, and yet what an
individual does with these determinations can differ—how through ways
of using these “products,” one can create another different production. A
concrete example of this is provided by research on youth skateboarding
practices and how they remake established places in new ways for ends
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34 Place in Research
different than those intended or expected (e.g., Anderson, 2010; see also
Katz, 2004; Soja, 2010).
In addition to forms of movement as practices that influences place, de
Certeau (1984) also discusses the place-making aspects of story, suggesting
that stories are a means of enabling solidified or structured places to become
habitable ones. Belief is one form of storying that allows a certain play
“within a system of defined places” (p. 106). He writes,
It is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and
wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and
garrets everywhere, that local legends . . . permit exits, ways of going
out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. . . . One can mea-
sure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends)
as practices that invent spaces. . . . Stories diversify. (pp. 106–107)
Related to this point, Indigenous scholars (Archibald, 2008; Brooks,
2008; Wilson, 2008) and non-Indigenous scholars conducting research with
Indigenous communities (Basso, 1996; Dehyle, 2009) have extensively theo-
rized the role of storytelling as a practice of shaping and being shaped by
place among Indigenous peoples. Some Indigenous scholars have empha-
sized the role that cosmology and cosmogony stories have played in Indig-
enous conceptualizations of collective identity and place (Archibald, 2008;
Cajete, 2000; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001), indeed how Indigenous people
came to be a place (Tuck & Yang, 2012; See also Basso, 1996).
After the people had emerged into the fourth world from former worlds
of development, stories relate distinctions of tribes or races of human-
kind, each of whom is given special instruction and sent to a particular
cardinal direction. Almost all emergence myths recount the migration3
of the people through the landscape with stories where important les-
sons about relationships, ideals, and moral teachings must be learned.
(Cajete, 2000, p. 33)
Stories thus carry out a labor; creating, maintaining, and/or shifting nar-
ratives about the places in which we live and how they produce us and us
them. As de Certeau (1984) writes, “In a pre-established geography . . .
everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it . . . [The
story] opens a legitimate theater for practical actions. It creates a field that
authorizes dangerous and contingent social actions” (pp. 122, 125).
Through better understanding how social practice is shaped by place as
well as an influential factor in the making and remaking of place through
time and over space, place becomes both less stable as well as potentially
more powerful. As Tim Cresswell (2004) writes,
Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for perfor-
mance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think
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Conceptualizing Place 35
of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is
constantly struggled over and reimagined in practical ways. . . . Place
in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing
rooted in notions of the authentic. (p. 39)
Or in the language of Tim Ingold (2008), places do not exist so much as
they occur.
As overviewed in Chapter 1, many “new materialist” accounts emphasize
the productivity of “matter” (e.g., human and non-human actors, including
other species, material objects, technology, etc.) and the events of their inter-
actions. Coole and Frost (2010) write, “Materiality is always something
more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference
that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (p. 9).
This in other words, is a “materiality that materializes” (Coole & Frost,
2010, p. 9). And while the work of Cresswell, Massey, or other critical
geographers is considered by some to be “new materialist,” there have been
critiques by these and other scholars of approaches that flatten human and
non-human relations in more micro-focused analyses that de-emphasize the
politics of materiality (Nayak & Jeffrey, 2011). Focusing on embodied per-
formance rather than language-based representation, non-representational
theories (NRT) and other “object oriented ontologies” (Burns & Smith,
2011) can be understood as insisting that,
the root of action is to be conceived less in terms of willpower or cognitive
deliberation and more via embodied and environmental affordances, dis-
positions and habits. This means that humans are envisioned in constant
relations of modification and reciprocity with their environs. . . . Arguably,
what [distinguishes] such accounts [is] their refusal to search for extrinsic
sources of causality or determination, an out-of-field ‘power’, an efficacy
and opportunism (or otherwise) of practices and performances. It is from
the active, productive, and continual weaving of the multiplicity of bits
and pieces that we emerge. (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, pp. 7–8)
However, we agree with others who have suggested that performances and
practices cannot exist outside of “extrinsic sources,” such as cultural con-
figurations of power and past colonial histories (Nayak & Jeffrey, 2009).
As the next section discusses, experiences of embodiment and emplacement
are not universal. We must also consider the role of power in our day-to-day
understandings and experiences of materiality and place.
POWER AND PLACE
We have discussed how places are themselves mobile, shifting subtly or sig-
nificantly over time and space and through interactions with “global flows”
of people, other species, and social practices. At a more localized level, places
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36 Place in Research
can be understood as both influencing social practices from ceremony to
design, as well as being performed and (re)shaped through practices and
movements such as walking, protesting, or institutionalization. In this sec-
tion, we discuss the ways in which power and place are coproduced, indeed
are co-constitutive. Spatial organizations give coherence and rationality to
maldistributions of power and resources (McKittrick, 2006), geographic pro-
cesses that result in what David Harvey (2003) has called accumulation by
dispossession. Capitalism and the production of capital has perhaps always
required the displacement and perpetual landlessness of some for the accu-
mulation of others; Harvey argues that it is not the process of accumulation
of dispossession that has changed, but its location (as the “development” of
the global south opens new markets) (see also Povinelli, 2011, p. 18).
For these reasons, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2012) has critiqued colo-
nial naming and mapping practices that have worked simultaneously to dispos-
sess Indigenous peoples of land and establish settler colonial nation-states.
L. T. Smith, McKittrick (2006), Brooks (2008) and others have embraced
Chandra Mohanty’s (2003) notion of cartographies of struggle to speak to
the importance of attending to the intersecting but never synchronous lines
of simultaneous oppressions. More than the duality of mapping,4 of draw-
ing oppositions with the line, cartography is the art and science of making
and remaking maps, of creating and being created by, of recognizing and
conceptualizing marginality, sites of struggle, domains, place, and sovereignty
(L. T. Smith, 1999/2012). Learning from this critique and from the notion
of cartographies of struggle, we resist ontological analyses that, much like
earlier phenomenological study, focus at the micro and yet universal level,
while ignoring the situated realities of historical and spatial sedimentations of
power. Rather we draw on work from feminist studies (Mohanty, 2003; Rose,
1993), Black feminist scholarship (McKittrick, 2006), Indigenous and set-
tler colonial studies (Byrd, 2011; McCoy, Tuck, & McKenzie, 2014), urban
studies (Lipsitz, 2011), critical Marxist (Harvey, 2005; Katz, 2004), criti-
cal geography (Gilmore, 2006), and other critical scholarship to understand
place as experienced differently based on culture, geography, gender, race,
sexuality, age, or other identifications and experiences; and to understand
how these disparate realities determine not only how place is experienced but
also how it is understood and practiced in turn. These place-specific differ-
ences do not amount only to “diversity,” but rather in many cases exemplify
and help establish forms of inequity, colonization, and other forms of oppres-
sion (Haluza-Delay, O’Riley, Cole, & Agyeman, 2009; McKittrick, 2006).
Writing alongside Gilmore’s important 2002 article, “Fatal couplings
of power and difference: Notes on racism and geography,” Katherine
McKittrick (2006) insists,
The simultaneous naturalization of bodies and places must be disclosed,
and therefore called into question, if we want to think about alternative
spatial practices and more humanly workable geographies. Borrowing
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Conceptualizing Place 37
from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I want to suggest that geographies of
domination be understood as “the displacement of different,” wherein
“particular kinds of bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always
visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy of human and inhuman
persons that in sum form the category of ‘human being’” (Gilmore,
2002, p. 16). Gilmore highlights the ways in which human and spatial
differentiations are connected to the process of making place. The dis-
placement of difference does not describe human hierarchies but rather
demonstrates the ways in which these hierarchies are critical categories
of social and spatial struggle. (p. xv)
McKittrick does not allow for categories of body/identity/place to be regarded
as separate. Her work pushes us to see how practices of subjugation, includ-
ing racism and sexism, are spatial acts and to consider effective ways of
mapping them. Indeed, it may only be possible to see how racism and sex-
ism are not bodily or identity based, but are spatial acts (p. xviii) through
embodied methods of critical place inquiry (see Chapter 5, this volume).
Indeed, McKittrick posits that disclosing how geographies are socially and
differentially produced, how subjugation is a spatial act, is “one way to
contend with unjust and uneven human/inhuman categorizations is to think
about, and perhaps employ, the alternative geographic formulations that
subaltern communities advance” (p. xix).
In How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz (2011) shows that attribut-
ing the ongoing material disparities between white people and people of
color to race alone can result in interpretations of social data that patholo-
gize people of color as “unfit for freedom” (p. 1). Building upon his prior
(Lipsitz, 1998) arguments that focusing only on Black disadvantages pulls
attention from unearned privileges enjoyed by white people (in health
care, criminal justice, banking, and education systems), Lipsitz argues that
“largely because of racialized space, whiteness in this society is not so much
a color as a condition” (p. 3). Whiteness operates as a spatialized and struc-
tured advantage. Lipsitz examines residential and school segregation, spa-
tial isolation from employment, mortgage and insurance redlining, taxation
and transportation policies, and the location of environmental amenities
and toxic hazards to learn how place and race are coproduced in urban
United States (p. 5).
Winona LaDuke’s (1999) All Our Relations traces the origins and
impacts of the “toxic invasion of North America” (p. 2): the dumping of
toxic waste, clearcutting, species contamination and extinction, violent
resource extraction, nuclear testing, and other industrial encroachments on
Indigenous land in now-United States. Mapping and narrating the conse-
quences of polychlorinate biphenyl (PCB) in mothers’ milk in Akwesasne
Nation, the “development” of the Everglades in Seminole Nation, coal min-
ing on Northern Cheyenne territory, nuclear waste dumping on multiple
Indigenous lands and reservations, the correspondence of the slaughter of
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38 Place in Research
buffalo and the dispossession of Indigenous land, LaDuke makes evident
the entanglements of uneven development and dismantling of Indigenous
land and sovereignty. Environmental degradation and its disproportionate
effects on Indigenous land and peoples is an extension of the violence and
biopolitics of settler colonialism.
The title of this section borrows from the title of a 2001 volume by Vine
Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in
America; power in this volume is theorized within an Indigenous metaphys-
ics and practices that “actively acknowledge the power that permeates the
many persons of the earth in places recognized as sacred not by human
proclamation or declaration, but by experience in those places” (p. 13).
Power in this framing cuts another way entirely, toward those who have
long-standing relationships with place(s) rather than those who purport to
conquer them.
Doreen Massey (1991) coined the term power geometries to discuss the
inequities associated with “a global sense of place.” While global mobility
has increased through travel and technology, these factors clearly are not
experienced by everyone with the same benefits. While some have the privi-
lege of choosing to travel, others are not able to due to financial or political
circumstances, or inversely are forced to “travel” as refugees, through being
removed from homeland, or as migrant workers sending remittances home
to distant family. As Massey (1991) suggests, while some are “in-charge”
of such time-space compression—“those who are both doing the moving
and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control
in relation to it”—others are doing a lot of physical moving but are not
in control of the process and rather are on the receiving end of time-space
compression (p. 26).
Within a given place, there are also more localized asymmetries of power
and privilege, for example, in who can walk or travel safely in particular
places based on identifications of race, gender, or sexuality (e.g., ecocriticism
ref from Evans, 2002); who has access or ‘ownership’ and who does not;
and who is disproportionately affected by environmental issues of water or
air pollution (Lipsitz, 2011; LaDuke, 1999; Walker, 2012). As Cresswell
(2004) suggests, “place does not have meanings not natural and obvious
but ones that are created by some people with more power than others to
define what is and is not appropriate” (p. 27). From religious institutions to
schools to homes to the street to natural spaces, different types of locations
have accepted members and norms that create and enforce boundaries and
relative privileges. Likewise, urban, schooling, health, economic, and other
policies operate through place to establish and reinforce inequities (Grande,
2004; Lipman, 2011; Peck, 2013).
Individual and collective histories and memories of place also contribute
in powerful ways to what is possible or not. This operates in how peo-
ple remember, experience, or imagine place, exemplified in June Jordon’s
(1989) Poem about My Rights. In this poem, Jordan writes about how being
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Conceptualizing Place 39
“the wrong age the wrong skin” can make it impossible to go down to the
beach or into the woods alone to think about the world, God, “all of it dis-
closed by the stars and the silence” (p. 102). As Reed (2002) writes, Jordan
is asserting, “with and against the Thoreauvian tradition, a ‘right’ to enter
the literal and literary ‘woods’ of America as an equal partner, free from the
fear of rape attendant upon her race, her class, her gender” (p. 155). In part
asking how the nature of colonialism reinforces the colonization of nature,
as well as how a privileged enjoyment of “wilderness” might obscure the
nature of injustices experienced by the less privileged,
Jordan reminds us throughout the poem that her ‘natural’ body is a
colonized site, one colonized with and as part of the natural world, that
the rape of an African country, an environment, an African American
woman’s body, are all entwined, that each violation of rights shapes
each of the others, reinforcing mutually. (p. 155)
In addition to unequal access to place, some memoried accounts of place
are explicitly impressed to the continued advantage of specific groups at the
expense of others, for example, in the case of the principles and practices
of Manifest Destiny in the United States, which gave and continues to give
European populations justification for settling Indigenous land (McCoy
et al., 2014). As David Harvey (1996) writes, the “production of memory in
place is no more than an element in the perpetuation of a particular social
order which seeks to inscribe some memories at the expense of others. Places
do not come with some memories attached as if by nature but rather they
are the contested terrain of competing definitions” (p. 309). An excellent
example of this is described in environmental historian William Cronon’s
(1992) essay “Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town.” Tracing the his-
tory of the now ghost town, Kennecott, Alaska, Cronon describes the trade
between the Indigenous population previously in the area and arriving set-
tler populations, including in relation to other organisms, food importation
after settlement via the railroad, the mining of copper, and other means
through which people and goods came in and out of Kennecott. Describing
the essay, Cresswell (2004) writes,
In order for the new population to mine the copper they had to import
new definitions of property—thus a legal landscape was imported
along with the turnips. The native population had no concept of static
property or place. They were nomadic and would move according to
the availability of resources. This lifestyle, Cronon writes, “left them
little concerned with drawing sharp property boundaries upon the
landscape” [sic] the newcomers “had in mind a completely different
way of owning and occupying the terrain. And therein lay the origin
of the community of Kennecott” (Cronon, 1992, 42). So the irony of
Kennecott—a place produced by its connections—was that the idea of
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40 Place in Research
place itself was imported from outside. Place based on property and
boundaries. (p. 42)
Concerned with the exclusions that are committed in the name of place,
Harvey (1996) credits place-making with dominantly negative outcomes.
However, others have suggested power can operate through and in relation
to place and land also to unsettle, to create public space, and to otherwise
work counter to oppressive understandings and practices of power (Sassen,
2006). Towards further expanding on the politics of place, we first need to
extend our understanding of place beyond social relations and implications,
to consider more deeply the land itself as well as nonhuman species that
inhabit it. In other words, place has meanings and implications that extend
beyond human considerations.
BEYOND THE SOCIAL
We are wary of approaches to place that seemingly collapse place to its
social considerations, and in this section, we discuss some of the consequences
of applying only social meanings to place. Instead we suggest we also need
deeper consideration of the land itself and its nonhuman inhabitants and
characteristics as they determine and manifest place. In earlier writing,
Massey (e.g., 1991), for example, reduces place to its social (and thus human)
contexts and considerations. Discussing each place as a meeting place or as
a “particular constellation of social relations,” she writes, “Instead then, of
thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as
articulated moments in networks of social relations” (p. 28 emphasis ours).
Going further in suggesting that place is a social construct, David Harvey
(1996) proposes as a result that “the only interesting question that can be
asked is: by what social process(es) is place constructed?” (p. 261).
Yet, in more recent writing, Massey (2005) suggests that the physical and
land-based aspects of place do matter in what place is and can be for humans
and beyond, such as her example of the rocks of Skiddaw discussed earlier
in this chapter. However, these effects and considerations are not elaborated
at depth, with most emphasis placed on the fact that physical aspects of
place are, like the social aspects, open, in transition, or unfinished.
One way in which place is frequently collapsed into its social consider-
ations is in a subset of place-based work on borders and border crossing.
Borders are surely human constructions, represented in the imagination, on
maps, and sometimes through walls and barbed wire. Yet there is a physical-
ity to borders that makes them more than socially constructed, as anyone
who has extralegally tried to cross them knows intimately. The physicality
of borders does not just apply to humans—land animal migration patterns
are disrupted by the enforcement of borders through structures, whereas fish
contaminated by nuclear waste defy the borders that are imagined for them.
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Conceptualizing Place 41
The language of borders and border transgression is commonplace in
social science inquiry, even and especially outside of critical recognition of
the significance of place. Part of a call towards critical place inquiry is to
problematize the metaphorizing of borders and border crossing and trans-
gressions in social science inquiry, not necessarily to curb such metaphoriz-
ing, but to call attention to the ways in which the figurative can eclipse the
literal. We can forget that there are those who die every day because borders
are not metaphors, but are very very real.
While contemporary border discourses within social theory find their
roots in Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza, some critical scholars seem to have (mis?)interpreted Anzaldúa’s
work, using it to call for a diminished significance of borders and boundar-
ies. This interpretation of Anzaldúa’s work sits uncomfortably aside the par-
ticular histories of Indigenous peoples and migrant peoples across the globe:
histories of relationships of domination, dispossession, and appropriation.
