Towards New Ways of Knowing Place
Registration is by permission only.
This week in Meaning Lab, we gather to explore Place — the landscapes, topographies, and environments that shape not only where we are, but who we become.
The word "genius" in the modern sense originates in the Latin phrase genius loci — "the spirit of a place." Place and mind interpenetrate until the nature of both is altered. Our formative physical landscapes become our landscapes of thought and feeling, furnishing us with metaphors to live by and shaping the very infrastructure of our selfhood.
While we often think of place as mere geography or backdrop, the reality is far more intimate. Place emerges from the interplay of memory and presence, the sensory impressions and emotional resonances that guide how we perceive, conceptualize, and orient in the world. In the stories we carry and the routes we navigate, place becomes a lived relationship between organism and environment, interiority and exteriority.
Across diverse fields of inquiry, certain themes about place continually surface:
In neuroscience and psychology, our hippocampus builds representations of places uniquely calibrated to our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. Place is how we consolidate identity across time — the treasure maps of exquisite memories that make us who we are.
In ecology and wayfinding, place is learned through navigation and embodied attention. It is how you fall in love with a mountain or a forest, how indigenous cultures encode generations of knowledge, how organisms develop attachment and belonging.
In culture and collective memory, places carry what we might call topophilia — a deep affective bond. The places we grow up in have outsized influence on us, establishing our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we identify with others.
In philosophy and phenomenology, place is the ground of being itself — not abstract space, but lived space thick with meaning, history, and relational presence.
Amidst our increasingly deterritorialized digital lives and algorithmic navigation, we confront new questions: What happens when we delegate wayfinding to GPS? How do we maintain our capacity for spatial intimacy and environmental attunement? What is lost — and what might be regained — when we relearn to attend to the specifics of where we are?
In Meaning Lab, we'll bring these strands together as a socio-phenomenological inquiry:
How do the places we inhabit — and the ones we carry within us — shape what we can perceive, care about, and imagine? What does it mean to truly dwell somewhere, rather than merely pass through?
This session is an invitation to reconsider our relationship to place: to examine how environments form us, how we in turn shape them, and how cultivating deeper place-literacy might restore something essential about being human in a more-than-human world.