Placemaking: A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy

Where are you from? This question often refers to someone’s birthplace, childhood home or a place that holds significance. The location that is offered in response to this question is more than a means of orientation; it is a lived place that has complex meanings that identify, are learned and made. Yet, the significance of place to our lives is often overlooked. It is key to understanding who we are and how we are, both individually and collectively.

Through embodied and material practice research, underpinned with theories of new materialism, Tara Page enables us to learn and understand how our ways of knowing, making and learning place are entangled with embodied and material pedagogies. She shows how our bodily engagements in and with the material world are intra-actions of the who, with the where.

The creative and multi-dimensional approach of this book, with links to photographs-creative practices to be read with the text, brings together the global with the local, practice with theory and demonstrates the complex pedagogy between bodies, places and everyday social relations of power. Page reveals that placemaking is the very experiential fact of our existence but is also a necessary one.