“A borderland,” writes Anzaldúa, “is a vague and undetermined place, cre-
ated by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a con-
stant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants”
(1987, p. 3). Contemporaneously, Donna Haraway writes, “Boundaries
shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provision-
ally contain remains generative, productive of meaning and bodies” (1988,
p. 595). In our view, Anzaldúa’s work interrogates the depth of emotional
conflict infused by desire in the borderland. Borderlands, like the invisible
lines upon the earth’s surface that separate Indigenous peoples from their
ancestral land and arbitrarily enact nationhood, are locations of psychic,
physical, and emotional conflict.
Part of what we see as the misinterpretation of Anzaldúa’s work, then,
is that the representations of borderlands in social science literatures are
associated with individual and group identity, collapsed into the social—
land is somewhat obfuscated, even when social identity comprises landed
constructs, specifically the experiential knowledge of life shaped by borders.
Another flawed interpretation is the presumption that because borders are
crossable, they are less significant. “Boundary transgressions should be
equated not with the dissolution of traversed boundaries (as some authors
have suggested) but with the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries” (Barad,
2007, p. 245, parenthesis original). Kevin Bruyneel’s (2007) The Third Space
of Sovereignty is an important exception to this problematic tendency in
social science inquiry. Bruyneel’s “boundary-focused approach” thoroughly
attends to the spatial boundaries around territory and legal and political
institutions and the temporal boundaries around the narratives of economic
development, political development, cultural progress, and modernity (p. xiii)
in order to analyze U.S.–Indigenous relationships.
The agency and interactions of materiality unto itself and including in
relation to humans (e.g., the effects of different objects and species on one
another) has been increasingly addressed in work in areas such as feminist
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42 Place in Research
theory, actor network theory, non-representational theory, speculative
realism and other “objective oriented ontologies” (Barad, 2007; Bryant,
Srnicek, & Harman, 2011). In fact much of this work breaks down the dis-
tinction between the social and material, turning and in some ways return-
ing (Marx, 1969 (1888); Williams, 1961) to understandings of materiality
as encompassing of, rather than singling out, social relations. Much of this
new materialist work is theoretical and is only starting to make its way into
the framings and methodologies of empirical studies; and in many cases still
takes as a central focus the implications of such theorizing for understand-
ing and practicing social life. In other words, and perhaps understandable
given we are in social science terrain, the focus is more so on how other
forms of materiality affect and interact with humans, versus emphasizing
or examining, for example, land or other species in and of themselves. For
example, Jane Bennett (2010a) writes,
What would happen to our thinking about politics if we took more seri-
ously the idea that technological and natural materialities were them-
selves actors alongside and within us—were vitalities, trajectories, or
symbolic values humans invest in them? I’m in search of a materialism
in which matter is an active principle and, though it inhabits us and
our inventions, also acts as an outside or alien power. This new, “vital
materialism” would run parallel to a historical materialism focused
more exclusively upon economic structures of human power” [i.e.,
Marxism]. (p. 47)
Likewise Nayak and Jeffrey (2011) suggest the implications of non-
representational theory (NRT) for understanding humans and social life
(e.g., Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2008): “they [NRT] remind us
that landscapes are not simply cultural texts but that their materiality must
be understood through the body as we encounter these environments through
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and other sensual experiences” (Nayak &
Jeffry, 2011, p. 293). This is important for critical place inquiry certainly, as
we understand experiences of and in place as embodied and sensual: that it is
not just who we ‘meet’ in place in terms of social and cultural influences, but
also that who we are and how we are is influenced by land and the nonhuman.
Such relationships of and to place thus suggest a deepened understand-
ing of materiality. Not as a static backdrop to human experience, this is
rather a meshwork (Ingold, 2011) or entanglement (Barad, 2007) of life on
the planet. In Indigenous cosmologies, land refers not just to the material
aspects of places, but to its “spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects”
(Styres, Haig-Brown, & Blimkie, 2013, p. 37). Signifying consideration of
these aspects in the capitalization of Land, Styres and Zinga (2013) write:
We have chosen to capitalize Land when we are referring to it as a proper
name indicating a primary relationship rather than when used in a more
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Conceptualizing Place 43
general sense. For us, land (the more general term) refers to landscapes
as a fixed geographical and physical space that includes earth, rocks,
and waterways; whereas, “Land” (the proper name) extends beyond
a material fixed space. Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in
interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning,
and is highly contextualized. (pp. 300–301)
Returning Massey’s (2005) lexicon, this suggests a meeting place, not only
of human histories, spatial relations, and related social practices, but also of
related histories and practices of land and other species. Mobile and prac-
ticed in a multitude of ways, including in and through the sedimentation
and manifestation of power relations, what do such conceptualizations of
place offer for critical politics of social change?
WHAT THEN FOR POLITICS?
Massey (2005) and others propose that conceptualizations of place that go
beyond the social yield productive ways of interpreting multifaceted accu-
mulations of human and nonhuman practices. Massey suggests how such
interpretations also yield possibilities for politics. Instead of assumptions of
a pre-given coherence or collective identity, Massey suggests that the multi-
plicity and mutability of place demands negotiation. She writes, “places as
presented here in a sense necessitate invention; they pose a challenge. They
implicate us, perforce, in the lives of human others, and in our relations with
nonhumans” (Massey, 2005, p. 141). Likewise, in refusing binary categories
of object versus subject, material versus cognitive, real versus imagined, and
space versus place, Soja (2010) also suggests the importance of the practiced
and lived for spatial justice. As Cresswell (2004) proposes, this provides a
groundwork for thinking about a politics of place based on place as lived
and inhabited. By these terms, “places are never established. They only
operate through constant and reiterative practice” (Cresswell, 2004, p. 38).
Thus, to practice place or land productively towards versions of critical
Indigenous and environmental politics will mean different things to differ-
ent people and communities. Warning against the dangers of identification
with place in terms of the creation of us/them categories in which the other
is devalued, Cresswell (2004) also suggests the potential of forms of critical
regionalism or militant particularism, in which the particularity of place is
used as a platform for resistance. Sociologist Saskia Sassen (e.g., 2007, 2012)
has examined the concept of territory in order to better understand how it is
being mobilized to support the nation-state or new globalized forms of land-
based colonization through practices such as land grabs. Advocating for the
liberation of the notion of territory from these dominant uses, Sassen (2012)
suggests the possibility of other place-based identifications that provide use-
ful politics that go beyond place (Massey, 2009), such as the “global street”
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44 Place in Research
as mobilized in recent social movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring,
and Idle No More (discussed later). She asks,
Do the powerless make history? They can, but there is a temporality
that attaches to it and it can take many generations. It is a making that
is easily rendered invisible. The actors are rendered invisible. So with
the global street it makes it visible. This power of the powerless to make
change is invisible to us and there’s something about the global street
that makes it visible.” (Sassen, 2012, n.p.)
Elsewhere Sassen (2007) has written about how through focusing on local
issues and linking with other places with related issues, this can enable a
“multiscaler politics of the local” (p. 207).
Researchers on social and youth movements have documented the impor-
tance of social networks in organizing protests (Otero & Cammarota, 2011;
Weiss, 2011; Yang, 2007). Social actions that appear to the media to be spon-
taneous, to spring up as if from nowhere, are made possible by rhizomes of
communication facilitated by cell phones and social media. Recent uprisings
in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Palestine, massive student protests in Europe
and Quebec, the Occupy movement in the United States and elsewhere, and
youth protests against police violence draw our attention to the power of
resistance networks but also the specificity of place of resistance (Tuck &
Yang, 2014). In late 1998, students in Serbia formed Otpor (translation:
Resistance), an anti-Milosevic-government movement starting with a small
group of middle-class students that soon spread across the entire country.
Otpor established a template that would be followed by Kmara (transla-
tion: Enough) in Georgia, and Pora (translation: It’s time) in Ukraine—
using similar branding, music, fashion, pranks, public performances, and
sticker campaigns (Collin, 2007, pp. 3–5; see also Tuck & Yang, 2014).
Organizers from one movement provided trainings to organizers in other
movements in other places, understanding the need for meticulous strategic
planning. Most striking about these movements was their wildfire reach
and speed. Other movements were ignited in Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and
Belarus, and inspired actions in 2005 in the Zvakwana/Sokwanele (transla-
tion: Enough) groups in Zimbabwe (where protesters distributed condoms
with Bob Marley lyrics on them), Kefaya (translation: Enough) in Egypt
(where protesters tried to prevent Mubarak from entering a fifth term),
and in the Cedar Revolution of Lebanon (where protesters set up a camp
in Martyrs Square in Beirut to protest the 15,000 Syrian troops stationed
there) (Collin, 2007, p. 167).
As referred to earlier in this chapter, in late 2012, an Indigenous envi-
ronmental and sovereignty movement, Idle No More, began in Saskatoon,
Canada. It was started with a teach-in on the consequences of Prime Minister
Stephen Harper’s Budget Omnibus Bill’s C-38 and C-45, which changed
more than 130 federal Acts without proper Parliamentary debate, and
AuQ4
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Conceptualizing Place 45
without First Nations consultation, and greatly diminished environmen-
tal protection across the country (Land, 2013). Idle No More events and
teach-ins spread throughout North America and across the globe, especially
among Indigenous peoples in other settler colonial nation-states, including
the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Palestine/Israel. This was
achieved through place-specific actions, such as round dances, protests,
teach-ins, and other displays of resistance, images, and accounts, which
were then shared through social media (Tuck & Yang, 2014).
In December 2012, Ogichidaakwe Theresa Spence went on a hunger
strike consuming only fishbroth for six weeks. Inspired by Ogichidaakwe
Spence’s hunger strike, on January 17, 2013, six young people, including
Travis George, Stanley George Jr., Raymond Bajo Kawapit, Johnny Abraham
Kawapit, David Kawapit, and Geordie Rupert, from Whapmagoostui
First Nation began a 1,600-kilometer walk from their homeland that
would conclude on Parliament Hill. They called it the Journey of Nishiyuu
(translation: Human beings). The youth were joined by about 200 others
along their journey, and they were greeted by an estimated 5,000 people
when they arrived in Ottawa more than two months later on March 25,
2013. Their walk was for recognition as sovereign peoples: “We just want
to be equal, we just want Algonquin and Cree, all the reserves . . . to be
known and to be treated equally,” said Jordan Masty, who joined them on
the walk (Barrera, 2013, n.p.). On May 22, 2013, at 5 pm, First Nations
Peoples restored the peak of Mount Douglas to its original name, PKOLS.
Tsawout, Songhees, and WSÁNEC
´ nations participated in the reclaiming
actions, including the installment of a new sign, a walk, and drumming. Par-
ticipants held signs that said, “Reclaim, Rename, Reoccupy” (Lavoie, 2013,
n.p.). These examples of movement building that are very much based on
and in relation to land in specific places, but also connecting to people and
places regionally and globally, exemplify a “politics of place beyond place”
as theorized by Massey (2005, 2009).
In a study on the 2006 mobilizations for immigration rights through social
networks and text messaging, K. Wayne Yang (2007) describes how what
appears to be “fast organizing” or spontaneous is actually quite slow: “Youth
fast organizing has been mistaken for ephemeral and spontaneous activity,
rather than the outcomes of intentional and continuous organizing . . . spon-
taneity is an illusion generated by fast-technology, and can mask deeper
structures of organized behavior” that took countless hours, days, or years
of participation to develop (p. 19). The channels for collective resistance to
flow are deepened over time, like trained neural pathways through which
the repeated movements become body memory. Yang observes,
[V]irtual space provides otherwise un-propertied youth with a durable,
malleable site of identity formation, social organization, and collective
memory . . . That radicalizing moment of protest and crisis was preceded
and succeeded by durable changes in ideology and social organizing—as
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46 Place in Research
remembered and lived through [social media]. These low-rent organiz-
ing halls and offices in virtual space can facilitate political activity, even
formal political parties, that could mature into transformative urban
movement. (p. 25)
Place itself, and our connections across place, can enable conceptualiza-
tions and practices of a “politics of place beyond place” (Massey, 2009).
In accounts of social movements and political action, the role of place in
shaping action can be obscured. Critical place inquiry seeks to make the
influences of place on organizing and resistance more discernable and, thus,
better able to be mobilized.
WHAT THEN FOR INQUIRY?
Toward the aims of this volume, the political implications of how place is
conceptualized are also enacted in research itself; how we theorize place
matters for how we do inquiry and research, but also what counts as evi-
dence, as knowing, as legitimacy, as rigorous, as ethical, and as useful.
Weighing the purposes of inquiry with regard to social change calls for not
a small amount of cynicism. Policy, law, and public opinion have been dis-
figured by neoliberal market logics; as Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) observes,
forms of life (and conceptualizations of land and life) that are not organized
on the basis of market values are characterized as irrelevant, irrational, even
as potential security risks (p. 22). Even if research determines a practice or
intervention that “can be shown to lengthen life and increase health, but
cannot at the same time be shown to produce a market value, this length-
ened life and increased health is not a value to be capacitated” (Povinelli,
2011, p. 22).
Yet, neoliberalism (like development, like settler colonialism) is always
uneven and incomplete, and there is hope in that (Peck, 2013). Although
it is not always sequentially clear how inquiry can work to impact policy,
pedagogy, or action (because channels between findings and applications
can be convoluted or ideologically dismantled, as is often the case in fields
like education and health), inquiry can have a meaningful role in maintain-
ing, resisting, or mobilizing political trajectories with material outcomes.
Chandra Mohanty (2003) observes that
as we develop more complex, nuanced modes of asking questions and
as scholarship in a number of relevant fields begins to address histories
of colonialism, capitalism, race, and gender as inextricably interrelated,
our very conceptual maps are redrawn and transformed. (p. 3)
Our hope is that the transformation of our very conceptual maps is informed
by more deeply considered and more elaborately articulated theorizations of
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Conceptualizing Place 47
place and land. In our next chapter, we turn to decolonizing conceptualiza-
tions of place, attending to the latent assumptions of settler colonialism and
encroachment of settler epistemologies on land and Indigenous life in social
science research. Decolonizing conceptualizations of place, like the concep-
tualizations described in this chapter, yield implications for the ethics and
protocols, topics, methodologies, and methods of research.
NOTES
1. To this point Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd wryly observes, “We are long-
memoried peoples and we remember what happened last time the world was
flat” (2011, p. xiv). Byrd insists that by making Indigenous peoples central to
theorizations of globalization and postcoloniality, errors such as dismissing
the continued significance of place can be avoided. This is discussed further
in the opening of Chapter 3.
2. Part of N. Smith’s project in Uneven Development is to disprove the assump-
tion of nature as external object, tracing the assumption to the formulation of
capitalism and its philosophical traditions (especially philosophies of Bacon
and Newton, see 1984/2008, p. 15; see also Chapter 7 in this volume). New
Materialist scholar Manuel DeLanda insists,
Any materialist’s philosophy takes as its point of departure the existence
of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it con-
fronts the problem of the origin of enduring identity of the inhabitants
of the world: if the mind is not what gives identity to the mountains and
rivers, plants and animals, what does? . . . If one rejects essentialism then
there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities
are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or
produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history.
(DeLanda in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 39)
3. It is politically important to note that the “migration” referenced here is not
the migration over a land bridge that is frequently/erroneously attributed to
Indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Indigenous peoples in
North America have cosmogony stories that refute the land bridge theory, and
we defer to those stories.
4. It is interesting to consider this critique of mapping alongside Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) advocacy for making a map and not a tracing.
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Now the people spoke among themselves and agreed with what their
leaders had said. They agreed to be known for the place where they
first planted corn.
Charles Henry, as quoted in Keith Basso, 1996
Terra nullius, the colonizer’s dream, is a sinister presupposition for
social science. It is invoked every time we try to theorise the forma-
tion of social institutions and systems from scratch, in a blank space.
Whenever we see the words “building block” in a treatise of social
theory, we should be asking who used to occupy the land.
Raewyn Connell, 2007
Indigenous peoples have lived through environmental collapse on local
and regional levels since the beginning of colonialism—the construc-
tion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the extermination of the buffalo in
Cree and Blackfoot territories and the extinction of salmon in Lake
Ontario—these were unnecessary and devastating. At the same time, I
know there are a lot of people within the indigenous community that
are giving the economy, this system, 10 more years, 20 more years,
that are saying “Yeah, we’re going to see the collapse of this in our
lifetimes.”
Leanne Simpson in Klein and Simpson, 2013, n.p.
In this chapter, we zoom in our focus on decolonizing conceptualizations
of place, which was discussed more generally alongside a variety of other
conceptualizations in Chapter 2. Our aim here is to attend to decolonial
and Indigenous renderings of place, and the ways in which they depart from
(and collide with) conceptualizations of place that derive from Western
philosophical frames. As we explain later, decolonizing perspectives and
approaches are always spatially and temporally specific (Fanon, 1968; Tuck &
Yang, 2012). The discussions in this volume are particularly concerned with
decolonization away from settler colonialism, which projects those who
Decolonizing Perspectives
on Place
3
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 49
already inhabited stolen land before settlers’ arrival as “spatially, socially,
and temporally before it in the double sense of ‘before’—before it in a tem-
poral sequence and before it as a fact to be faced” (Povinelli, 2011, p. 36).
