Thinking Place

This seminar focuses on questions of place in relation to process, method, and field-form for environmental humanities. What does it mean to think in place, or to write from place, at a moment when the pressures of the planetary and the collapse of worlds and world orders make themselves felt in uneven ways? 

Attention to place and/or place-based work has become increasingly prominent in the environmental humanities, indebted to work in feminist science studies (Haraway 1988, Tsing 2005) and anti-colonial scholarship and praxis that calls on research to be accountable to Land, community, and history (Watts 2013; Liboiron 2021; Kanngeiser & Todd 2020). Yet, it is often taken up without the methodological inheritances and histories found in anthropological or scientific field research. This seminar asks: what collective, creative, and undisciplined practices are orienting our encounters and engagements with place?

This seminar will build upon conversations, collaborations, and compositions begun during Fogo Collaborative Inquiry (FoCI), a two-week writing residency on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in May 2025. Participants at FoCI considered the question how to live? and the possibility of forging new and durable imaginaries as we confronted the inadequacy of extant cultural narratives. We grappled with what it meant to ask these questions from Fogo Island, with how best to engage with place in all of its complexity, and what forms of writing or practice could best convey the experience:  the almanac? the lexicon? the field note? the guest book?

We seek to extend and expand this conversation, welcoming both previous FoCI participants and new members to think place together in Montreal.

We welcome contributions that consider question such as: 

• Place as field of study: how has the “normative impulse to particularize theory in relation to animate ecologies” (Diamanti 2024) shaped environmental humanities in recent years? 
• Place as occasion: what practices–research-based, collaborative, material, communal or creative–emerge from situated inquiry? What knowledge does place make possible and what might place obscure? 
• Place as politics: if “justice is a place” (Gilmore, 2023), what is the role or work of place in meeting the political demands of our historical conjuncture? 
• Place as constructed: how do we understand and relate to place not as given, but as it is shaped through displacement, mediation, and uneven forms of access? How might place-based work be a form of or resistance to “immediacy culture” (Kornbluth, 2023)? 
• Place as precarious: how does engagement with place respond to the accelerating instability of places in the context of solastalgia and other forms of [climate driven] change? 
• Place as narrative: how do places give rise to narratives and how might narratives attempt to fix place? How should we understand the formation and circulation of narrative in relation to place?