Introduction : Place Studies for a Global World

This book began with a provocation to think ‘place’ differently. The aim was to create conversations – multiple, contingent, divergent, and situated conversations – to move us beyond the limits of our current thinking. This introduction includes the ideas from the paper that was circulated to leading researchers in the newly emerging field of place studies to stimulate these conversations (Somerville, 2008). The paper proposed a new post-poststructural and postcolonial understanding of place, and place learning. The researchers responded with their latest work-in-progress, leading edge place research. As editors, we set out in this introduction to map the ideas in the provocation, and the chapters that have come to form this book.