In Chapter 2, we began with a discussion on the competing conclu-
sions about the saliency of place in a globalized context. Some scholars and
popular media pundits have taken the increased mobility and technological
connectivity of the world’s populations to mean that place does not mat-
ter anymore. Others, especially Neil Smith (1984/2008) in his articulation
of uneven development, insist that globalization means that place matters
more. Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011), in arguing that Indigenous peo-
ples must be central to theorizations of the conditions of globalization and
postcoloniality, offers this insertion to the debate: “For indigenous peoples,
place, land, sovereignty, and memory matter. In a world growing increas-
ingly enamored with faster, flatter, smooth, where positionality doesn’t mat-
ter so much as how it is that we travel there, indigeneity matters” (p. xiii).
Byrd’s point is that mistakenly concluding that place no longer matters can
be avoided if Indigeneity becomes a lens through which to view globaliza-
tion and postcoloniality.
In most cases, decolonizing conceptualizations of place (and decoloni-
zation more broadly) draw upon Indigenous intellectualism and world-
views, which is why we discuss them together in this chapter. We agree that
Indigenous perspectives must be at the center of decolonizing theories and
practices (Tuck & Yang, 2012), and in this chapter we also note how decolo-
nial perspectives on place might be informed by Southern theories (Connell,
2007) and theorizations of anti-Blackness in settler colonial nation-states.
Decolonizing conceptualizations of place confront, undermine, dis-
avow, and unsettle understandings of place that emerge from what Mary
Louise Pratt (1992) calls “Europe’s planetary consciousness” (p. 15). The
specific version of European planetary consciousness that Pratt describes
arose in 1735, with the publication of Swedish naturalist Carl Linne’s
The System of Nature, a classification of all plant forms on the planet,
and the launch of the La Condamine expedition, Europe’s first formal
pursuit of scientific evidence of the exact shape (a sphere or a spheroid?)
of the planet. The classification system typified a European desire to order
nature into hierarchies, whereas the expedition typified a European desire
for not only wealth, but Science and scientific knowledge (capitaliza-
tion intended) to enkindle colonial expansion. Constructed of the dual
impulses toward interior exploration and constructions of global-scale
meanings, this European planetary consciousness is the basic element of
modern Eurocentrism (Pratt, 1992, p. 15).
Pratt (1992) explains that these two activities, classification and expedi-
tion, were primary activities of colonialism and the establishment of settler
colonies. We note that both are concerned with place—the former with plac-
ing/emplacing various hierarchies, the latter with the accumulation of place.
Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman (2013) observes,
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50 Place in Research
This ‘planetary consciousness’ [described by Pratt, 1992] which still
largely orders the world, has had major implications for Native and non-
Native communities alike . . . Colonization resulted in a sorting of space
based on ideological premises of hierarchies and binaries. Settler colonial-
ism continues to depend on imposing a “planetary consciousness” and
naturalizing geographic concepts and sets of social relationships. (p. 2)
Quechua scholar Sandy Grande (2004) elaborates the “deep structures”
of what she calls “colonialist consciousness,” which closely corresponds to
Pratt’s term, European planetary consciousness. These are the animating
beliefs that course through colonialist societies, hegemonic perspectives that
serve as common sense. These deep structures involve five core beliefs:
1) Belief in progress as change and change as progress
2) Belief in the effective separateness of faith and reason
3) Belief in the essential quality of the universe and of “reality” as imper-
sonal, secular, material, mechanistic, and relativistic
4) Subscription to ontological individualism
5) Belief in human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of
nature. (Grande, 2004, p. 69)
Grande posits that contemporary cultural and ecological crises can be cred-
ited to these deep structures—they both afford and justify environmental
degradation, cultural domination, and the practices of “overdeveloped,
overconsumptive, and overempowered first-world nations and their envi-
ronmentally destructive ontological, axiological, and epistemological sys-
tems” (2004, p. 68).
Erstwhile, Indigenous philosophies of place predate and have co-developed
alongside and in-spite of the deep structures of European planetary con-
sciousness. Synthesizing the role of place in Indigenous philosophical frame-
works, Vine Deloria, Jr. (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001) argues that,
Power and place produce personality. This equation simply means that
the universe is alive, but it also contains within it the very important sug-
gestion that the universe is personal and, therefore, must be approached
in a personal manner . . . The personal nature of the universe demands
that each and every entity in it seek and sustain personal relationships . . .
[Thus], the corresponding question faced by American Indians when
contemplating action is whether or not the proposed action is appropri-
ate. Appropriateness includes the moral dimension of respect for the
part of nature that will be used or affected in our action. Thus, killing
an animal or catching a fish involved paying respect to the species and
the individual animal or fish that such action had disturbed. Harvesting
plants also involved paying respect to the plants. These actions were
necessary because of the recognition that the universe was built upon
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 51
constructive and cooperative relationships that had to be maintained.
(Deloria in Deloria & Wildcat, 2001, pp. 23–24)
Indigenous philosophies of place represent significant epistemological and
ontological departures from those that have emerged in Western frames.
Yet, in Indigenous worldviews, relationships to land are not overly
romantic—it might be more accurate to say that they are familiar, and if
sacred, sacred because they are familiar. Rarámuri ethnobotanist Enrique
Salmón argues,
When [Indigenous] people speak of the land, the religious and romantic
overtones so prevalent in Western environmental conversation are absent.
To us, the land exists in the same manner as do our families, chickens, the
river, and the sky. No hierarchy of privilege places one above or below
another. Everything is woven into a managed, interconnected tapestry.
Within this web, there are particular ways that living things relate to one
another. . . . One Raramuri elder mentioned to me that “It is the reason
why people should collect plants in the same way that fish should breathe
water, and birds eat seeds and bugs. These are things we are supposed to
do.” (Salmón, 2012, p. 27)
Salmón locates the tendency to romanticize Indigenous relationships to land
inside the Western cultural tradition, a misunderstanding of the nexus of
Indigenous identity and land.
Similarly, Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman (2013) observes,
Describing Native relationships to land is riddled with pitfalls and
paradoxes, many of which are impossible to avoid given the nature of
power and colonialism. I do not take the phrase “relationship to the
land,” as a given, unchanging, and naturalized part of Native American
identities, especially as capitalism and colonization have produced new
ways of experiencing time and space. . . . On one hand, Native rela-
tionships to land are presumed and oversimplified as natural, and even
worse, romanticized . . . Respecting the environment is not encoded
in the DNA. In fact, tribes have experience many travesties of justice
in regard to environmental destruction. We also have a tendency to
abstract space—that is to decorporealitize, commodify, or bureaucratize—
when the legal ramifications of land or the political landscape are
addressed: too often we forget that reserve/ations, resource exploita-
tion, federal Indian law, and urbanization are relatively new phenom-
ena. The stories that connect Native people to the land and form their
relationships to the land and one another are much older than colo-
nial governments . . . Stories create the relationships that have made
communities strong even through numerous atrocities and injustices.
(Goeman, 2013, p. 28)
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52 Place in Research
DECOLONIZING CONCEPTUALIZATIONS DRAW
ON INDIGENOUS THEORIES
It seems self-evident that a discussion on decolonizing conceptualizations of
land would primarily draw on conceptualizations by Indigenous peoples.
Yet, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) have observed, the discourse
of decolonization is frequently invoked without reference to the works and
lives of Indigenous peoples:
At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear
speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,”
or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking.” Yet,
we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no men-
tion of Indigenous peoples, our/their struggles for the recognition of
our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals
and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further,
there is often little recognition given to the immediate context of settler
colonialism on the North American lands where many of these confer-
ences take place. (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 2–3)
In these instances, the discourse of decolonization is epistemically severed
from the specific colonial contexts from which it emerges. The result is the
use of “decolonization” as a synonym for civil and human rights-based social
justice projects. This is problematic because decolonization seeks something
quite different than those forms of justice (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 2). The
too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse is a kind of inclusion that is also,
a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization. It
is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories
of social change. (W)e wanted to be sure to clarify that decolonization is
not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very
possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it
extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize
(a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-
existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are
anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption,
adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of set-
tler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not
offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences
of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things
we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization
doesn’t have a synonym. (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 3)
Decolonization within settler colonial nation-states is complicated because
there is no spatial separation between empire, settlement, and colony/colonized.
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 53
When decolonization is allowed to stand as metaphor, it papers over this
complexity, backing away from the very aspects of decolonization that are
unsettling.
Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decoloniza-
tion in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land
simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have
always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of
the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization
is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity . . . Settler
colonialism, and its decolonization, implicates and unsettles everyone.
(Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7)
Thus, when we discuss decolonizing perspectives of place in this chapter,
we are doing so with an understanding of decolonization that is purpose-
fully informed by Indigenous analyses of colonization and theorizations of
unsettlement. Further, we discuss decolonization as always involving recali-
brations of human relationships to land.
“CONCEPTUALIZATION” IS NOT THE RIGHT WORD
In Western philosophical traditions, Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum has
sprouted a lexicon that links what humans do to/with ideas only to the
mind, located in or near the brain in the human head. Intellect/ualization
and concept/ualization are both nouns and activities that are thought or
perceived to have a home in the mind, which is physically located, some-
how, in the brain. Thoughts and perceptions, incidentally, also take place
in/from the human head; so too with comprehension, cognition, theorizing,
understanding, interpreting. This observation (again, the head) is not meant
to be dense or obvious, but to draw attention to how the very words we use
to describe how humans interact with ideas are over-coded by assumptions
about where thinking comes from and goes to. This coding is perhaps a
good match with Western common sense, which regards the mind as apart
from the body, the self as apart from others, the body as apart from the
rest of matter, and humans as perhaps part, but also discreet and unique
from, the rest of the living world.1 But, this coding is not a good match for
how Indigenous philosophies engage questions of self, us, the (living) world,
interactions with it, and interactions with ideas. As Gloria Anzaldúa (1987)
says of the body, “We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intel-
ligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern
between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination” (p. 37).
In a discussion about decolonizing conceptualizations of place, it is neces-
sary to remember that conceptualizations is not the right word. Theorizations
is not quite right either, in this case not because Indigenous people do not
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54 Place in Research
position themselves as theorists, but because what counts as theorizing is
often quite narrow in Western definitions. Maori scholar Leonie Pihama
(2005) writes,
Our histories remind us of many acts of resistance to colonial imperial-
ism and struggles of resistance against the confiscation of our lands.
In the history of Taranaki, where my own tribal links hold firmly, we
have many examples of the approaches taken by our tupuna, our ances-
tors, in the struggle against the confiscation of our land, the imprison-
ment and death of many of our people, and the denial of our language,
culture, and knowledge bases. As such our people have always been
theorists. We have generations engaged with our world and constructed
theories as a part of our own knowledge and ways of understanding our
experiences. (p. 191)
In this excerpt, Pihama fuses together notions of resistance, ancestors, land,
knowing, experience, and theory.
Thus, although we employ the word conceptualizations in the title of
this chapter and throughout, we do so with the important acknowledg-
ment that the epistemological and cosmological departures represented by
Indigenous worldviews (especially when compared to Western perspectives)
require an expansion to the connotative meanings of concept/ualization.
“Interactions” and “relationships” are somewhat helpful words toward
describing what we are getting at, but only if they are imbued with notions
of intention, consideration, reflection, and iteration. Learning from Pihama
(2005), “conceptualization,” must connote resistance, land, knowing, and
experience over generations.
PLACE IS NOT THE RIGHT WORD EITHER
As it becomes quite clear in reading Indigenous philosophy, “place” and
“space” are not the right words either. Even when the term place is used, it
is clear that it is a referent to something quite different than can be found
in Western philosophical traditions. Vine Deloria, Jr. (Deloria & Wildcat,
2001), writing about American Indian [sic] metaphysics, observes,
The best description of Indian metaphysics was the realization that
the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social real-
ity, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate
knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This
world was a unified world, a far cry from the disjointed sterile and
emotionless world painted by Western science. Even though we can
translate the realities of the Indian social world into concepts famil-
iar to us from the Western scientific context, such as space, time, and
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 55
energy, we must surrender most of the meaning in the world when we
do so. The Indian world can be said to consist of two basic experiential
dimensions that, taken together, provided a sufficient means of making
sense of the world. These two concepts were place and power, the latter
perhaps defined as a spiritual power or life force. Familiarity with the
personality of objects and entities in the natural world enabled Indians
to discern immediately where each living being had its proper place
and what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged, and sug-
gested. And knowing places enabled people to relate to the living entities
inhabiting it. (pp. 2–3)
For several reasons related to Deloria’s observations, Indigenous authors
have indicated preference for the term land over place. “Land” in these dis-
cussions is often shorthand for land, water, air, and subterranean earth—for
example, in discussions of wetlands (Bang et al., 2014) and Sea Country
(Whitehouse et al., 2014). As we discuss throughout this chapter, land is
imbued with the experiential sense making invoked by Deloria in the previ-
ous passage.
Among Indigenous peoples, relationships to land and place are diverse,
specific, and un-generalizable (Lowan, 2009):
Every cultural group established relations to [their land] over time.
Whether that place is in the desert, a mountain valley, or along a sea-
shore, it is in the context of natural community, and through that under-
standing they established an educational process that was practical, ulti-
mately ecological, and spiritual. In this way they sought and found their
life. (Cajete, 1994, p. 113, as cited in Lowan, 2009, p. 47)
“Land” is imbued with these long relationships and, as we discuss in the
following section, the practices and knowledges that have emerged from
those relationships.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PLACE AND LAND2
Megan Bang et al. (2014) differentiate Western connotations of place
from Indigenous connotations of land by invoking Brian Yazzie Burkhart’s
(2004) discussion of Descartes’s aforementioned insistence. Burkhart revises
Descartes statement, “I think, therefore I am,” away from an individualist
focus toward a more tribal understanding, “We are, therefore I am,” to
express the saliency of collectivity in Indigenous life and knowledge systems
(Bang et al., 2014, p. x). Bang et al. extend Burkhart’s revision in order to
compare notions of place to notions of land.
Similarly, we might imagine that ontology of place-based paradigms is some-
thing like “I am, therefore place is,” in contrast, the ontology of land-based
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56 Place in Research
[paradigms] might be summarized as “Land is, therefore we are” (p. xx, insertion
ours, original word was pedagogies). Bang et al. (2014) seem to be saying that
the ontology of place prioritizes and centers the individual human, the surveyor
or place, whereas an ontology of land prioritizes and centers land, which consti-
tutes the life of a collective. This represents a profound distinction that cannot be
overlooked. Understandings of collectivity and shared (although not necessarily
synchronous) relations to land are core attributes of an ontology of land.
Further—and this is not a romantic point—the land-we ontology articu-
lated by Bang et al. (2014) is incommensurable with anthropocentric notions
of place. Daniel Wildcat (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001) insists that indigenous
means “to be of a place,” meaning that “Indigenous people represent a
culture emergent from a place, and they actively draw on the power of that
place physically and spiritually” (p. 32). This is why Eve Tuck has argued
elsewhere that Indigenous peoples have creation stories, not colonization
stories about how Indigenous people came to (be) a place (Tuck & Yang,
2012). In Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), Charles Henry, ethnographer Keith
Basso’s Apache host, tells Basso the following story about how one Apache
community narrated their land:
This is where our women first planted corn. They have planted it again
and again. Each year we have harvested enough to roast and dry and
store away. These fields look after us by helping our corn to grow. Our
children eat it and become strong. We eat it and continue to live. Our
corn draws life from this earth and we draw life from our corn. This
earth is part of us! We are of this place . . . We should name ourselves
for this place! (quoted in Basso, 1996, p. 21)
Henry continues, “You see, their names for themselves are really the names
of their places. This is how they were known, to others and to themselves.
They were known by their places. This is how they are still known” (p. 21).
This narrative of being “known by their places” cannot be made compat-
ible with flat world ontologies (e.g., Friedman, 2007) and other ontologies
that put humans at the center of the universe, or conversely, as but small
and simple cogs in a universal scheme (see N. Smith, 1984/2008, p. 7). This
characteristic of Indigenous worldviews is derived in no small part from
necessity. Yup’ik elder Oscar Kawagley wrote,
The cold defines my place. Mamterilleq (now known as Bethel, Alaska)
made me who I am. The cold made my language, my worldview, my cul-
ture, and my technology . . . I grew up as an inseparable part of Nature. It
was not my place to “own” land, nor to domesticate plants or animals that
often have more power than I as a human being. (Kawagley, 2010, p. xviii)
Finally, Bang et al.’s (2014) insistence on “Land is, therefore we are”
is not an abstraction. Many Indigenous cultures refer to seascapes,
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 57
mountains, and other land formations literally and not figuratively as
ancestors. This is as true in Indigenous cosmogony as it is in contempo-
rary accounts of Indigenous resistance, such as the October 2013 attack on
Mi’kmaq anti-fracking protesters by Royal Canadian Mounted Police at
Elsipogtog. Writing about the Mi’kmaq mothers, grandmothers, aunties,
sisters, and daughters—armed with drums and feathers against the pointed
rifles of the RCMP—and their choice to lay their bodies on their land to
protest and protect their land from fracking, Leanne Simpson remarks,
“Our bodies should be on the land so that our grandchildren have some-
thing left to stand upon” (Klein & Simpson, 2013, n.p.). This, like the
notion of land as ancestor is simultaneously poetic and real; it is both a
notion and an action.
