Place

![CDATA[Many contemporary thinkers, inspired most prominently, perhaps, by Martin Heidegger, have made “place” a central concern of theory (particularly ontological meanings) and illustrated that it mattered. Scholars in a range of disciplines have adopted place as a central conceptual and philosophical theme, but in particular geography, humanities and social sciences have been central to understanding how place comes to be activated through and within the relations of humans with others. Areas that have been theorized in literature include place in relation to the body, the local, the regional, and the global. Place as a theme has incorporated a range of foci such as location, architecture, place attachment, place identity, sense of place and in the arts the production, practice, and performance of place. In more contemporary times, theoretical frames have sought to unsettle the romantic sometimes more static physical notions of place with critical, feminist, poststructuralist, and new materialist theorists taking up conceptual ideas around gendered spaces, contested spaces, embodied spaces, the politics of space, cultural topographies, cyberspace, nomadism, spaces of desire, monumental spaces, forgotten spaces, and the materiality and relations of objects and entities (human and nonhuman).]]