Introduction: Situatedness and Place

2018

Over the last two or three decades, the spatio-temporal contingency of human life has become an important topic of research in a broad range of different disciplines including the social sciences, the cultural sciences, the cognitive sciences, and philosophy. Significantly, however, this research topic is referred to in quite different ways: While some researchers refer to it in terms of the “situatedness” of human experience and action, others refer to it in terms of “place”, emphasizing the “power of place” and advocating a “topological” or “topographical turn” in the context of a larger “spatial turn”. In this chapter, we will first give a short introduction to place and situatedness as …