LAND
As Styres, Haig-Brown, and Blimkie (2013) recently articulated in discussing
a “pedagogy of Land” (echoing Cajete [1994] and Lowan [2009]), “land”
refers not just to the materiality of land, but also its “spiritual, emotional,
and intellectual aspects” (p. 37). These scholars choose to signify consider-
ation of these aspects in their capitalization of Land (as do Styres & Zinga,
2013; Korteweg & Oakley, 2014; and Engel, Mauro, & Carroll, 2014).
Land can be considered as a teacher and conduit of memory (Brooks,
2008; Wilson, 2008) in that it “both remembers life and its loss and serves
itself as a mnemonic device that triggers the ethics of relationality with the
sacred geographies that constitute Indigenous peoples’ histories” (Byrd
2011, p. 118).
Relationships to land are familial, intimate, intergenerational, and
instructive. For example, Manulani Aluli Meyer (2008) writes,
Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor. For the Native Hawaiians
speaking of knowledge, land was the central theme that drew forth all
others. You came from a place, you grew in a place and you had a
relationship with a place. This is an epistemological idea. . . . One does
not simply learn about land, we learn best from land. (p. 219, italics
original)
Land teaches and can be considered as first teacher (Styres et al., 2013).
Yup’ik scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley (2010) writes that for Yupiaq
people, land and nature are “metaphysic” and pedagogical:
It is through direct interaction with the environment that the Yupiaq
people learn. What they learn is mediated by the cultural cognitive map.
The map consists of those “truths” that have been proven over a long
period of time. As the Yupiaq people interact with nature, they carefully
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58 Place in Research
observe to find pattern or order where there might otherwise appear to
be chaos. (p. 88)
He continues, “It was meaningless for Yupiaq to count, measure, and weigh,
for their wisdom transcended the quantification of things to recognize a
qualitative level whereby the spiritual, natural, and human worlds were
inextricably interconnected” (p. 90). Kawagley’s rendering of Yupiaq rela-
tions to land braids together the cosmological, pedagogical, pragmatic, and
spiritual.
Significantly, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars theorizing the con-
notative differences between land and place include the urban in their
considerations. Land does not exclude the urban, to be relegated only to the
“green spaces” outside and within the urban (Bang et al., 2014; Paperson,
2014).
Styres and colleagues (2013), Meyer (2008), Kawagley (2010), and oth-
ers also warn against understandings of Indigenous knowledge of land as
static or performable. Calderon (2014) emphasizes embracing protocols
“that are mindful of how indigenous knowledge has been co-opted and omit-
ted” (p. 6), including, for example, expectations that Indigenous peoples lead
discussions on place. This mindfulness of co-option also entails an acknowl-
edgement that Indigenous identities and knowledge are not static and that
non-Indigenous desires for performances of “authentic” Indigeneity are also
problematic. Friedel (2011) outlines this concern effectively in her paper
on “urban Native youth’s cultured responses to Western place-based learn-
ing” in western Canada. The youth in the study resisted the stereotypes
and expectations of the White educators for them to “get back to nature,”
instead holding fast to their own desires for social experiences and connec-
tions, wanting to “to learn to be Aboriginal without being in the woods”
(p. 535). Friedel (2011) writes,
Of the pernicious representations of Indigeneity today, none is more
equivocal than the trope of ‘the Ecological Indian’. Borne from nine-
teenth-century romantic primitivism, this White construction (Bird,
1996) has become a prevalent signifier in the environmental realm,
an ideal to which Canadians and others look today for a critique of
Western institutions. (p. 534)
As this suggests, mindfulness of non-Indigenous desires to access assumed
Indigenous knowledge also needs to extend to a mindfulness of non-Indigenous
desires to adopt or use such knowledge (e.g., critiques of the formula-
tions and uses of “traditional ecological knowledge,” as in Agrawal, 2002).
This is difficult terrain in working both with Indigenous and non-Indigenous
peoples: to acknowledge and include Indigenous knowledge and perspec-
tives but in non-determined ways that do not stereotype Indigenous knowl-
edge or identities.
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 59
THEORIZING COLONIALISM
Raewyn Connell (2007) observes,
The most important erasure in globalization theory concerns colonial-
ism. The fact that the majority world has deep prior experience of sub-
jugation to globalizing powers is surely known to all the theorists. But
this experience of subjugation does not surface as a central issue in any
of the [major] theories of globalization.” (p. 65)
Theories of colonialism have largely focused on what is sometimes called
exogenous domination (Veracini, 2011), exploitation colonialism, or
external colonialism—three names for the same form. In this form of
colonization, small numbers of colonizers go to a new place in order
to dominate a local labor force to harvest resources to send back to the
metropole, for example, the spice trade that impelled the colonization of
India by several different European empires. Exploitation colonialism, its
nature, consequences, endgame, and post-possibilities, has been the focus
of (what would become) the field of postcolonial studies for the past fifty
years.
It has only been in the last two decades that settler colonialism has been
more comprehensively theorized, mostly via the emergence of the field of
settler colonial studies. Settler colonialism is a form of colonization in which
outsiders come to land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and claim it as their
own new home (see also Hinkinson, 2012). Subsequent generations of
settlers come to the settler nation-state for many reasons, under many
circumstances—but at the heart of all of those rationales is the need for
space and land. This form is distinct from the exploitation colonialism that
has been so deeply theorized in postcolonial studies because in settler colo-
nialism, settlers come to the new land seeking land and resources, not (neces-
sarily) labor (Wolfe, 2011). Put another way, in this version, the colonizers
arrive at a place (“discovering” it) and attempt to make it a permanent home
(claiming it). Settlers enforce their interpretations on everyone and every-
thing in their new domain, and their new societies require corporeal and
epistemic elimination of the Native (Wolfe, 1999, 2006; Veracini, 2011).
Although there are many important parallels and connections between
exploitation colonialism and settler colonialism, especially as settler colo-
nial nation states also occupy and colonize other lands, there are impor-
tant differences to be teased apart (see also Hinkinson, 2012). For example,
Veracini (2011) observes that exploitation colonizers and settler colonizers
want very different things: the exploitation colonizer says to the Indigenous
person, “you, work for me,” whereas the settler colonizer—because land
is the primary pursuit—says to the Indigenous person, “you, go away” (p. 1).
Of course, in reality, settler colonizers communicate an amalgamation of these
messages to Indigenous peoples; Veracini observes that the accumulating
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60 Place in Research
sentiment may be more like, “you, work for me while we wait for you to
disappear,” or “you, move on so you can work for me,” but the base inten-
tion of settlers has been to disappear Indigenous peoples from the land to
make it available for settlement (p. 2).
One of the notable characteristics of settler colonial states is the refusal
to recognize themselves as such, requiring a continual disavowal of history,
Indigenous peoples’ resistance to settlement, Indigenous peoples’ claims to
stolen land, and how settler colonialism is indeed ongoing, not an event
contained in the past. Settler colonialism is made invisible within settler
societies and uses institutional apparatuses to “cover its tracks” (Veracini,
2011). For example, most non-Indigenous people living in settler societies, if
they think of colonizers and/or settlers at all, think of Captain James Cook,
Christopher Columbus, colonies, and forts (Donald, 2012; see Hinkinson,
2012, for a discussion of the colonization of Australia). They think of col-
onization as something that happened in the distant past, as perhaps the
unfortunate birthpangs of a new nation. They do not consider the fact that
they live on land that has been stolen, or ceded through broken treaties, or to
which Indigenous peoples claim a pre-existing ontological and cosmological
relationship. They do not consider themselves to be implicated in the contin-
ued settlement and occupation of unceded Indigenous land. Indeed, settler
colonial societies “cover” the “tracks” of settler colonialism by narrating
colonization as temporally located elsewhere, not here and now (Veracini,
2011).
Another of the general characteristics of settler societies is that settlers are
located at the top and at the center of all typologies—as simultaneously most
superior and most normal (Tuck & Yang, 2012). These typologies include
settler/Indigenous, but also the hegemony of settlers over non-Indigenous
workers. These hierarchies are established through force, policy, law, and
ideology and are so embedded that they become naturalized.
The hegemony of the hierarchy of settlers over Indigenous peoples was
already well established and thriving before Captain Cook left England to
“discover” lands in the South (Moreton-Robinson, 2009). A letter from the
President of the Royal Society documents full knowledge of the presence
of Indigenous peoples on (what is now) Australia, but also their existing
proprietary rights (which Cook was further instructed to ignore to claim
possession of the land for the king) (Moreton-Robinson, 2009, p. 30). From
Cook’s notes, the natives he encountered in Australia did not value the pos-
sessions he and his men offered them, nor would they be willing to part with
their possessions or land in exchange for what Cook could provide—this
was the rationale for claiming land without consent.
To be able to assert “this is mine” requires a subject to internalize the
idea that one has proprietary rights that are part of normative behav-
iour, rules of interaction and social engagement. Thus possession which
constitutes part of the ontological structure of white subjectivity is
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 61
also constituted socio-discursively. For Cook to be able to take posses-
sion of the east coast of Australia without the consent of the ‘natives’
means he had to position Aboriginal people as will-less things in order
to take their land in the name of the King. Thus Cook’s white posses-
siveness operated ontologically and epistemologically by willing away
Indigenous people’s sovereignty in order to make them appear will-less.
(Moreton-Robinson, 2009, p. 32)
Cook’s idea of possession was informed by the logic of capital
according to which possessions are those things having an exchange
value when they are sold or otherwise traded, usually man made mate-
rial objects or other things occurring naturally and taken without con-
straint. This logic underpins Cook’s perception of Indigenous people as
property-less and living in a state of nature whose possessions do not
go beyond satisfying their immediate needs. Being perceived as living in
a state of nature relegates one’s existence to being an inseparable part
of nature and therefore incapable of possessing it. (Moreton-Robinson,
2009, p. 34)
Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) theorizes settler colonialism as a
form of biopower, observing that “the biopolitics of settler colonialism
arose in the Americas by perpetuating African diasporic subjugation and
Indigenous elimination simultaneously” (p. 57). Thus, in several con-
texts, settler colonialism has simultaneously taken form as “Slave estates”
(Spillers, 2003; Wilderson, 2010), requiring the forced labor of stolen
peoples on stolen land. In these cases, settlement required/s the labor of
chattel slaves and guest workers, who must be kept landless and estranged
from their homelands. For example, as Kate McCoy (2014) has detailed,
Tsenecommacah peoples were killed, displaced, and otherwise removed
from areas surrounding colonies in Virginia, as Black men and women
were brought from Africa to be bought and sold to labor the land. This
same “triad” dynamic continues to operate in North America and else-
where in the working and living conditions of migrant workers (Byrd,
2011; Patel, 2012).
A final, general characteristic of settler colonialism is its attempt (and
failure) to contain Indigenous agency and resistance. Indigenous peoples
have refused settler encroachment, even while losing their lives and home-
lands. Writing about Aotearoa/New Zealand, Jo Smith (2011) cites the
long history of Maori resistance to settler invasion, describing the settler
nation’s need to “continually code, decode, and recode social norms and
social spaces so as to secure a meaningful (read: proprietary) relationship
to the territories and resources at stake” (p. 112, parentheses original).
Thus, when we theorize settler colonialism, we must attend to it as both an
ongoing and incomplete project, with internal contradictions, cracks, and
fissures through which Indigenous life and knowledge have persisted and
thrived despite settlement.
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62 Place in Research
DECOLONIZING POSSESSION AND PROPERTY
One of the false but widely circulated narratives that has justified steal-
ing Indigenous land in the United States and Canada has always been that
Indigenous people traded land for beads and baubles because they lacked a
serious understanding of buying and owning land. This story is featured in
public school textbooks and is used to both pity and romanticize Indigenous
peoples, while still explaining away settler complicity in living on ill-gotten
land.
For example, countless websites, children’s books, and posters feature
the words of a fictional 1854 Chief Seattle (Suquamish) speech, which sup-
posedly asked,
The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land.
But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water,
how can you buy them? (Perry, 1972, n.p.)
The fictional speech continues,
If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the
air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave
our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also
gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep
it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that
is sweetened by the meadow flowers. (Perry, 1972, n.p.)
The fictional speech concludes,
As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is
precious to us. It is also precious to you. (Perry, 1972, n.p.)
In reading these lines, it is easy to see how they became a sort of anthem for
environmental movements, including the establishment of Earth Day, New
Age Indians, and others. The words echo something that settler children
learn about Indigenous peoples: that they enjoy a more simple and noble
relation to the environment and are ignorant of more sophisticated aspects
of civil life.
Seattle was a real Suquamish leader, and he did make a speech directed
to U.S. President Franklin Pierce in the 1850s. The original speech was in
response to the reach of the U.S. Government onto Suquamish land and to
protest removal of Suquamish people from their homelands. However—
as, hopefully, is now widely known—the previous words that are regularly
attributed to Seattle were fictionalized for an eco-awareness film, called
Home, by filmmaker Ted Perry, a white Southern Baptist, in 1971. Perry
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 63
appropriated and co-opted the original speech by Seattle to amplify his
film’s message of Judeo-Christian stewardship of the planet (Black, 2012,
p. 635). Perry’s fictionalized version seems to loosely be based on what
Seattle actually said, but he amplified themes of simplistic understandings
of land ownership, inserted environmental themes, and completely ignored
Seattle’s message of resistance and refusal. Perry’s reasons were strategic, in
order to build upon existing tropes of Indigenous peoples in order to redirect
them toward an environmental movement supposedly rooted in “so-called
Native connections to the earth” (Black, 2012, p. 635).
The problem, of course, is that Perry’s bogus speech was widely and
wrongly attributed to Chief Seattle, recirculated by the National Wildlife
Federation, then later by Joseph Campbell and Spokane’s 1974 World’s Fair
(p. 636). Black (2012) observes,
The Eurocentric pursuit of authenticity, in particular, is problematic
because it punctuates a Western obsession with attributing essentialized
genuineness to key Native agents. This pursuit denies a Native oral tradi-
tion that puts stock in individual tribal lifeways . . . The way fragmented
discourse circulates says much about a public that interprets it and the
ideologies that underscore that particular public’s civic imaginary. (p. 636)
Although there is no surely accurate record of Chief Seattle’s actual speech
directed at Franklin Pierce, several historians support that the speech more
likely contained lines like the following (also a fictionalization):
The young men, the mothers, the girls, the little children who once lived
and were happy here [on Suquamish land], still love these lonely places.
And at evening the forests are dark with the presence of the dead. When
the last red man has vanished from this earth, and his memory is only
a story among the whites, these shores will still swarm with the invis-
ible dead of my people. And when your children’s children think they
are alone in the fields, the forests, the shops, the highways, or the quiet
of the woods, they will not be alone. There is no place in this country
where a man can be alone. At night when the streets of your town and
cities are quiet, and you think they are empty, they will throng with
the returning spirits that once thronged them, and that still love those
places. The white man will never be alone.
So let him be just and deal kindly with my people. The dead have
power too. (Liberation Theology and Land Reform website, n.d., n.p.)
The foreboding quality to these words reveals a different strategy of resis-
tance, not one confused by “white man’s” ways, but surely certain of their
consequences.
We elaborate this point to be sure to avoid well-worn traps in circula-
tions of discourse about Indigenous peoples. There is indeed a problem with
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64 Place in Research
Western conflations of place and property, but not because Indigenous peo-
ples were/are too pre-modern to understand property. New interpretations
of historical accounts argue that Native people engaged in heated debates
over notions of colonial property and extensively used legal arguments to
oppose European dispossession from the very outset of colonial occupation
(Belmessous, 2012, p. 3). Although Indigenous resistance to colonization
is widely known, Indigenous resistance through legal counter-claims and
arguments with regard to property and making-property is less commonly
discussed. This history confounds descriptions of Native legal resistance as
a more recent phenomenon—Native people fought colonization with legal
resistance immediately (Belmessous, 2012). Further,
Cultural boundaries were porous, allowing Indigenous and European
peoples to translate each other’s legal documents, to draw parallels, and
to understand what kind of titles they could use to make recognizable
and valid claims to land. Europeans often, although not always, under-
stood the nature of the claims put forward by their Native competitors:
they understood that when Indigenous communities made claims to
ownership (hence British insistence, for example, upon purchasing the
land), they were distinct from when they made claims that resembled
sovereignty: that is, when they made claims to a particular territory with
delimited borders and upon which they had established the law of the
land, determining, for example, who could come and live on that terri-
tory. (Belmessous, 2012, p. 5)
Although violence was an important aspect of establishing and enacting
land claims, claims were also negotiated nation-to-nation between tribes
and Europeans. The status of claims acquired through conquest were more
clear than the status of claims acquired through purchase, possession, or
occupation (p. 12). The connotation of claim is/was not just about request-
ing or demanding land, but more an appeal to justice with the promise of
force as a consequence (pp. 10–11).
SETTLER COLONIALISM MAKES PROPERTY
AND UNMAKES INDIGENOUS LAND
Through the process and structuring of settler colonialism, land is remade
into property, and human relationships to land are redefined/reduced to the
relationship of owner to his property. When land is recast as property, place
becomes exchangeable, saleable, and steal-able. The most important aim of
recasting land as property is to make it ahistorical in order to hack away the
narratives that invoke prior claims and thus reaffirm the myth of terra nul-
lius. Existing epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships
to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward (Tuck & Yang,
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 65
2012). Conceptualizations of land as property are enmeshed in the ideolo-
gies of settler colonialism, reliant upon constructions of land as extractable
capital, the structural denial of indigenous sovereignty, the fantasy of discov-
ery, and the naturalization of heteropatriarchal nation-state (Arvin, Tuck, &
Morrill, 2013).
