Search Results

Place management theory—a part of routine activity theory—explains why a relatively few places have a great deal of crime while most places have little or no crime. The explanation is the way place managers carry out their four primary functions: organization of space, regulation of conduct, control of access, and acquisition of resources. Place managers are those people and organizations that own and operate businesses, homes, hotels, drinking establishments, schools, government offices, places of worship, health centers, and other specific locations. They can even operate mobile places such as busses, trains, ships, and aircraft. Some are large—a multi-story office tower for example—while others are tiny—a bus stop, for example. Place managers are important because they can exercise control over the people who use these locations and in doing so contribute to public order and safety. Consequently, it is important to understand place management, how it can fail, and what one can do to prevent failures. Place management has implications beyond high-crime sites. When crime places are connected, they can create crime hot spots in an area. The concentration of high crime places can inflate crime in a neighborhood. Moreover, place management can be applied to virtual locations, such as servers, websites, and other network infrastructures. There is considerable evaluation evidence that place managers can change high crime locations to low crime locations. Research also shows that displacement to other places, though possible, is far from inevitable. Indeed, research shows that improving a high crime place can reduce crime at places nearby places. Although much of this research has studied how police intervene with place managers, non-police regulatory agencies can carry out this public safety function.

Asian American ecocriticism focuses on providing theoretical frameworks for understanding race and ethnicity in environmental contexts. Attention to Asian American literary criticism can fill crucial critical lacunae in the study of the environment in American studies. Since the early 2000s, ecocritical and environmental studies have conceptualized place, the physical and built environment, not only as an object of study but also as a site from which to launch a critique of how ecocritical studies has centered issues such as climate change and environmental degradation by understanding the intersectional contexts of environmental studies. Asian American ecocriticism in this sense can be understood as a rejoinder to the extant body of work in ecocritical studies in that it demands a vigorous engagement with race, class, and ethnicity in understanding what we think of as the environment.

Ongoing shifts in demographics, knowledge, and expectations require continuous critical reflection on the leadership of K-12 schools. The models of school leadership offered in the past, which focus on management, are no longer adequate. Today, leaders must also ensure that all the students in their care are being provided high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and challenging educational opportunities that prepare each student for college, careers, and life. In other words, leaders must engage in “Inclusive Educational Leadership.” Inclusive Educational Leadership is a reconceptualization of traditional education leadership, which is dedicated to equity, quality and inclusion. We emphasize “inclusive” because it is our contention that providing a quality education experience that is both equitable and fosters equitable outcomes requires an intentional focus on inclusion. Inclusive Educational Leadership has three key areas of emphasis: place, preparation, and practice. Place refers to social practices and policies that reflect competing meanings and uses of spaces, the role people play in a given space and articulations of locations (geographic positions), environments (conditions), and ranks (hierarchies). Preparation refers to education, training and mentoring that is provided to leaders, and practice refers to the work leaders do to cultivate dispositions that support inclusion, support inclusive and culturally responsive practice, and develop an inclusive school culture. The goal of inclusive leadership is to cultivate an inclusive, caring, and supportive school culture that promotes the academic success and well-being of each student. In other words, its goal is to offer more than expectations that lightly touch on all students; its goal is to deliver results for each student. Thus, the work of Inclusive Educational Leadership involves a restructuring of the education experience to prevent marginalization, while creating school cultures based on dignity and respect and focused on achieving equity, high-quality educational experiences, and life success for all students.

Broadly, landscapes can be considered terrains of connectivity. Landscapes encompass wild, cultivated, urban, feral, and fallow spaces, as well as the human and nonhuman entities who inhabit and shape them. Memory refers to the past as it exists in the present, bridging temporally discrete moments through the intentional or unintentional act of remembering. Memory studies, from the view of anthropology, include explorations of individual forms of remembrance, as well as the collective, heterogenous ways of marking, interpreting, and erasing the past. Taken together, landscapes and memory co-constitute one another: landscapes store, depict, and evoke memories while memories recall, revise, and shape landscapes. Knowledge and power are inevitably wrapped up in the relationship, and anthropologists have investigated the manifest ways such forces emerge through human acts of cultivation, commemoration, nostalgia, and forgetting. Because landscapes and memory appear in both physical and immaterial forms, the social constructs, cultural expressions, and human and nonhuman relationships on which they are based generate rich material for anthropological study. While landscape and memory are surely topics independently worthy of study, undertaking the two in tandem elucidates the intertwining threads that bind together space and time; such studies interrogate realms of personal meaning and political power while simultaneously highlighting dynamic processes of adaptation, improvisation, and erasure.

