What informs our experience of place? What happens when we—as scholars, readers, artists, inhabitants, audience members—encounter a mountain range, an electric fence, a slum or a museum, whether physically or on a screen or page?

At a time of growing critical interest in the way humans and their surroundings are intertwined, ‘Taking Place’ explores the various facets of our relationship with our environment. Bringing together scholars and creative practitioners from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, we aim to explore the synergy between physical and human geographies, and the creative, cultural and social practices that form them and are formed by them.

Over a series of talks, panels, reading groups and field trips, the group adopts a wide- ranging approach that combines theoretical approaches with sensitive attention to the material conditions of different environments. Bringing together such fields as Literature, Geography, Social Anthropology, Land Economy, History and Architecture, we explore subjects from the building of empires to the way we occupy our bodies, from psychogeography to sound installation. We will cover themes including:

* What happens when places become sites of contention – when there are different takes on a place, and when places are taken.
* Issues of historical narrative, and how our understanding of place can depend upon public acts of retrospection.

* How experience of a place might be inflected by gender, culture, or class.
* The roles that various media play in forming and recording our experience of place.