Thus, from the perspective of Indigenous scholars and writers, Western
notions of place have been compromised by an over-reliance on the European,
colonial notion of property (see Barker, 2005; Grande, 2004; Belmessous,
2012, for elaborations on this point). But, as Indigenous philosophers and
elders remind us, there are more complex and meaningful relationships to
land that humans have always enacted. For example, Chamberlin (2001,
2004) tells the story of a meeting between Canadian government foresters
and Gitskan elders and leaders.
The meeting was about jurisdiction over the woodlands. The foresters
claimed the land for the government. The Indians were astonished by
the claim—they couldn’t understand what the relative newcomers were
talking about. Finally, one of them put what was bothering them in the
form of a question. “If this is your land,” he asked, “where are your
stories?” (2001, p. 127)
This question reveals the interwoven aspects of land (origin) stories, claims,
and identity that comprise Gitskan and other Indigenous peoples’ relation-
ships to place. This, Chamberlin continues, “was a revelation not about
ownership in any simple-minded sense, because these stories didn’t establish
possession of the place. On the contrary, they showed how people were pos-
sessed by it—owned and occupied as it were, and answerable to it by means
of their stories and songs” (p. 127).
Again, it is the structure of settler colonialism that has reduced human
relationships to land to relationships to property, making property owner-
ship the primary vehicle to civil rights in most settler colonial nation-states.
In the United States and other slave estates, the remaking of land into prop-
erty was/is accompanied by the remaking of (African) persons into property,
into chattel (Wilderson, 2010; Spillers, 2003; Tuck & Yang, 2012). The
remaking of land and bodies into property is necessary for settlement onto
other people’s land.
These manifestations of materiality as property suggest multiscalar dis-
courses of ownership (McKittrick, 2006). These include discourses of “hav-
ing ‘things,’ owning lands, invading territories, possessing someone,” all
“narratives of displacement that reward and value particular forms of con-
quest” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 3). McKittrick observes,
(This) reward system repetitively returns us to the body, black sub-
jecthood, and the where of blackness, not just as it is owned, bit as
black subjects participate in ownership. Black diasporic struggles can
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66 Place in Research
also be read, then, as geographic contests of discourses of ownership.
Ownership of the body, individual and community voices, bus seats,
women, “Africa,” feminisms, history, homes, record labels, money, cars,
these are recurring positionalities, written and articulated through pro-
test, musics, feminist theory, fiction, the everyday. These positionalities
and struggles over the meaning of place add a geographic dimension
to practices of black reclamation. Yet they also illustrated the ways
in which the legacy of racial dispossession underwrites how we have
come to know space and place, and that the connections between what
are considered “real” or valuable forms of ownership are buttressed
through racial codes that mark the body as ungeographic. (pp. 3–4)
Thus, discourses and practices of property are also central to the hegemonic
relations of colonialism and slavery. As Wilderson (2010) observes about the
United States, there are three structuring positions that converge to typify
relationships of power and place, ultimately remaking land into property.
Each of the three structuring positions (“Savage,” Slave, and Human in
Wilderson’s analysis) are “elaborated by a rubric of three demands: the
(White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the land,
and the (Black) demand for ‘flesh’ reparation” (p. 29). Here, we briefly
sketch these structured antagonisms:
Indigenous Erasure
Settler colonialism wants Indigenous land, not Indigenous peoples, so
Indigenous peoples are cleared out of the way of colonial expansion, first
via genocide and destruction, and later through incorporation and assimila-
tion (Wolfe, 2006). The settler colonial discourse turns Indigenous peoples
into savages, unhumans, and eventually, ghosts. As a structure and not a
past event, settler colonialism circulates stories of Indigenous peoples as
extinct, disappeared, or maybe as never having existed at all. The goal of
settler colonialism is to erase Indigenous peoples from valuable land (see
McCoy, 2014; Paperson, 2014). Indigenous peoples, by their survivance and
persistence, disprove the completeness, cohesiveness, civility, and ultimately
the presumed permanence of the settler nation-state (see Bang et al., 2014).
Black Containment
“Chattel” means property of the owner. In the United States, Africans were
stolen, enslaved, and brought by force to colonies as chattel, and kept from
owning land (see McCoy, 2014). “The slave has no socially recognized exis-
tence outside of his master, he became a social nonperson . . . the defini-
tion of the slave, however recruited, [is] a socially dead person” (Patterson,
1982, p. 10, as quoted in Wilderson, 2010, p. 51). In chattel slavery, it is
the body that is valuable, not the person. The person is seen as in excess of
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 67
the body; the person is ownable, punishable, murderable (Tuck & Yang,
2012). Settler colonialism structures anti-blackness by circulating stories of
(the descendents of) chattel slaves as monsters, as requiring containment; we
can understand the contemporary prison industrial complex in the United
States as an extension of chattel slavery, in which Black and brown bodies
are contained to build the wealth of mostly white towns relying financially
on incarceration centers.
Settler Ascendancy
Settlers are defined by their actions. “ ‘Settler’ is a way to describe colonizers
that highlights their desires to be emplaced on Indigenous land” (Morgensen,
2009, p. 157). Settler emplacement, in Morgensen’s analysis, is concerned
with settlers’ attempts to live on stolen land and make it their home. The
desire to emplace is a desire to resolve the experience of dis-location implicit
in living on stolen land. A core strategy of emplacement is the discursive and
literal replacement of the Native by the settler, evident in laws and policies
of eminent domain, manifest destiny, property rights, and removals. Settlers
are not immigrants who come expecting to become part of existing commu-
nities and cultures; they implement their own laws and understandings of
the world onto stolen land.3 Settler emplacement is incommensurable with
Indigenous life insofar as it requires erasure of Indigenous life and ontolo-
gies. Thus, settlers engage a range of settler moves to innocence (Tuck &
Yang, 2012) to relieve themselves of the discomfort of dis-location, and to
further emplacement/replacement.
There are important variations to the settler colonial triad, specifically
Jodi Byrd’s borrowing of the word arrivants from African Caribbean poet
Kamau Brathwaite in place of “chattel slave” to refer broadly to people
forced into the Americas “through the violence of European and Anglo-
American colonialism and imperialism around the globe” (2011, p. xix).
This nomenclature is a recognition of the ways in which arrivants both resist
and participate as settlers in the historical project of settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism “requires settlers and arrivants to cathect the space of the
native as their home” (Byrd, 2011, p. xxxix).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE STRUCTURED ANTAGONISMS
OF SETTLER COLONIALISM
It cannot be emphasized enough that settler colonialism wants Indigenous
land. In a 2013 interview between Naomi Klein and Leanne Simpson (2013)
about the Indigenous movement Idle No More, Simpson observes,
Extraction and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are
based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My
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68 Place in Research
relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture
and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are
a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold
the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all
of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning.
Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing—it is taking with-
out consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts
that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s
always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always
extracted the indigenous—extraction of indigenous knowledge, indig-
enous women, indigenous peoples . . . Children from parents. Children
from families. Children from the land. Children from our political sys-
tem and our system of governance. Children—our most precious gift.
In this kind of thinking, every part of our culture that is seemingly useful
to the extractivist mindset gets extracted. The canoe, the kayak, any
technology that we had that was useful was extracted and assimilated
into the culture of the settlers without regard for the people and the
knowledge that created it. (Simpson, in Klein & Simpson, 2013, n.p.)
The problems of invasion and settlement include the ways in which settler
colonialism turns Indigenous land into property by destroying Indigenous
peoples, and turns humans into chattel/property by destroying their human-
ity. In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy
and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. For the settlers,
Indigenous peoples are in the way, and, in the destruction of Indigenous
peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and pol-
icy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land, land under settler regimes, is recast
as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be
made into ghosts (Tuck & Ree, 2013).
At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced
labor of chattel slaves4 whose bodies and lives become the property, and
who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from
other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons.
First, chattels are commodities of labor, and therefore it is the slave’s person
that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land,
the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-
located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity, but the person underneath
is imprisonable, punishable, murderable.
Drawing out the problems of settlement is an important distinction to
make, especially when considering the strategies of ecological and environ-
mental justice; justice efforts that aim to disentangle from capitalism, for
example, may in effect reinforce settlement. As Patrick Wolfe (2006) insists,
“Settler colonialism destroys to replace” (p. 388). Frequently it does so by
denying the existence of Indigenous peoples and the legitimacy of claims to
land. It denies the long-lasting impacts of slavery. It continues to dispossess
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 69
Indigenous peoples and Black peoples, promoting white supremacy. It
requires arrivants to participate as settlers. Settler colonialism implicates
everyone (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
SETTLER EMPLACEMENT
One of the ways in which current theories of space and place that emerge
from Western philosophical frames are incommensurable to Indigenous and
decolonizing conceptualizations involves the degree to which Western theo-
ries enable or are agnostic towards settler emplacement. Settler emplace-
ment, in Morgensen’s analysis, is the desire of settlers to resolve the expe-
rience of dis-location implicit in living on stolen land. A core strategy of
emplacement is the discursive and literal replacement of the Native by the
settler, evident in laws and policies such as eminent domain (and similar con-
structs), manifest destiny, property rights, and removals, but also in board-
ing schools, sustained and broken treaties, adoptions, and resulting “apolo-
gies” (see Coulthard, 2007, for a discussion on the politics of recognition
in Canada). “Historically, a desire to live on Indigenous land and to feel
connected to it—bodily, emotionally, spiritually—has been the normative
formation of settlers,” writes settler-scholar Scott Morgensen (2009, p. 157;
see also Korteweg & Oakley, 2014).
Here, we wish to differentiate the goal of settler emplacement, which
is one way of resolving the colonial situation, from decolonization, which
is another way. Settler emplacement, according to Morgensen (2009), can
never lead to decolonization.
Decolonization does not follow if settlers simply study and emulate
the lives of Indigenous people on Indigenous land . . . [this] is relevant
in particular to those for whom anarchism links them to communal-
ism and counterculturalism, such as in rural communes, permaculture,
squatting, hoboing, foraging, and neo-pagan, earth-based, and New
Age spirituality. These “alternative” settler cultures formed by occu-
pying and traversing stolen Indigenous land and often by practicing
cultural and spiritual appropriation . . . They must ask, then, if their
interest to support Indigenous people arose not from an investment in
decolonization, but in recolonization. (p. 157)
Settler emplacement is incommensurable with decolonization because at its
basis is a drive to replace the native as the rightful claimant of the land.
Replacement relies on fantasies of the extinct or becoming-extinct Indian
as natural, forgone, and inevitable, indeed, evolutionary (see Tuck &
Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Replacement is invested in settler futurity;
in our use, futurity is more than the future, it is how human narratives and
perceptions of the past, future, and present inform current practices and
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70 Place in Research
framings in a way that (over)determines what registers as the (possible) future.
Settler futurity, then, refers to what Andrew Baldwin calls the “permanent vir-
tuality” (2012, p. 173) of the settler on stolen land. Theorizing the significance
of futurity for researching whiteness and geography, Baldwin (2012) examines
whether a history-centered analysis paves the way for the faulty,
teleological assumption that [settler colonialism] can be modernized
away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in
which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said
to be an effect of whatever came before . . . According to this kind of
temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which [settler
colonialism] will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and,
thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. (p. 174)
Replacement and emplacement, to be clear, are entirely concerned with set-
tler futurity, which always indivisibly means the disruption of Indigenous life
to aid settlement. Any form of place or space theory that seeks to recuperate
and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorpo-
rate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state, is
invested in settler futurity. In contrast, Indigenous futurity forecloses settler
colonialism and settler epistemologies. This does not mean that Indigenous
futurity forecloses living on Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples.
That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-
settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples (see
also Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).
DECOLONIZATION AND COLLAPSE
Indigenous peoples have predicted the collapse of settler societies since con-
tact, all the while building and articulating viable alternative epistemologies
and ontologies. That theories of decolonization have been taken up across
disciplines in academe now rather than in prior generations is evidence of
the more widely held recognition among settlers of impending environmen-
tal and economic collapse. Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Simpson tells Naomi
Klein in a 2013 interview,
Our elders have been warning us about this for generations now—they
saw the unsustainability of settler society immediately. Societies based
on conquest cannot be sustained, so yes, I do think we’re getting closer
to that breaking point for sure. We’re running out of time. We’re los-
ing the opportunity to turn this thing around. We don’t have time for
this massive slow transformation into something that’s sustainable and
alternative. I do feel like I’m getting pushed up against the wall. Maybe
my ancestors felt that 200 years ago or 400 years ago. But I don’t think
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Decolonizing Perspectives on Place 71
it matters. I think that the impetus to act and to change and to trans-
form, for me, exists whether or not this is the end of the world. If a
river is threatened, it’s the end of the world for those fish. It’s been the
end of the world for somebody all along. And I think the sadness and
the trauma of that is reason enough for me to act. (Simpson in Klein &
Simpson, 2013, n.p.)
Simpson’s words speak to both the urgency and undeniability of the need
for decolonization. They also hint at the inevitability of decolonization (see
also Fanon, 1968). To say that decolonization is inevitable is not to say that
it is guaranteed or that it does not require human agency. Just as Indigenous
youth learned from elders in Chicago when they saw tobacco growing in
the cracks in the concrete, decolonization is not just something that humans
(may) do; it is (primarily) something that the land does on its own behalf.
Whether or not humans can survive this latter form of decolonization can’t
be known.
NOTES
1. As an aside, this coding is not a good match for the most recent science (see,
for example, studies on proliferation of brain cell in the human stomach).
2. Parts of this section and the following section draw from McCoy, Tuck, and
McKenzie, 2014.
3. Settlers are not a particular racial group. Settler pursuits of valuable land are
the context for the invention of race in the United States—race, almost two
hundred years after plantation colonies were established, became the justifica-
tion for the ways in which settlers made Indigenous peoples and slaves inhuman
to get land and labor (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
4. As observed by Erica Neeganagwedgin (2012), these two groups are not
always distinct.
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Part II
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In the first section of the book we introduced the need to (re)examine how
we research place in the social sciences, and we provided a discussion of
some of the inspiring critical theories taken up in such research. In Chap-
ter 2 we engaged current approaches to conceptualizing place, mostly from
Anglo-American and Continental frameworks, but also from Indigenous
worldviews. In Chapter 3 we discussed approaches that theorize and prac-
tice place as land, which have emerged from the fields of settler colonial
studies and Indigenous studies. In this second part of the book, we move
from a discussion of theory to a discussion of related practices of doing
research on place: we focus on research methodologies and methods of data
collection and analysis.
In this chapter, we overview some of the most compelling methodologies
shaping research that meaningfully address or engage place. As discussed
in the introduction, in examining critical place inquiry we are referring to
research that takes up critical questions and develops corresponding meth-
odological approaches that are informed by the embeddedness of social life
in and with places, and that seeks to be a form of action in responding to
critical place issues such as those of globalization and neoliberalism, settler
colonialism, and environmental degradation. The focus on place includes
not only social science research that uses this term, but a range of work that
uses different terms to talk about the materiality of the world, including its
physical characteristics and related historical, social, and cultural dimen-
sions, as well as its both localized and interconnected aspects. This includes
a broad spectrum of research across a range of disciplines and interdisciplin-
ary areas in the social sciences, such as geography, anthropology, area stud-
ies, sociology, psychology, history, education, policy studies, environmental
studies, Indigenous studies, and methodological studies. As signaled already,
our aim is not the task of chronicling in detail all existing and emerging
research approaches to place across these and other domains. Rather we
survey a variety of approaches currently being engaged as a heuristic to
assist researchers in determining which type of approach or approaches may
be the best fit for a given research question or scope and particular place.
4 Methodologies of Critical
Place Inquiry
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76 Place in Research
By methodology we mean the epistemological, ontological, and axiologi-
cal assumptions guiding the research, or in other words, the ways in which
the researcher’s explicit or implicit assumptions are at work in the selec-
tion of research focus, problem, and approach. These explicit or implicit
assumptions have also been termed one’s paradigm or worldview (Kuhn,
1970; Wilson, 2008). Table 4.1 offers a heuristic for thinking through an
underlying paradigm in relation to its epistemological, ontological, and axi-
ological assumptions, as well as suggesting the types of theories, method-
ologies, and methods that are more commonly used in relation to particular
paradigmatic orientations. This table is not intended to be static or to fix
research approaches: we invite readers to make additions and adjustments,
or to build their own heuristics for thinking through how one’s theory,
methodology, and methods of research align with or are influenced by their
epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions. In terms of the
approaches included in Table 4.1, we draw on categorizations used else-
where (e.g., Lather, 2006) and have added in categories of “new material-
ist” and “Indigenous.” We also recognize that postmodern, materialist, or
Indigenous approaches are often also “critical” and that approaches can be
mixed together or taken up at different times by the same researcher with
strategic aims of having the research “be of use” in particular settings or
times (Fine & Barreras, 2001; McKenzie, 2009).