Urbanization is a central challenge of our times. At its core, it is an urban development challenge that requires addressing transportation and housing in cities. Transport improvements can reduce travel times and improve the spatial reach of urban dwellers. But these improvements may be crowded out by latent demand for travel and may lead to worse congestion, pollution, and other negative externalities associated with urban traffic. To evaluate the effects of transport improvements, direct travel effects must be measured. Then, an improvement in traffic conditions somewhere may spill over to other areas. Firms and residents may also relocate, so economic growth close to a transport improvement may just result from a displacement of economic activity from other areas. Conversely, better accessibility is expected to foster agglomeration effects and increase productivity. Valuing these changes is difficult, as it requires being able to quantify many externalities such as congestion delays, scheduling gains, and greater job accessibility. Housing policies present different challenges. More fundamental policies seek to enable housing construction by offering more secure property rights, up-to-date land registries, and competent land-use planning—all complex endeavors and all necessary. Other housing policies rely on heavy government interventions to provide housing directly to large segments of the urban population. These policies often flop because governments fail to link housing provision with job accessibility and appropriate land-use planning. Housing is also an expensive asset that requires significant initial funding, while credit constraints abound in the urbanizing world. Policymakers also need to choose between small improvements to extremely low-quality informal housing, retrofitting modern housing in already-built urban areas, or urban expansion. All these options involve sharp trade-offs, subtle induced effects, and complex interactions with transport. All these effects are difficult to measure and challenging to value.

Globalization and global travel have existed for centuries. It is over the past century in particular, however, that travel has become truly global, in the sense that most and not just some travel can in some way or other be said to globalized. Indeed, with the invention and spread of new technologies of mobility (like jet travel), and new technologies of information (like the internet), as with the increasingly invasive impact of human activity on the planet at large (like global warming), it is difficult to conceive of travel in the 21st century that is purely “local.” Travel in the age of globalization, then, is at one and the same time both more widespread yet also more irrelevant than ever. As humans, goods, and information move around in ever-increasing quantities, and at ever-greater speed, it seems that mobility is at an all-time high in human history. On the other hand, as a rising number of people and places are interlinked through ever-faster travel and various forms of communication technologies, the local and the global are becoming harder and harder to distinguish. In this, travel writing has faced a range of challenges that are both old and new. With contemporary travel writers facing a global reality that is very different from the colonial legacy of a traditionally Eurocentric genre, travel writers in the age of globalization have been forced to radically reconsider the itineraries, the destinations, the purpose, and the identity of the traveling subject. Traditionally defined as a white (European) male, the global traveler of the 21st century can take on many forms in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. At the same time, however, a large number of contemporary travel writers have found it hard to break with the mold of old, desperately continuing to pursue the exotic adventure and the untouched “otherness” of the blank spaces of a map that, in the age of Google Earth, satellite navigation, jet and space travel, global warming, and an explosive growth in human population, are no more.

The concepts of gender, space, and place have significant social and political implications for the kind of world that people inhabit and the kinds of lives we can lead. That there has been a transformation in thinking about these concepts is indicated in references today to pluralized (and polymorphic) spaces, to the waxing, and waning of distinctions between space and place, and to the idea that gender, space, and place are something produced rather than simply lived in, or ventured into. These subtle shifts hint at a complex history of ideas about what constitutes gender, space, and/or place and how we might understand the connections and disjunctures between and among them. The theoretical roots of space act as the starting point for discussion, since these have a longer historical record than work which also explicitly includes gender. Western conceptions of space have drawn primarily from early Greek philosophers and mathematicians, and these conceptions indicate an early distinction between a philosophy of space and a pre-scientific notion of space. From here, the development of feminist methods has become essential for revealing how spatial thinking informs ideas about gender. These methods include deconstructing canons, asking the profoundly spatial question of “Where are the women?” and “ungendering” space. These methodological strategies reveal the extent to which the central concerns of feminism today have spatial and place-based dimensions.

