Geoscience Reference
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approaches developed in Geography during the 1970s, subjective, imaginative
notions of life in local place were emphasised. These confi gurations have been
dogged by somewhat one-dimensional notions of place as fi xed, bounded space, and
problematic ideas of who and what belongs to the 'authentic' chemistry of any given
place. With topographic sensibilities very much to the fore, nature and culture were
seen as co-present yet separate categories, mixed in dense, kaleidoscopic local
arrangements.
Such topographical notions of place and landscape are being challenged and
reworked by more topologically infused ideas that fi gure them as temporary out-
comes of processes, networks and hybridity. Thrift (1999), Harrison et al. (2004)
and Massey (2005) jettison any notion of place as bounded, static, or exclusively
social spaces. They instead understand places as temporal processes where all
manners of trajectories - people, non-humans, economies, technologies, ideas and
more - come together to assemble enduring (but also changing/open to change)
distinctive patterns which are still fully networked into the wider world. As Amin
and Thrift (2002, p. 30) summarise,
Places . . . are best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encoun-
ter, not so much as 'presents', fi xed in space and time, but as variable events; twists
and fl uxes of interrelation.
These comings together operate at differing velocities, rhythms, and trajectories,
'where spatial narratives meet up or form confi gurations, conjunctions of trajecto-
ries which have their own temporalities' (Massey, 2005, p. 139). It is not just a case
of social fl ows whirling through, and tangling with, more fi xed grounds of nature.
Both are on the move. If a long enough view is taken, even land itself can be seen
swirling across the surface of the globe through the movements of plate tectonics.
Other processes operate in fl ows and rhythms more amenable to immediate human
apprehension, such as weather patterns or planetary, tidal, and seasonal cycles and
the corresponding rhythms of animal and plant life.
All manner of entities thus bring their agency to the formation of place, which
is in turn rendered 'local' by the dwelt processes of living bodies. Cities, oceans,
fi elds and parks, even seemingly inanimate objects, like a desk, can all be seen in
this way. Along with ideas of dwelling and ANT that Thrift (1999) incorporates
into his 'ecologies of place' are the further entanglements of human memories,
longing and affect, and even hauntings, thus widening again the repertoire of life
to be considered in its own unfolding. Seen in this way place can be a ground on
which to hold all these rich entanglements together. In turn this more dynamic
notion of place might offer a way to work through the politics and ethics an
acknowledgement of relational demands. Massey (2005) advocates an open, non-
foundational, non-purifying/ed notion of place, which is sensitive to 'other' notions
of 'other' places.
Methodologies, Ethics and Politics Suitable for an
'After Natural World'
The approaches set out above attempt in differing ways to draft new constitutions
for knowledges of life on earth. They are very challenging because they question
the very foundations of Western knowledge upon which much of our academic and
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