Senses of Place

If there is one single research topic that has evolved from my work the last five years, it is the pedagogical aspects of place. This insight has come gradually. It concerns much more than what goes on inside schools. All cultural institutions are pedagogical institutions. By using place as an analytical and integrated frame it is possible to identify and facilitate good learning processes. Why is this important? One way to talk about the valuation of community in society is to talk about place. Place is also a concept that can be used to transform our people-centred notions of community to include the more-than-human parts of community, to stress that community is created through social and eco-social relations. We live in a multicultural world where globalized, horizontal relationships and bonds between people, goods, things, images are valued more than the verticality of inhabiting place, by living in, of, and for place. I regard place as a profound, pedagogical phenomenon.

Ecopsychology brings psychological principles and practices to research on landscape and wellbeing. According to Jungian analyst Mary-Jayne Rust (2004), ecopsychology is a movement that has emerged in the last two decades, attempting to connect psychological and ecological worlds in order to speak about the psychological roots and impact of the current environmental crisis. Rust shows that psychology has entirely been concerned with human relationships “not acknowledging the part that the other-than-human world may play in our lives” (Rust 2002). Ecopsychology argues that not knowing the relationship to the more-than-human world, and acting as if being set apart from this world, has disastrous consequences that are not only ecological, social and economical, but psychological. Most of its practitioners and theorists are based in the USA, and are rooted in humanistic psychology (Searles 1960), and so far research in ecopsychology has come very short, since most work so far is either dir...

”A new pedagogy – and therapy - of time and place is beginning to take shape” (Birkeland 2005: 59). This new pedagogy of place is concrete and subjective, with an origin, a history and geography of lived life. It is a new pedagogy for human beings for resituating our selves (”nurture”) in ecological terms and the non-human (”nature”) in ethical terms. It means to stop treating the nature-nurture debate as an either-or question and instead ask how human beings are becoming alongside many other species and life-modes. Is it too much for hope for? Well, it depends on whether we avoid a gynocentric view of society, or an uterine social space, which Henri Lefebre (1991) calls it, and how the transition from modernity´s abstract space to a utopian, differential space develops. There is a potential connected to a restoration of meaning in space and the feminine principle that started with the women´s movement some decades ago. A reawakening of the female principle seems, however, today to t...

The ideas that I present here take outset in my book "Making Place, Making Self", where the concept of place is rewritten in non-dualist and non-androcentric ways (Birkeland 2005). By working with biographical interviews with individual holiday makers to the Northern parts of Norway, and the North Cape, I have sought understandings of the meaning of place and how place is created in both external and internal worlds of individual human beings. Such understandings can work as a foundation for developing sustainable concepts of subjectivity and self, and for forming sustainable relationships to place and to nature for humans. When I use the word sustainable here, I am treating it in a very loose sense. I am not using it in an instrumental sense of the word but evoking a flow of maternal thinking – thinking about things and people in a way where everything is related to everything and that everything affects everything. Re-inscribing place with new meaning needs place-writing....

"To build an ecological consciousness, we do... need to question systems of thought that confine agency to a human or human-like consciousness and refuse to acknowledge the creativity of earth others". These are the words of a favorite philosopher of nature of mine, Val Plumwood, in an article from Ethics & the Environment in 2006. In her last years before her sudden death in 2008, she was very interested in the agency of nature, perhaps fuelled by the experiences and thoughts that came after an attack by a crocodile while canoeing in Kakadu National Park in Australia in 1985. It has been described as a near-death experience. I am amazed by the attack which she described in the article "Prey to a Crocodile", published in the Aisling magazine in 2002 (and other places). The sudden experience that she was nothing more than food for an other animal let her realize that humans are edible, but also more than edible. In early June 2006 Val Plumwood was one of the key ...

How do we see life? How do we sense life? Instead of treating nature as a consequence of the social realm, we should view human beings as created in relationships that are both human and more-than-human. Human beings are connected to the more-than-human world in terms of being part of the same world in a deeper sense, but in modern societies there is a lack of understanding of these connections and their relevance for socialization and human development . Our human situation or reality is that we are part of, and a product of, community. Being a human being, is to be a part of a community. But what is a community, really? Rural communities are populated by human and more-than-human life in complex ways. One classical way to distinguish a rural community from a non-rural community is by looking at the density of the population. If we say that rural communities are scarcely populated by human nature, what do we then exclude and marginalize? Who talks about density of more-than-human ...

Sense of place: If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. To inhabit the earth: Do you know the rhythms, possibilities and limits of the earth? Those who know these rhythms are more able to take responsibility for the earth. Your region: Learn about the region where you live. How much do you know about it? To live in, of, and for place: Seek to meet your needs from within the place and region where you live. Maps: By mapping your own place you may create a renewed understanding of place and sense of place. Community: Create new place-based communities that take responsibility for the welfare of both humans, society and nature. The power of place: Place planning for both humans, society and nature.