Place matters. The conceptualizations and analyses of place defined in geographical and metaphorical terms play a significant role in understanding curriculum and are an exciting, important and ever-increasing discourse in the field of curriculum studies. As the discourses have developed, an increasing amount of scholarship has emerged that centers on place and its significance autobiographically, psychoanalytically, culturally, racially, and politically, not only in the field of curriculum but in education and society in general. There is also attention paid to the notion that understanding our place (situatedness) is as important as our positionality. There is a historical discussion on the manner in which studies of curriculum and place have focused on the southern United States; however, as the area has developed, the focus has expanded to place considered not only in terms of the southern United States, but other areas of the country and internationally. The discussion begins with notions of why place matters in curriculum studies and in our general understandings of place as well. A second major emphasis elaborates on the work done in curriculum and place developmentally and historically, highlighting major studies that exist in the area. A discussion of the future of what is called place studies in curriculum is the final area including highlights of the newest scholarship alongside a discussion of the movement toward the parameters of place globally. Beyond the parameters of this article, but significant in the study of place, are the treatments of place in literature, film, and television series; a small discussion of these areas is included.

Society is constituted by both historical and spatial elements; however, education research, policy, and practice often subordinates the spatial in preference for the temporal. In what is often referred to as the “spatial turn,” more recently education researchers have acknowledged spatial concepts to facilitate understandings and inform debates about identity, belonging, social justice, differentiation, policy, race, mobility, globalization, and even digital and new communication modes, amongst many others. Social geographers understand place as more than a dot on a map, instead focusing on the sociocultural and sociomaterial aspects of spaces. Space and place are core elements of social geography. Schools are comprised of architectural, material, performative, relational, social, or discursive spaces, all of which are socially constructed. Schools and education contexts, as social spaces and places, produce and reproduce modes of social interactions and social practices while also mediating the relational and pedagogical practices that operate within. Pedagogical spaces are also about the exercise of power—a spatial governmentality to regulate behavior. Yet pedagogy can focus on place-based and place-conscious practices that highlight the connectedness between people and their non-human world. A focus on the sociospatial in education research is able to foreground inequalities, differences, and power relations that are able to speak to policies and practices. As such, in this field there is often a focus is on spatial justice, where inequalities based on location, mobility, poverty, or indigeneity are analyzed using spatial understandings of socioeconomic or political characteristics. This brings together connections between place and space in a powerful combination around justice, equity, and critical thinking.

Imaginative Ecological Education (IEE) is an emerging cross-curricular and cross-grade pedagogical approach that seeks to address the neglect of emotional and imaginative engagement in Place-based learning. Its dual aims are to engage learners emotionally with the natural world and, ultimately, to transform how learners understand their relationship within the natural world. Understanding ecologically or the development of ecological understanding is the main goal; this represents a deep understanding of human connectedness within the living world. To achieve this goal, Imaginative Ecological Education acknowledges the central role of emotion in all learning and considers the value of emotional engagement not just for learning, but for supporting connections to nature that inspire environmental values and action. This pedagogical approach brings imagination from the sidelines to the centre of theory and practice, acknowledging that imagination is essential for engaging in learning and transforming human-nature relationships. Envisioning the possible, the not-yet, requires imagination. The central focus on emotional and imaginative engagement of learners within Place-focused teaching is what sets Imaginative Ecological Education apart from other approaches to outdoor learning. Imaginative Ecological Education theory and practice is evolving based on practitioner feedback and research.A Walking Curriculum: Evoking Wonder and Developing Sense of Place (K-12) is the most practical and accessible book on Imaginative Ecological Education. It contains a series of walking-focused activities that engage the principles of Imaginative Ecological Education in order to support emotional connections in learning. To date this approach has been most employed in the elementary school context. Research suggests that Imaginative Ecological Education practices support learners in forming emotional connections with and in the natural world.

Interest in the neural representations of scenes centered first on the idea that the primate visual system evolved in the context of natural scene statistics, but with the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging, interest turned to scenes as a category of visual representation distinct from that of objects, faces, or bodies. Research comparing such categories revealed a scene network comprised of the parahippocampal place area, the medial place area, and the occipital place area. The network has been linked to a variety of functions, including navigation, categorization, and contextual processing. Moreover, much is known about both the visual representations of scenes within the network as well as its role in and connections to the brain’s semantic system. To fully understand the scene network, however, more work is needed to both break it down into its constituent parts and integrate what is known into a coherent system or systems.

