Dr. Tim Cresswell: Outline of a Theory of Place

Tim Cresswell is a human geographer and Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston. He is the author of five books on the role of place and mobility in cultural life, co-editor of four collections and managing editor of the journal, "cultural geographies". Tim Cresswell is also a poet and his first collection, "Soil" was published by Penned in the Margins in 2013.

In this talk, he will present the elements of an approach to place. Place has been theorized through a number of theoretical lenses in geography and beyond. These include descriptive accounts, phenomenological approaches, Marxist analyses and poststructuralist diagnoses.  Cresswell will present a hybrid account of place that accounts for the elements that make up place (materiality, meaning and practice) and the ways that each of them contributes to place’s temporal dimension – how each plays a role in the endurance of otherwise of places. In doing so, he will combine approaches that focus on the ‘here’ness of place as bounded and rooted entity, and approaches that emphasize how places exist in a horizontal relation of networks to other places outside of it. The aim is to provide a meso-theoretical template for thinking about individual places.