Others have offered different, although related, typologies of research
in the human disciplines; for example, Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000, 2005,
2011) sketches of at least eight “moments” of research in North America:
the traditional (1900–1950); the modernist or golden age (1950–1970);
blurred genres (1970–1986); the crisis of representation (1986–1990); the
post-modern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990–1995);
postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000), the methodologically contested pres-
ent (2000–2010), and the future (2010–), which is now. As these authors
suggest, “These moments overlap and simultaneously operate in the present”
(p. 3). We join others in being wary of assumptions that newer necessarily
means better in terms of paradigmatic or methodological approach (Greene,
2013; Merriman, 2013). Instead, we seek to provide descriptions and heuris-
tics for researchers to better consider which approaches may be the best fit
given their underlying commitments, intentions, and audiences.
That said, we also focus more on the paradigmatic approaches and the
associated theories, methodologies, and methods included in Table 4.1 from
the “Critical” to “Indigenous” columns. The reason for this is twofold: it is
these domains in which more critical approaches to place have been engaged,
and also where there is more recent theorizing and consideration of place
and associated concepts in social science research. We also recognize that at
one level, all of the approaches other than Indigenous share certain assump-
tions at a more macro scale, for example, of the secular nature of knowledge
and social science research, and can therefore all be understood as sharing a
Western or Eurocentric framework or meta-paradigm.
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Table 4.1 Paradigms and Their Epistemological, Ontological, Axiological, and Methodological Orientations to Research
Paradigm:1
Positivism
Postpositivism/
Interpretivism
Critical
Postmodernism/
Spatial turn
New
Materialism2
Indigenous
Epistemology
(Understanding
of Knowledge):
Knowledge
is based on
observable and
verifiable
experience.
Knowledge is
influenced by our
perceptions.
Knowledge is
influenced by
power.
Knowledge is
situational,
partial, and
incomplete;
influenced
by temporal,
spatial, and
social contexts
No separation
between
epistemology,
ontology, and
ethics.
Knowledge is holistic,
cyclic, and relational.
Knowledge is not just
mental, but physical,
emotional, spiritual.
Ontology
(Understanding
of Being/
Reality):
There is one
Truth or reality.
The truth is
seen through a
variety of lenses.
Our subjective
experience affects
our perception of
the truth of reality.
The truth is
that reality is
structured by
arrangements
of power that
require social
change.
There are no
grand narratives
(“Truths”), but
action is still
possible.
Matter and
meaning are
entangled.
Materiality is
a dynamism.
Reality is relational
and holistic.
Axiology
(Understanding
of Ethics/
Values):
Knowledge is
objective and
value-free.
The ability
to know is
affected by one’s
perceptions
and values. By
bracketing these
out, it may
be possible to
determine the
truth.
Knowledge
and values are
inextricably
linked.
Knowledge is
subjective and
value-laden.
Ethics is not
responsibly
responding to
the other, but
responding to
an entanglement
of which we are
part.
Knowledge and values
are one and the same.
(Continued)
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Paradigm:1
Positivism
Postpositivism/
Interpretivism
Critical
Postmodernism/
Spatial turn
New
Materialism2
Indigenous
Methodologies
Frequently
Used:
Usually none
stated
E.g., general
inductive
qualitative
research,
ethnography,
grounded theory,
narrative inquiry,
phenomenology
E.g., critical
ethnography,
participatory
research,
action research
E.g., narrative
approaches,
arts-based
research,
experimental
research, spatial
ethnography
E.g., following
objects, network
analysis,
diffraction
analyses
E.g., modified
cultural practices,
Decolonizing
methodologies,
methodologies
modeled after
Indigenous cosmology
and understandings of
ecology
Methods
Frequently
Used:
Quantitative
(e.g., surveys)
and Qualitative
(e.g., interviews)
Qualitative (e.g.,
observation,
interviews, focus
groups, visual
methods)
Quantitative
and Qualitative
(e.g., surveys,
observation,
interviews,
focus groups,
visual methods)
Qualitative (e.g.,
observation,
interviews, focus
groups, visual
methods, mobile
methods);
Experimental
Qualitative (e.g.,
interviews, visual
methods, sensory
methods, mobile
methods)
Storywork, mappings
and remappings
1 The organization and inspiration of this table is from Lather, 1991, p.
2 From Dolphijn & van der Tuin with Barad, 2012.
Table 4.1 (Continued)
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 79
In the past (and still in some approaches and fields), the language of
“methodology” has been used interchangeably with “methods” to mean
empirical data collection and analyses methods (e.g., survey, interviews,
photovoice, etc.). However, as social science research has expanded over the
past half century, increasingly researchers are using the language of meth-
odology to name the assumptions embedded in their study about knowl-
edge, reality, and the role of research in society, and retaining the language
of methods to talk about specific methods of data collection or analysis
(Wilson, 2008). In many cases, similar methods of data collection (e.g., sur-
vey, observation, interview, etc.) and analysis may be used across methodol-
ogies, and it is the methodology that drives and informs how those methods
are used, and with and by whom. In this chapter we focus on methodolo-
gies, and on those we see being taken up most prevalently or in emerging
ways in research on place.
Finally, we also want to draw attention to ways in which the methodolo-
gies we present in this chapter are conceptual and/or empirical. This dis-
tinction has become less useful in the social sciences as researchers have
become more aware of how all research is unavoidably embedded within
the researcher’s worldview and associated assumptions (Clifford & Marcus,
1986) and, thus, that all inquiry carries theory within it to some degree.
Likewise, a researcher’s experience-based study, or the “empirical,” can be
considered to inform all research, including the development of theory or
conceptual research. Nonetheless, we find empirical to be a useful term to
indicate when research involves the collection and analysis of quantitative
or qualitative data. Likewise, the term conceptual is useful to prioritize the
use and development of ideas in addition to and beyond what can be col-
lected through empirical research (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Thus, while
all approaches can be considered to be conceptual and empirical on one
level, we focus in this chapter on methodologies that involve some quantita-
tive or qualitative data collection and analysis.
The remainder of the chapter is divided up into sections discussing the
following methodologies used in researching place: archival research; nar-
rative research; phenomenology; ethnography; participatory, action, and
community-based research; mixed, “post,” and strategic methodologies;
and Indigenous methodologies. We note again that these methodologies are
not necessarily exclusive and that more than one may be used in combina-
tion by some researchers. We also recognize “suspicions of efforts to codify
and discipline” approaches to research (Lather, 2013, p. 242), and this is
not our intention. We appreciate the call toward transversality,1 the cutting
across of dual oppositions, offered by new materialist approaches (Dolphijn &
van der Tuin, 2012). Rather, we want to examine a range of methodological
approaches currently being used in ways that explicitly attend to place in
order to contribute to the future depth and diversity of means of engaging
place in research.
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80 Place in Research
ARCHIVAL RESEARCH AND PLACE
Archival research includes studies that rely on archival content for their data,
such as previously existing photography collections, newspaper reports, his-
torical accounts, policy documents, legal cases, and online repositories. We
list the study of such materials as a methodology because of the epistemolog-
ical, ontological, and axiological assumptions that underlie these approaches
to inquiry. Detailed later in this chapter in relation to examples of archival
research, these physical materials are viewed by researchers as representing
particular understandings of place, time, and subjects and are analyzed in
various ways to elicit and elaborate those understandings.
Writing in 2009, L’Eplattenier remarks that when she and a colleague
tried to find examples of “practical articles to orient and guide people new
to archival work, articles that described the methods of historical research,”
few were to be found (p. 67). While she observes that concerns about orga-
nizing and using sources, verifying information, and methods of archival
research—or in other words, a methodology of archival research—have
been posed at important moments throughout the field’s history, she con-
tends that a methodology must be more comprehensively articulated so that
archival research is understood as work engaged systematically and incre-
mentally, in a way “that both highlights the uniqueness of archival study
and creates the depth and breadth of knowledge required to begin general-
izing about the tools our discipline needs and uses” (L’Eplattenier, 2009,
p. 68). In many ways, L’Eplattenier is arguing that existing articulations
of archival methodology are thin because they do not adequately discuss
the methods of archival research. Indeed, she contends that an appropri-
ate methods section would address the name and location of the archives,
finding aids, amount of time spent in archives, number of linear feet in a
collection, amount of collection examined, the provenance of the artifacts,
physical state of the artifacts, problems with materials, missing materials,
and specificity of the materials (p. 72). A methods section might also discuss
elements of the archive that puzzled the researcher or were of special note,
or other surrounding facts, in order to “destabilize the story presented” by
the archive and by the researcher’s use of the archive (p. 73).
Terrance (2011) uses Native feminist theory to “refuse” the archive, tell-
ing and not-telling an account of finding an autograph journal of a young
Indigenous woman who attended a boarding school in the early twentieth
century. In her analysis, Terrance will not reveal the location of the archive,
the journal, or even the specific identifying information of its author. Ter-
rance believes it is not her right to reveal these details, or the personal reflec-
tions of a young Indigenous woman in a colonial space.
The journal’s very designation as an archival object demonstrates the
relationship between the state’s colonial project/objectives and its pro-
duction of indigenous peoples as “objects-of-knowledge” (Spivak, 1999),
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 81
specimens for study, primitive and historical, forever vanishing as a
result of the pathology that defines their communities. Moreover, it
reinforces the conception of social hierarchies as inevitable and natural:
some populations are to be investigated, scrutinized and objectified
by those who are able to cogitate and analyze. Refusing to reify the
narrative of colonization and the naturalization of colonial structures
necessitates a re-evaluation of what constitutes “legitimate” research
material. (2011, p. 625)
Terrance interrogates the colonial gaze of archival research, its voyeurism
and seduction towards believing that the dead can have no secrets. For the
most part, Terrance’s refusal is concerned with not telling/not selling (Tuck &
Yang, 2014) the place-based details that would authenticate her research.
In our discussion of Terrance and L’Eplattenier’s contrasting arguments,
we draw attention to the material-spatial components of what comprises the
methods, and ultimately the methodology of archival research. The meth-
odology hinges on the specificity, materiality, physicality, and location of
the archive and how much of the archive was examined. Parrish (2010) has
described the human-physical aspects of engaging the archive as prompting
nausea and motion sickness, both because “the backlit small white curving
shapes [cascading] in a vertical loop” made the author “dizzy to the point of
queasiness” and because of the “deeper sense of motion sickness . . . some-
where between boredom and hopelessness” (p. 289). She writes,
The motion is historical and spatial, and the sense of sickness comes
from the experience of not being able to make the crossing into other
worlds of signification. Sometimes you worry that you have crossed
into their world, and frankly, it was not worth the trouble. (p. 289)
The work of archival research is spatial in concept and in practice. Its rigor
and refusal (Terrance, 2011) is related to its location in place, or in ether
space.
With regard to representations of place within the archive, much of the
archive includes photos of places, maps, and historical accounts of places.
Thomas (2009) theorizes the use of photographs by historians and read-
ers’ ability to interpret photographs, even when seen as discursive objects.
Stewart (2008) engages oral stories as archival data in order to “read the
landscape” for its relationships between cultures, communities, and geo-
graphical places. Van Wyck (2008) pursued his research in the Mackenzie
River basin with the typewritten field journals of Harold Innis as his com-
panion; his goal was to render a North that was much more than an empty
space and passage to elsewhere.
As an example of the representation of place through archival analysis,
in research on the history of education, O’Donoghue (2010) sought to learn
what understandings emerge when considering classrooms as installations.
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82 Place in Research
He applied the tenets of installation art practice in analyzing archival class-
room photographs, including the tenets that objects always signal some-
thing beyond themselves and that meaning resides in the study of objects.
These spaces, entered and inhabited by students and teachers, are
structured in accordance with a set of particular ideas about what
constitutes teaching, learning, and the teacher and learner. Then lay-
out, designed, and associated disciplinary and spatial practices of this
space, to a large degree, determine the types of engagement students
will have here. (p. 402)
O’Donoghue posits that educational historians might think of classroom
photographs as photographs of installations in order to “imagine what it
might possibly mean to inhabit this space” (p. 411).
NARRATIVE, STORYTELLING, AND PLACE
Here speaks the storyteller, telling by voice what was learned by ear. Here
speaks a poet who did not learn language structure from one teacher
and language meaning from another, nor plot structure from one and
characterization from another, but always heard all these things work-
ing together in the stories of other storytellers. (Tedlock, 1983, p. 3)
Narrative researchers examine narratives of any kind, including personal expe-
rience stories, ethnographic and historical stories, individual stories, shared
stories, written texts, and oral stories, in order to “understand how individu-
als and groups of people construct reality” (Bird, 2002, p. 521). Narrative
and storytelling methodologies hold that narratives are how humans come to
know, understand, and make meaning in the social world, while also making
ourselves known, understood, and meaningful in the world (Bird, 2002).
D. Jean Clandinin and Jerry Rosiek (2007) remark that narrative inquiry
is an old practice, engaged by humans through storytelling practices since
humans could speak. Yet, the methodology feels new as it has gained prom-
inence in social science inquiry. This emergence has been accompanied by
“intensified talk about our stories, their function in our lives, and their
place in composing our collective affairs” (p. 36). Clandinin and Rosiek
use a cartographic lexicon to situate narrative inquiry on the conceptual
borders (and in the composite borderlands) of post-positivism, Marxism
and critical theory, and poststructuralism; the trajectories and travels away
and toward these borderlands are defined only by their shared effort to
study experience as it is lived through questions of temporality, sociality,
and place (p. 69). Concerns of place are central to narrative inquiry because
all inquiry and events occur in some specific place, the specificity of which
is important (p. 70).
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 83
In Reflections in Place: Connected Lives of Navajo Women (2009),
Donna Deyhle uses ethnography and narrative methodology to bring
together the already interconnected place-based stories of three women.
The research, which took place over twenty-five years, tells stories told over
time, in interviews, at community gatherings and cultural events, interfaced
with ethnographic portraits compiled by the author. Deyhle insists upon
the centrality of place in the very definition of community—which is “not a
uniform group of people, but rather a location or place” (2009, p. xvii). As
a white woman researching the lives of Navajo women, Deyhle took careful
steps not to reinscribe the discourse of manifest manners into her telling of
the women and her interpretations of the tellings they offered of themselves
(p. xxi). This dilemma, or tension, was not one that Deyhle attempted to
resolve or overcome; instead, her research and emphasis on the narratives
shared by research participants engaged these tensions as the ethical context
of the relationships that formed.
Attending to shared narratives, Bird (2002) has sought to understand how
Western cultures (not just Indigenous and non-Western cultures) “re-create
place through historic reconstructions . . . to tell stories to locate us where
we feel we should be” (p. 523). Bird and undergraduate students collected
stories, folktales, and narratives related to a variety of places throughout
the state of Minnesota. These places, sometimes only made significant
through the stories told and re-told about them, are what Bakhtin (1981)
called “chronotypes,” locations in which “time and space intersect and fuse,”
standing “as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces
operating to shape its members’ images of themselves” (p. 7 as quoted in
Bird, 2002, p. 544). Stories, Bird concludes, are opportunities for people to
make sense of place while also making those spaces meaningful in their own
cultural contexts.
In another example of critical place narrative inquiry, Myers (2010)
considers three artist-guided walks that engaged participants in order to
bring attention to the landscape. The walks, conducted using a variety of
approaches including recordings, live voices, and whispers, were forms of
what Myers came to call “conversive wayfinding,” allowing for “patterns,
paces and paths of walking as experienced in the breath, rhythm, sweat and
memory of the walker” (p. 59). Invoking Lavery’s (2005) premise that walk-
ing is “an ideal strategy for witnessing,” involving what Miller (2003) calls
a “sense of relinquishing ourselves to a rhythmic state of being (n.p.), Myers
(2010) posits that walking-narrative methodology or conversive wayfinding
methodology involve
embodied, participatory, and spontaneous modes of responsiveness
and communicability. Furthermore, they are conversive, activating and
inviting modes of participation that generate places and knowledge of
places through a conversational and convivial activity of wayfinding,
where a percipient becomes more a wayfarer than a map reader, a mode
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84 Place in Research
of travel that encourages convivial and social interaction with inhabit-
ants of places. (p. 67)
Myers emphasizes the combining of narrative and wayfinding methodolo-
gies as fertile for coming to know (more about) place.
Recent textual analyses also make place more significant in their meth-
odologies. Lee’s (2009) dissertation documented the thriving community
meanings attributed to urban sites disregarded as placeless—commercial
districts in Gwangbok-dong and Nampo-dong in Busan, South Korea. The
sites of anonymous commercialization (the author’s words) almost erase the
powerful social history of those places—almost. Lee’s methodology put tex-
tual interpretive analysis in relation to mapping and narratives as research
participants narrate the connections they saw between maps and newspaper
clippings. Lee finds that personal meanings and renderings of place persist
and outlast corporate insertions of function and meaning.
PHENOMENOLOGY AND PLACE RESEARCH
Phenomenology literally means the study (“logos”) of that which appears
(“phenomena”) and can be understood as attempting the objective study
of topics that are usually regarded as subjective, such as perceptions and
emotions. Edmund Husserl (1913/1982) was central to the early develop-
ment of phenomenology as a methodology of inquiry, or “the reflective study
of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point
of view” (Smith, 2007). Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) is another particular
central figure in the development of phenomenology. In the words of David
Seamon (1980), a phenomenologist concerned with the role of place in peo-
ple’s everyday lived experience:
Phenomenology . . . asks if from the variety of ways which men and
women behave in and experience their everyday world there are par-
ticular patterns which transcend specific empirical contexts and point
to the essential human condition—the irreducible crux of people’s life-
situations, which remains when all non-essentials—cultural context,
historical era, personal idiosyncracies—are stripped bare through phe-
nomenological procedures. (in Creswell, 1994, p. 33)
Such reflective attentiveness to “lived experience” has been taken up in
relation to place in various trajectories of phenomenological scholarship
(e.g., Heidegger, 1971; Malpas, 1999; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1974, 1977).