The work of American artist, educator, and researcher Elizabeth Ellsworth is profoundly influential in many fields of study, including social policy, architecture, feminism, mass communication, media, education, and art activism. In education, Ellsworth’s insights and ideas about knowledge and pedagogy challenge the view of student education in terms of mental activity and processes of growth promoted by modern psychology. She problematizes knowledge and learning by connecting them to moving bodies, offering radical insights regarding how human embodiment affects activities of teaching and learning and how places of learning implicate bodies in pedagogy. Ellsworth claims knowledge to be always in the making and pedagogy as a force that is already at play in the world, driving experience and sustaining the human prospect. Ellsworth challenges art education by actively questioning knowledge and reality as already made, arguing instead that both are multiple, and can and must be challenged so that society can respond and engage with discursive and material spaces of classroom and daily life practices that changing times, spaces, and bodies engender. Drawing from a wide variety of disciplines, including contemporary art and media design, Ellsworth urges education to orient to the pragmatics of aesthetic experience and the rich indeterminacy of time in moving bodies and demonstrates the potentialities in responding to the anomalies of teaching even while allowing them to be undecidable. In calling for pedagogic efforts that liberate matter from constraint, her work has inspired many varieties of new materialisms currently coming to the fore in curriculum studies. Ellsworth emphasizes the practice of thinking that pedagogy offers, which engages the aesthetic to neutralize binary thinking. She argues that even in attempts to act against oppressions, easy polemics oppose victims to perpetrators; unity is based on sameness; and an “us-ness” versus “them-ness.” Methods appear unproblematic in their use of rationalistic tools, and there are incapacities or refusals to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information and practice that assume exemption from becoming oppressive to others. Instead, Ellsworth advocates thinking in which dynamic and relational unities move through each other, always emerging as something un-predetermined. Her work carries a clearly articulated sociopolitical agenda for design of pedagogic circumstances whose anomalous and “impossible” natures are the actual places in which difference has the flexibility to differ, and students of difference can thrive.

Sacred places have characterized most known settled societies. They have been both religious, domestic, civil, and related to the natural world. The Renaissance looked back to both Greek and Roman models, but in Europe, the Gothic model retained its importance. A lively debate as to whether sacred spaces are needed, and if so how to build them, runs from the 15th century to the present. The importance of domestic sacred space has declined for most communities in the West apart from Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians, and secularization has led to the deconsecration of many religious buildings. However, the late 20th century also saw many inspirational religious buildings that in many ways broke with tradition, and the importance of civil sacred places has increased as secularization has grown. Romanticism, the roots of which can be traced to the 16th century, finds the sacred above all in the natural world, and this has informed both New Age religious movements and developments like the establishment of national parks.

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.

Water in all its permanent, temporary, colored, salt and freshwater forms, is vital and life-sustaining to human and other living species. Ethnographic research has, by necessity, always included water in all its variations, whereas ethnographies of water describe and analyze not only accounts about water’s intrinsic value to life, but also how different societies conceptualize, sustain, use, control, and attribute meaning to it. Water as a cultural ethnographic lens reveals how both the presence and absence of water is managed, as well as how it is believed to have originated and should be cared for. Practices such as the regular enactment of religious rituals, the development of irrigation, origin narratives, understandings of hydrological movements, and the problem of drought and flood, all convey a complex of water-inspired stories. Water’s relationship to other elements—air, wind, fire, cloud, and smoke—are also part of the depth and breadth embedded in ethnographies of water, constituting a richness of narratives, especially when explored from country to country, and place to place, as new generations and circumstances across time and space converge. These inevitably include the impact of global warming, the technology revolution, and globalization, alongside the curiosity, rigor, and insight that is the long-term hallmark of anthropological inquiry.

Despite scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causation of climate change, and ever-growing knowledge on the biophysical impacts of climate change, there is large variability in public perceptions of and belief in climate change. Public support for national and international climate policy has a strong positive association with certainty that climate change is occurring, human caused, serious, and solvable. Thus to achieve greater acceptance of national climate policy and international agreements, it is important to raise public belief in climate change and understandings of personal climate risk. Public understandings of climate change and associated risk perceptions have received significant academic attention. This research has been conducted across a range of spatial scales, with particular attention on large-scale, nationally representative surveys to gain insights into country-scale perceptions of climate change. Generalizability of nationally representative surveys allows some degree of national comparison; however, the ability to conduct such comparisons has been limited by the availability of comparative data sets. Consequently, empirical insights have been geographically biased toward Europe and North America, with less understanding of public perceptions of climate change in other geographical settings including the Global South. Moreover, a focus on quantitative surveying techniques can overlook the more nuanced, culturally determined factors that contribute to the construction of climate change perceptions. The physical and human geographies of climate change are diverse. This is due to the complex spatial dimensions of climate change and includes both the observed and anticipated geographical differentiation in risks, impacts, and vulnerabilities. While country location and national climate can impact upon how climate change is understood, so too will sociocultural factors such as national identity and culture(s). Studies have reported high variability in climate change perceptions, the result of a complex interplay between personal experiences of climate, social norms, and worldviews. Exploring the development of national-scale analyses and their findings over time, and the comparability of national data sets, may provide some insights into the factors that influence public perceptions of climate change and identify national-scale interventions and communications to raise risk perception and understanding of climate change.

