According to Setha M. Low and Irwin Altman (1992), place attachment can be understood as “the bonding of people to places” (2). Much of the existing scholarship on this phenomenon has focused on the ways in which attachment emerges through sustained interaction with environments and through everyday experiences of inhabiting a place. Factors such as familiarity, routine practices, landscapes, built environments, infrastructures, social relationships, and community networks have been identified as central elements in the formation of meaningful bonds between people and places. As Bernardo Hernández (2021) explains, “Place attachment refers to the link people establish with the environments in which they carry out their daily activities and develop their personal stories, where the person feels safe and secure and, therefore, where they want to stay” (101).

While these approaches have significantly contributed to our understanding of human-place relationships, this panel seeks to expand current discussions of place attachment by exploring how literary and cultural productions from the Hispanic world complicate traditional understandings of attachment as dependent on physical presence and continuous interaction with a place. Experiences such as exile, migration, displacement, political violence, colonialism, and historical rupture reveal forms of attachment that emerge not only through inhabiting a place but also through its absence, remembrance, imagination, and narration.

 We are particularly interested in how texts from Spain and Latin America represent the processes through which attachments to places are created, developed, and transformed through lived experience, everyday practices, social relationships, landscapes, and shared histories, as well as how these attachments evolve when places are lost, abandoned, transformed, or become physically inaccessible.

We welcome proposals that address questions such as:

• How is attachment to place formed and maintained?
• Why do certain individuals or communities develop stronger attachments to particular places?
• How do memory and imagination sustain attachments to places that are no longer accessible?
• Can absence intensify rather than diminish attachment?
• How do literary and cultural representations expand theoretical understandings of place attachment?
• What new forms of belonging emerge when place is experienced through memory, narrative, and affect rather than through physical presence?
• How do histories of exile, migration, diaspora, and colonialism reshape attachments to place in Hispanic contexts?

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].