This scholarship ranges from a focus on the conditions of “dwelling” in
a place; to experiences of movement between places (or of experiences in
“non-places”; Augé, 1995); to relationships or attachments between peo-
ple and places/the natural world (including considerable work on “place
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 85
attachment” in psychology and related disciplines, e.g., Chawla, 2007). It
also varies in the extent to which it is conceptual and/or empirical. While
the diversity of phenomenological approaches to place in research prevents
easy summary (see Cresswell, 2003, 2004, for more extensive overviews),
we point to a few examples to indicate some of the ways in which research-
ers are engaging place in phenomenological research.
The work of David Seamon (e.g., 1979, 1980) is one example that has
been influential within cultural geography over the last several decades. In
Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), Seamon focuses on “everyday environ-
mental experience,” which is defined as people’s “experiential involvement
in their everyday geographical world” (p. 17). Seamon examines research
participants’ emotions and practices in relation to their movement and lives
in an American city. He (1980) introduces a specific vocabulary to discuss
the role of place or environment in research participants’ bodily, and thus,
human experience. For example, a sequence of preconscious actions used to
complete a particular task are termed a “body-ballet,” and when sustained
over a considerable period of time become a “time-space routine.” Other
researchers have drawn on Seamon’s work to support phenomenological
analysis of people’s experiences in and across other places. For example,
Moores and Metykova (2009) examine young Eastern Europeans’ experi-
ences following migration to the UK, illuminating the “close connection
between matters of migration and those of place-making in daily living”
(p. 185). They discuss how factors such as physical movement in the new
locations (e.g., driving, public transportation, walking) facilitated the “for-
mation of particular affective attachments and they can contribute, in turn,
to complex rearrangements of at-homeness” (pp. 178–179).
Another recent example of phenomenological research on place can be
found in a study by Worster and Abrams (2005) on New England com-
mercial fisherman and organic farmers. Responding to the lack of empirical
research on “the conceptual framework of sense of place,” the researchers
undertook phenomenological interviewing (Seidman, 1998) to gather quali-
tative data to address the following “essential questions regarding sense of
place” (p. 527):
• How do the people in these communities perceive the place in which
they work?
• Who and what do they speak of when discussing their livelihood?
• How do they speak of the land or ocean?
• How were these views formed? How are they sustained?
Reporting some of the analysis from a larger study on the same topic,
Worster and Abrams (2005), like the study by Moores and Metykova (2009)
discussed previously, include quite extensive selections of quotations from
participants. The excerpts suggest how participants’ experiences with place
have both influenced, and been influenced by, their worldviews, choice of
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86 Place in Research
occupation, “spiritually perceived relationship with the ecological content”
(p. 530), and other factors. Seeking to better understand the phenomena of
social and ecological knowledge and experience in relationship to partici-
pants’ identities, the researchers suggest broader implications in the devel-
opment of sense of place.
ETHNOGRAPHY AND PLACE
Ethnography literally means “the study of culture,” with this methodology
having its roots in the field of anthropology in the early study of various cul-
tures around the world. This legacy was critiqued in the 1980s and ’90s, both
over concerns with the Western academic studying and “writing” culture
that is not their own, as well as due to recognition of the subjectivity of the
researcher more broadly and how their experiences and assumptions influ-
ence the accounts that are provided (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Through
the development of post-positivism and later research paradigms, increas-
ing numbers of researchers came to view “the study of culture” as always
occurring through the lenses that the researcher brings to the inquiry, and
also questioned the appropriateness and protocols of research conducted
across cultures (L. T. Smith, 1999/2012). More recently, the methodology of
ethnography has been mobilized to study one’s own culture, or sub-cultural
groupings within it, including in relation to place. The term ethnography is
used by some researchers as synonymous with “qualitative research”; how-
ever, more usually it is still used to connote a fine-grained qualitative analy-
sis of “culture,” understood here as “ordinary,” or as all forms of social
activity that comprise a way of life (Williams, 1958).
Since its beginnings as a methodology, ethnography has been concerned
with place, or with the physical settings of the ordinary and their relationships
to other material aspects of people’s lives, such as household objects, ani-
mals, institutions, and technologies. Ethnographers have explored how such
material aspects of people’s lives are bound up, for example, with social prac-
tices and customs (Bourdieu, 1990), emotion or affect (Pain, 2009; Stewart,
2007), the senses (Pink, 2009), movement (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008), or
spirituality (Dillard, 2000; Meyer, 2008). A range of adjectival descriptors
are used to indicate ethnography with various foci. These include “critical
ethnography” as engagement in ethnographic study, not only to understand
or describe, but with aim of contributing to social change (e.g., Carspecken,
1995). “Autoethnography” is used to refer to diverse forms of self narrative
in which the ethnographic focus is one’s self in relation to social context
(e.g., Ellis, 2004). “Digital ethnography” is used to refer to ethnographies
of digital environments as well as the use of digital tools for data collection
and representation (e.g., ethnographies of YouTube or social networking
sites, and the use of web-based surveys, social media sites, video, blogs, etc.
in ethnographic research; see Murthy, 2008). Likewise, terms like “visual
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 87
ethnography” are used to describe the use of visual methods in ethnographic
practice (Pink, 2007), whereas “sensory ethnography” refers to topical and/
or data collection focus on the senses (Pink, 2009; Stoller, 1986). Across
these and other subareas of ethnography, fieldwork (in physical settings and
now online) has been central to this methodology, with common methods of
data collection including extensive participant observation and interviews
and, more recently, the use of photography, video, or the internet to collect
or represent ethnographic research.
While difficult to generalize across this rich diversity of approaches, eth-
nography’s general strength as a methodological approach to the consid-
eration and study of place is in its fine-grained descriptive focus. Through
chronicling lives lived in relationship to place through multiple methods,
ethnographies can offer a sense of showing versus telling, bringing alive
for the reader socially embedded qualities of particular places in relation to
their historical, spatial, and political contexts. From classic anthropological
studies that detail the interwoven aspects of physical locations and social
practice in village life (e.g., Rosaldo, 1993), to sociological research that con-
nects the reader to the particularities of social life in specific temporal and
spatial locales in intimate detail (e.g., Willis’s 1977 study of working class
“lads” in England), the research literature is abundant with ethnographies
that recognize the role of place and associated materialities (built environ-
ment, climate, living conditions, etc.) in the constitution and manifestations
of social life. While the postmodern turn of the last several decades of the
twentieth century emphasized dispersed and shifting social identities and a
focus on the role of language in social constitution, ethnographers such as
Nayak (2003) have re-established a focus place and materiality in ethno-
graphic analysis. In contrast to suggestions that youth lifestyles had become
de-territorialized or placeless in the face of globalization and technologized
lives, Nayak’s “place-based study” of youth subcultural groupings of “Real
Geordies,” “Carvers,” and “B-Boyz” in northeastern English shows the
ways in which youth identifies are still place-bound, or in other words, spe-
cific to the histories and geographies of local place.
As another contemporary example, a book edited by Ingold and Vergunst
(2008) provides a sort of collective ethnography of “ways of walking.”
Chapters span research on walking with hunter-gatherers in Malaysia, on
walking with goat herds, and on the road-based marches of colonizers ver-
sus the land-based walks of human and non-human inhabitants. The collec-
tion suggests the ways that knowledge is forged, both by the researched and
the researcher, through the performances and habits of walking, as well as
its embodied memories. As the editors write, “the movement of walking is
itself a way of knowing” (p. 8), as well as a way through which traces are
left on the world.
A final example of the ways in which contemporary ethnographers
are focusing on place-based data and topics is the digital ethnography of
Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University on mediated
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88 Place in Research
cultures. Functioning as participatory ethnographies in that the research is
undertaken with groups of students as part of their course learning, topics
have included virtual and physical settings such as the YouTube community,
university classrooms, and a retirement center in which Wesch’s students
lived while filming a documentary ethnography. These examples of digi-
tal ethnographies, which can be watched at www.mediatedcultures.net, are
emotional, exploratory looks at various cultures/places using digital tools
and modes of representation (e.g., Wesch’s video work has millions of hits
on YouTube, with few written publications or citations to his name).
PARTICIPATORY, ACTION, COMMUNITY-BASED
RESEARCH AND PLACE
Participatory action research (PAR) has long been practiced all over the globe,
in at least 2,500 universities in 61 countries (Fals-Borda, 2006, p. 353). In
participatory action research, those who would be the subjects of research—
community members, young people, Indigenous peoples, people with dis-
abilities, people in prison, migrants, and countless other groups—are instead
engaged as co-researchers. As co-researchers, everyday people collaborate
with (professional) researchers to identify research questions, select methods
and design data collection instruments, collect and analyze data, interpret
results and determine findings, and communicate findings to diverse audi-
ences. Many have insisted that participatory action research is not a method
or set of methods (Tuck & Fine, 2007). We categorize it as a methodology in
this discussion because of the way we have been using the term throughout
this chapter, to signal an approach to gathering and validating information,
making decisions, and beliefs about knowledge and knowing. Certainly, PAR
is an ethical framework in which exploitation is consciously theorized and
avoided, people and their ideas are valued, and collaboration and mutual
benefit are highly prized. Participatory action researchers engage in this
approach because of its ethical touchstones, but also because they see it as
resulting in richly textured, accurate, and useful data.
The “action” in PAR refers to the aims of change that PAR studies hold
central. This is shared with other forms of research that are not partici-
patory in terms of involving research participants in research design, data
collection, or data analysis, but similarly aim to effect learning and change
through the research (e.g., Carr & Kemmis, 1986). Community-based par-
ticipatory research (CBPR) refers to participatory action research that is
centered on issues of broad interest to community and often entails forms of
community consultation, for example, in relation to land use, public health,
or other policy-related issues.
Writing in 2006, Orlando Fals-Borda reflected on his 30 years of
involvement in PAR in order to determine the contributions of PAR to
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 89
theory and practice. Fals-Borda (2006) identified five key contributions,
including (2) the building up of useful knowledge toward achieving social
justice; (3) the development of techniques that facilitate collective search,
recovery, and sharing of knowledge; (4) mutual respect for academic and
popular knowledge; and (5) transformation of participating researchers in
the struggle for radical change (p. 354).
At the top of Fals-Borda’s (2006) list of contributions of PAR to theory
and practice is the generation of “an interdisciplinary science or body of
knowledge, contexts, and problems of a particular setting, such as the trop-
ics or subtropics” (p. 354). Participatory action research and community-
based participatory research, indeed because they are participatory and
involve the efforts of real people in real places, are methodologies that can
yield real and useful knowledge about place and places. Although this aspect
of PAR and CBPR is not always highlighted in the field, it is an important
characteristic that we attend to here. PAR and CBPR have utilized methods
that are also associated with several other methodologies and that offer
place-related data, including visual methods (especially photovoice and
fotonovella and videography), participatory Geographic Information Sys-
tems (GIS) and other forms of participatory mapping or diagramming, web-
based participatory discussion, and others.
The 1979 Appalachian Land Ownership Study is one of the earliest exam-
ples of comprehensive multi-site participatory action research, conducted by
a task force on land ownership and taxation across Kentucky, West Virginia,
Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama (Scott, 2009). The task
force comprised members of citizen groups and faculty, staff, and graduate
students of local universities, and it convened at the Highland Research and
Education center in the summer of 1978 (p. 187). The 1983 report written
by the task force indicated that land ownership was concentrated among
corporate and absentee owners who were relieved of fair tax burdens and
that this arrangement limited the economic development of surrounding
communities (p. 186). Few of the recommendations from the report were
implemented, but the study is still viewed as an important early example of
the promises of PAR (Scott, 2009).
Scott argues that many of the challenges inlaid in the study would also
become challenges for the larger field of participatory research, particularly
post-positivist approaches. Debates about the validity of “local perceptions”
in the face of “hard” and “objective” quantitative data circled, and the task
forced concluded (too quickly, says Scott) that qualitative data could not
be generalizable (p. 197). Yet, the study was a harbinger of many of the
attributes that would go on to define participatory action research: partici-
pants interviewed 30 years later described their involvement as individually
and collectively transformative, and the study built participants’ capacities
to actively engage in public discourse and policy-making. The study also
provides a clear instance of the importance of “clarifying epistemological
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90 Place in Research
assumptions, justifying participatory research design, and asserting the
validity of both participatory practices and everyday knowledge throughout
all phases of our research” (p. 200).
Asking whether CBPR is “a good fit” for their study with newly arrived
Mexican migrants to the Rocky Mountain West, Letiecq and Schmalzbauer
(2012) found the methodology to be “riddled with challenges” (p. 257)
but, ultimately, to hold “great possibilities to support community organiz-
ing, to build mutually rewarding relationships with community partners,
to empower migrant community members, and to utilize research for both
public health and social justice aims” (p. 257). Their study sought to learn
from newly arrived Mexican migrants about the specificity of their experi-
ences in their “new rural destination” (p. 244). Montana, the site of their
research, is described in terms of both political and geographical terrain: the
state has expanses of “rugged” “undeveloped” land, fewer than a million
residents, and is experiencing a 121 percent population growth, in part due
to migrants and immigrants (p. 244). Migrants encounter language barri-
ers, racial homogeneity, cultural and political resistance to their presence,
and few public transportation, housing, and social services. The presence of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is prominent.
Letiecq and Schmalzbauer provide a step-by-step account of their
approach, including (1) establishing a community advisory board, (2) estab-
lishing partnerships, (3) collaborating with community partners in research,
and (4) implementing action. However, with each of these steps came sig-
nificant methodological challenges, which they identify as challenges of
doing CBPR “on the margins” (p. 251). Among those challenges are issues
concerned with identifying “community,” selecting research questions and
methods, negotiating power—particularly in partnership with undocu-
mented migrants—negotiating university-installed barriers to collaboration
and activism, and negotiating the spoken and unsaid concerns, fears, ambiv-
alence, and resistance of participants and partners (pp. 251–254).
Also working with recent migrants, Kwok and Ku (2008) brought together
a collective of university researchers, an anthropologist, an urban planner,
and migrant women from China to Hong Kong to research migrant women’s
experiences of environmental stress, housing, and neighborhood planning
needs. The goal of this PAR study was to document experiences in order to
inform urban planning and design. In the discussion of the study, design, and
findings, the authors emphasize the physical environment of Hong Kong and
the material and lived aspects of “socio-spatial exclusion” (p. 262). In this
study, a pilot study was conducted in which recently arrived mothers were
interviewed to help shape research questions and methods. Later phases of
the study included photovoice and a participatory design process in which
participants used modeling kits to construct ideal furnished interiors and
public spaces (p. 270). Finally, the participants all worked together (in focus
group settings) to analyze data from the photovoice and modeling exercises.
In their reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology of the
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 91
project, the authors observed that the methodology helped to foster relation-
ships among the newly arrived women and that project activities prompted
sharing of information and mutual support (p. 279). However, the authors
did not always feel that they were successful in transferring feelings of own-
ership to the migrant women. The authors conclude that this approach held
important insights for urban planners and policy-makers.
Intersecting participatory research and mapping methods, community
mapping is a participatory approach that emphasizes “openness and inclu-
siveness of the mapmaking process” (Amsden & VanWynsberghe, 2005,
p. 361). Community mapping invites participants to map places and loca-
tions that matter to them, in whichever language or symbols is most mean-
ingful to them. The results are often layered, textured, and far from static,
conveying relationships, movement, trajectories, and multiplicities (Krueger,
2011). In one approach to community mapping known as bioregional
mapping, participants create maps to marcate the relationships and “pro-
cesses” of nearby natural systems (Krueger, 2011; see also Aberley, 1993).
In another approach of capacity-focused development, participants con-
struct maps of their neighborhoods and communities, pertaining to assets,
capacities, and abilities (Amsden & VanWynsberghe, 2005; Kretzmann &
McKnight, 1993). Thus, community mapping can document not only physi-
cal, geographical elements of place, but also other components imbued with
human meaning.
MIXED, POST, AND STRATEGIC METHODOLOGIES
In this section we discuss methodological approaches to research being
used in many studies that can be considered postmodern or new material-
ist in theoretical orientation. Over the past several decades, it has become
common in these domains to not align with an identified methodology and
instead to be strongly guided by a theoretical approach in the uptake and
development of research methods. For example, in a recent book on Emerg-
ing approaches to educational research: Tracing the sociomaterial, Fenwick,
Edwards, and Sawchuck (2011) write,
Sociomaterial approaches to research to date more often appear to sug-
gest a sensibility, rather than a specified set of methods for conducting
research. . . . As Law (2004b: 195) writes of ANT, the question is of
“method assemblage,” which is not quite a method but a “resonance”:
“a continual process of crafting.” (p. 177)
They suggest that such research begins from the local and singular, focus-
ing on everyday interactions, and can draw upon, for example, “fine-fined
ethnographic tracings,” ethnomethodological studies, engaging groups in
analyzing their own practices (participatory approaches), visual narratives
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92 Place in Research
(e.g., photography and film), cartographic methods (e.g., mapping social
relations and resource flows), and/or using theory “as an analytical tool
rather than a series of particular methods” (p. 177).