Even the most primitive hunter-gatherers occasionally had to give names to tools and places, and the need for instrument and place nouns has grown ever since in tandem with the unfolding of human culture. It is therefore no wonder that the majority of languages of the world, among them Latin and the Romance languages, have specific patterns of word formation to this effect. As is the case with other categories of word formation, those referred to with instrument noun and place noun do not constitute conceptually homogeneous sets, but sets of conceptually related subcategories. Instrument nouns comprise objects that can range from simple tools and gadgets to complex machines, but can also represent less prototypically instrumental objects like chemical substances or pieces of clothing and armor, as well as more abstract entities that are often referred to as means. Place names, in turn, cover subcategories as diverse as terrains, fields and groves, burrows, stalls and other buildings, countries, regions, and towns. Vessels represent a category located halfway between instrument and place nouns: an inkpot, for example, is an artifact designed to contain ink and as such close to an instrument, but can also be viewed as a place where ink is stored. Both instrument and place nouns can take as bases nouns and verbs, more rarely adjectives. This description of the two categories is essentially valid for both Latin and Romance. The category of place nouns has remained relatively stable at the conceptual level throughout the period considered here, although many changes can be observed for individual suffixes. Instrument nouns, by contrast, have suffered a major overhaul in the wake of the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Critical communication studies of space and place consider the ways power becomes located within a wider topography of social relations. How a body thinks, its exposure to pollutants, or access to societal resources: these all depend, in part, upon where that body moves in relation to the other bodies that share their historical moment. The logic of power becomes manifest in the spatial organization of a society, and subsequently influences social practice. Emergent from multiple intellectual traditions—including humanistic geography, the spatial turn in the critical humanities, and postcolonial theory—spatial studies understand space and place as the product of social relations and maintain a critical, de-essentializing politics: Spaces are always being made and remade with consequences for marginalized populations. Moreover, as sites of public identification, certain spaces and places (a national park landscape or urban park) are imbued with epideictic significance. In order to understand and critique the relationship between communication, space, and place, scholars employ a number of concepts, many of which they share with neighboring fields, including mobility, globalization, affect, imagined geographies, place-making, critical regionalism, heterotopia, omnitopia, and memory places. Scholars of space and place, moreover, remain committed to mapping both as method and object of analysis. If a society’s spatial logic (who and what resides where and with what consequences) provides insight into power and subjugation, then mapping offers a potentially useful critical methodological practice. At the same time, mapping remains a technology of colonialism, a way of seeing space that stabilizes its movements and continues to enable colonial domination. Thus, critical communication scholars of space and place also analyze and critique the rhetoric of mapping, analyzing both the ways in which maps are used to uphold operations of domination as well as those “countermapping” efforts that employ and subvert the history of cartography towards more emancipatory ends.

Positive youth development (PYD) assumes that, when given appropriate support, all youth have the capacity to develop the assets that enable them to succeed in life. Such assets include competence, confidence, connection, character, caring, and contribution to community, otherwise known as the six Cs of PYD. Environmental education (EE) programs that focus on youth action and empowerment offer the support needed for youth to develop these assets. Youth after-school, summer, and residential programs, often serving low-income and minoritized youth, increasingly are using environmental action and learning as a means to achieve PYD outcomes. Yet both PYD and EE have been criticized for not addressing the root causes of poverty and environmental degradation. In response, critical traditions in PYD and EE have emerged, in which youth reflect and act on structural barriers to human and environmental well-being in their communities. As youth and their mentors seek to address systemic inequities impacting themselves and their environment, they develop additional “Critical Positive Youth Development/Environmental Education” assets including critical reflection, efficacy, the ability to take collective action, and community-level empowerment.