Such approaches to “socio-material” empirical research share character-
istics with earlier attempts to “work the ruins” of social science research
after postmodernism (Lather, 1991b; Scheurich, 1997; St. Pierre & Pillow,
2000) and more recent discussions of “post-qualitative research” (e.g., Lather,
2013; MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011). Offering a typology of approaches
to qualitative research, Lather (2013) suggests that “QUAL 3.0 . . . begins to
use postmodern theories to open up concepts associated with qualitative
inquiry,” such as validity, voice, data, reflexivity, and so forth, whereas
“QUAL 4.O . . . cannot be tidily described in textbooks or handbooks.
There is no methodological instrumentality to be unproblematically learned.
In this methodology-to-come, we begin to do it differently wherever we are
in our projects” (p. 635). Working to articulate what “no methodological
a priori” (Marcus, 2009) looks like in practice, Lather points to several
exemplars, including a book by Margaret Somerville (2013) focused on a
study on drought in Australia undertaken by a team of Indigenous and non-
Indigenous researchers. Suggesting the book provides a “radical alternative
methodology across worlds that cannot know one another,” Lather (2013)
outlines how Somerville mobilizes “ ‘a methodology of lemons’ of entangle-
ment and reflexivity out of bodywork” through artwork and stories that
were then shaped into a series of public exhibitions of artworks and texts
(p. 641).
The directions described previously could be understood as a movement
away from “methodology,” or perhaps more accurately, as mixing and
experimenting with methodology (for example, Somerville’s (2013) study is
variously described as “a collaborative (auto) ethnographic study,” as “arts-
based methodology,” as “a methodology of lemons”). In any case, many
researchers working in postmodern and materialist theoretical domains are
emphasizing invention in drawing upon familiar and new methodologies and
methods to address the questions identified through their theoretical orien-
tations (Greene, 2013; Merriman, 2013). Common to these approaches is a
theoretical loss of confidence in the ability of research to “see” or accurately
represent what is occurring in a research setting, and instead emphases on
the identities and lenses of researchers (in earlier postmodern work; see
Lather, 1991b) and on viewing research as a performance or enactment of
relational and material conditions (Anderson & Harrison, 2010; MacLure,
2013). As Fenwick and colleagues (2011) write, “The question of producing
knowledge and learning shifts from a representational idiom, mapping and
understanding a world that is out there, to a view that the world is doing
things, full of agency. Not only humans act, because non-humans act on and
with humans” (p. 3).
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 93
With this book’s emphasis on critical place inquiry, whether research
captures reality in some ways and/or is a performance or product of the
world is overshadowed by what it is that the research itself does. In this
vein, there have been critiques of the emphasis on novelty sand inven-
tion in the previously described approaches at the expense of a focus on
the research’s impact on social and broader material conditions (Greene,
2013). In contrast, some researchers have suggested that what matters
in terms of choosing methods of data analysis and representation is how
the research can best “be of use,” or in other words, determining which
methodologies and methods may be most effective towards particular
ends (Fine & Barreras, 2001). From a large scale quantitative study, to
court testimony, to participatory art as public pedagogy, framings and
methods of research are designed to maximize the potential to act as a
form of intervention, or as public scholarship (McKenzie, 2009). This
type of orientation could perhaps be considered a strategic methodologi-
cal approach, which involves selecting the methodology and methods of
research best suited to the type of data and analysis most likely to criti-
cally inform the decision-making and conditions surrounding a particular
issue. This is one of the methodological approaches with which we align,
and it informs our motivations for writing a book discussing the range of
theories, methodologies, and methods of research that can be mobilized in
critical research on and in place.
Table 4.2 The Things We Do with Research∗
Addressing wider audiences through media, op-ed articles, and other popular forms
Policy-making and engagement
Active participant in struggles and campaigns
Collaborating with community-based organizations
Participatory research with students, educators, community-members, policy-makers
Constituency building: creating social science ‘literate’ and activist communities
Workshops on the critical use of research and policy
Constructing curriculum documents or guidelines
Creating public service announcements from social science research
Translating research into practice
Theoretical contributions that shift thinking
Social criticism
Testimony in court
Political satire
Public art, museums, parks, photo exhibits, as venues for presenting research
Note: Adapted from McKenzie, 2009 (with original references to Fine & Barreras, 2001;
Massey, 2008; Posner, 2001)
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94 Place in Research
INDIGENOUS METHODOLOGIES AND LAND
Gregory Cajete (2000) writes that Indigenous languages have no words for
“science,” “psychology,” or “philosophy,” or any attempts to know more
about life and nature (p. 2). What Cajete terms “Native science,” then,
is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking,
acting, and “coming to know” that have evolved through human experi-
ence with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied
participation with the natural landscape. To gain a sense of Native sci-
ence one must participate with the natural world. (p. 2, italics original)
Cajete’s definition of Native science, part of what we refer to more broadly
in this book as Indigenous methodologies, makes clear the deep connections
between Indigenous knowledge and land. As discussed in Chapter 3, Indig-
enous conceptualizations of land can be teased apart from European con-
ceptualizations of place as property (see pages 89–100). We show examples
of how these differences play out later in Chapter 6. This section, then, is
dedicated to drawing out the significance of land and place within Indig-
enous methodologies.
Cajete (2000) argues that there have always been Indigenous method-
ologies, or processes for gathering and interpreting knowledge. Much of
Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley’s work over the course of his career was dedi-
cated to documenting Indigenous knowledge processes (2006, 2010). How-
ever, the need to bring Indigenous knowledges into professional research
practice and the academy as a more cogent body of approaches and ideas
emerged in response to generations of exploitation and abuse of Indigenous
communities at the hands of academic researchers (L. T. Smith, 1999/2012;
Kovach, 2009). Kovach emphasizes that Indigenous methodologies spring
from tribal epistemologies, not Western philosophy (2009, p. 36).
Reading across several book-length articulations of Indigenous method-
ologies (L. T. Smith, 1999/2012; Cajete, 2000; Wilson, 2008; Kovach, 2009;
and Chilisa, 2011), there are several epistemic touchstones. At the base of
each of these touchstones is a rootedness on and in relationship to land.
The first has to do with relationships, especially because “all relationships
are related to other relationships” (Cajete, 2000, p. 41). Indigenous meth-
odologies both are enacted by and seek to study relationships, rather than
object-based studies that typify Western sciences. Among the most primary
relationships, upon which all other relationships are configured, are rela-
tionships to land and place (L. T Smith, 1999/2012), or what sometimes
gets called the natural world in the literature (Cajete, 2000; Kovach, 2009;
see also the discussion in Chapter 3 of this volume on Indigenous conceptu-
alizations of land). Bang et al. (2014) write,
Indigenous scholars have focused much attention on relationships
between land, epistemology and importantly, ontology. Places produce
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Methodologies of Critical Place Inquiry 95
and teach particular ways of thinking about and being in the world.
They tell us the way things are, even when they operate pedagogically
beneath a conscious level. (p. 44)
For example, Vine Deloria, Jr. (1991) has referenced Seneca planting prac-
tices of the three Sisters of the Earth crops—corn, squash, and beans—to
describe the relational integrity with which Indigenous peoples in North
America planted and harvested plants for food and medicine: Seneca planted
three Sisters together because they grew well together, because they helped
to deter one another’s potential predators, and because they had compat-
ible spirits. Many years later, laboratory science confirmed that the plants,
together, create a complementary nitrogen cycle that promotes fertility and
productivity of the soil (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001, p. 25).
Indigenous knowledges emerge and exist within a universe that is rela-
tional and responsive. Thus, another epistemic touchstone of Indigenous
methodologies is reciprocity (Kovach, 2009; L. T. Smith, 1999/2012; Cajete,
2000; Wilson, 2008). Kovach (2009) explains that reciprocity is the ethical
starting place of Indigenous methodologies. “Because of the interconnec-
tion between all entities, seeking information ought not to be extractive
but reciprocal, to ensure an ecological and cosmological balance” (p. 57).
Reciprocity, of course, is not a touchstone observed only within Indigenous
methodologies—many other methodologies emphasize reciprocity, espe-
cially participatory methodologies. However, reciprocity in Indigenous
methodologies takes a different tenor because of its cosmological connota-
tion, concerned with maintaining balance not just between humans, but
with energies that connect and thread through all entities in the universe.
This is not a mystical statement, but one that is grounded in Indigenous
metaphysics (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Kawagley, 2010), which, as has
been previously noted, is regarded within Indigenous worldviews as simul-
taneously sacred and mundane.
A third epistemic touchstone of Indigenous methodologies is a notion
of something like the long view (Cajete, 2000; Kawagley, 2006; Wilson,
2008). In no small part due to the thousands of years that Indigenous peo-
ples have known their homelands, Indigenous research methodologies often
emphasize the wisdom and catalytic validity (Lather, 1991a) of the long
view (see Chapter 7, this volume, for a discussion on catalytic validity). By
the long view, we mean the centuries-long, or millennia-long sense of time
that allows a vision of land and place as animated, formed and unformed,
mountains growing at the same speed of fingernails, and oceans and ice
flows shaping the coasts. It is the long view that shows what is so alarm-
ing about rapid human-induced climate change, and it is the long view that
might guide decisions related to energy and fuel sources, human migration,
the whole of social life, and the necrophilic logics of late capitalism and
neoliberalism (Povinelli, 2011).
A final epistemic touchstone of Indigenous methodologies is concerned
with decolonization. In Chapter 3, we are careful to differentiate Indigenous
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96 Place in Research
conceptualizations from decolonizing perspectives; although there are fre-
quent overlaps, it is important to not collapse them. However, decolo-
nization is still an epistemic touchstone by sheer example of Indigenous
methodologies as a viable alternative ontological frame that has persisted
and resisted neoliberalism and market logics. “Indigenous methodologies
do not merely model Indigenous research,” writes Scott Morgensen (2012).
“By exposing normative knowledge production as being not only non-
Indigenous but colonial, they denaturalize power within settler societies and
ground knowledge production in decolonization” (p. 805). We discuss more
of the decolonial possibilities made available through Indigenous methods
in Chapter 6.
FROM METHODOLOGY TO METHODS
In this chapter we have outlined some of the possible methodologies that
researchers are using to engage in critical place research. This is not an
exhaustive or exclusive list, and as we have indicated, researchers are
employing mixed methodologies together or varied methodologies at differ-
ent times based on the particular topic, audience, and place of inquiry. We
have discussed archival, narrative, phenomenological, ethnographic, par-
ticipatory, mixed, post, strategic, as well as Indigenous methodologies of
research. In providing a sense of these varied methodologies, we have briefly
discussed some of the specific methods they typically employ, and in the
next chapter we offer further discussions of how researchers are using par-
ticular research methods to gather, analyze, and mobilize place-based data.
NOTE
1. Guattari coined the term transversality in 1964 to refer to means that search
for the new not by critiquing the old but by radically questioning all the bar-
riers that supported this logic (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 100).
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Standing on the street in an urban downtown on Treaty 6 territory in the
Canadian prairies, a group of teachers and soon to be teachers summarize
their understanding of Guy Débord’s description of the technique of dérive
(Débord, 1958). More than half the students are white, multi-generation
European settlers, with some Indigenous students and several recent immi-
grants and international students from Puerto Rico, China, and England.
The students are enrolled in an intensive summer urban education course
on “Place and socio-ecological experience” and are about to head off on
half-day “dérives.”
Vincent Kaufman (2006) writes in a biography of Débord, “the dérive is
an art of detour,” or of tactically reworking the structures and institutional
intentions of the urban environment as well as of self, a reworking that
occurs through “movement, mobility, and drift.” Traveling in small groups
for up to several days through the streets of the city, Débord and other
Situationists developed the dérive in France in the 1950s and ’60s as “the
projection onto space of a temporal experience, and vice versa” (Kaufman,
2006, p. 109). As with de Certeau (1984) as discussed in chapter 2, the Situ-
ationists were concerned with the potential politics in practices of walking
the structures of the city.
In the urban education class, educators engage in urban walking as a crit-
ical pedagogical/research method on one morning of their six-day course.
After three hours of unstructured walking and exploring in small groups,
students reflect on the experience, including in relation to their broader
course on critical anti-oppressive pedagogies of place:
A Dérive is an experience of ‘letting go’ and becoming ‘drawn by the
attractions of the terrain and the encounters’ (Débord, 1958). What
an unusual thing for our structured world. This contradiction was
an amazing experience being totally aware of my surroundings, the
new classmates I was with, and sharing stories of Saskatoon. This
wandering we did created what it was supposed to: wonderment.
(Kellie, 2011)
Methods of Critical
Place Inquiry
5
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98 Place in Research
Another student writes of committing to the experience:
In the next moment or two I was totally caught off guard by the amazing
green growth going on between two buildings not more than 12 inches
apart. The natural growth had decided, in spite of human intervention,
that this was where it was going to flourish. I began to notice more and
more of this. (Julie, 2011)
Students discussed seeing the racialized history and locations of the city
through the layering and juxtaposition of critical readings and differing sto-
ries of parents, communities, peers, and people and places encountered and
discussed while walking. This collective urban walking experiment/exercise
“really highlighted how our past experiences shape our present perceptions
of place and space” (Katie, 2011). These and other data from student course
journals were later collected as one part of a participatory research project
on teachers’ experiences of learning to teach for social and ecological justice
(McKenzie et al., 2013).
This example of urban walking as teaching and research method suggests
several of the key issues we will focus on in this chapter. Having discussed
theorizations (Chapters 2 & 3, this volume) and methodologies (Chapter 4,
this volume) of critical place inquiry, we turn our attention to methods
of critical place inquiry in this chapter and in Chapter 6. Issues discussed
include the “where” of methods, or how data collection takes place in rela-
tion to land and place, and in stationary and/or mobile locations; other
embodied aspects of data and data collection and analysis processes; and
the productivity of methods. The latter includes the participatory and per-
formative aspects of methods and of what is learned and done through the
research process. Like developing work in “ecology of place” or “place-
based research” in the sciences (Billick & Price, 2010), here we highlight
social science research that assigns place “a central and creative role in its
design and interpretation,” rather than considering it “a problem to be cir-
cumvented” (p. 5).
In the following chapter (Chapter 6, this volume), we specifically discuss
Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry. As you will see, this does not
mean that we do not discuss Indigenous methods in this chapter; our inten-
tion is not at all to install a barrier between methods of critical place inquiry
writ large and Indigenous methods of critical place inquiry. Instead, after
the broader discussion of the current chapter, our aim in Chapter 6 is to
determine some of the considerations and commitments that may be specific
to Indigenous methods. In the final chapter of the book, we address how the
larger project of critical place inquiry might be more accountable to people
across places.
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Methods of Critical Place Inquiry 99
EMPLACED AND LAND-BASED DATA
When it comes to research approaches, geographers have largely failed to take
the difference that place makes to methodology seriously. While social science
has done much to demonstrate the significance of social relationships in meth-
odology (through, for example, processes of researcher reflexivity), the influ-
ence of the ‘where of method’ has received less attention. (Anderson & Jones,
2009, p. 292)
With places “partially responsible for how knowledge is formulated, accessed
and articulated,” Anderson and Jones (2009) suggest that researchers ought
to pay more attention to “the where of the research encounter” (p. 293). We
agree and also expand consideration beyond the where of data collection (or
what McKittrick [2006] calls the “where of subjectivity”) to other ways that
various methods “get at” the influence of place in the broader understand-
ings and practices that the research may be examining or furthering. This
suggests the importance of how various methods and the data they elicit
may be responsive to or indicative of various “emplaced” understandings/
practices, not only through the location of data collection, but also more
broadly in the type of data collected or created.
Sofia Cele (2006) elaborates on this through use of a typology of “con-
crete” and “abstract” aspects of place. Concrete aspects of places are defined
as including the physical characteristics and objects present in a place, as
well as how humans interact with these places and objects through their
senses. The category of abstract aspects of place is used to refer to inner
processes that places evoke, including dreams, imagination, memory, and
feelings as they relate to people’s understandings and connections to place.
Trell and van Hoven (2010) suggest that various research methods offer
insight into these different aspects of place (see Table 5.1). For example,
they propose that visual methods that include seeing places with partic-
ipants (walks), or are created with or by participants (photos or video),
enable more insight into the concrete aspects of place that may be affecting
understandings and actions. Oral data collection methods, including inter-
views, on the other hand, are suggested to provide data on abstract orien-
tations to place through information on participants’ thoughts, memories,
and feelings as they relate to place.
This typology can be helpful in understanding the value of different types
of methods for eliciting qualitative data on place and people’s relationships
with place. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests the value of going beyond
oral or written methods to include visual and sensory modes of data col-
lection (Pink, 2007, 2009). As Anderson and Jones (2009) suggest, chang-
ing the location of oral methods such as interviews to familiar places, or
through walking interviews or video “go alongs,” can enable the elicitation
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100 Place in Research
of “data” of both the concrete and abstract varieties (Cele, 2006): for exam-
ple, as we see the grass sprouting up between buildings and hear a research
participant’s reflections in relation to this same experience.
However, a typology of concrete and abstract aspects of place also assumes
these considerations can be separated—that objects and physical character-