From Yardstick to Gyroscope -
Interdisciplinary Methods for the Long-Term Study of Social-Ecological Systems
Sense of Place: Domesticated nature, telephone surveys, and ethnography
Instructors - J. Morgan Grove, Laura Ogden
Date - January 28, 2007
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As social scientists we recognize that social values and cultural histories are "emplaced" within landscapes-in other words, various kinds of geographies reverberate with the stories we tell about ourselves. These places range from landscapes considered wilderness, busy urban corridors, agricultural fields, to the suburbs' emerald lawns. Understanding the significance of place remains a key concern to resource managers and environmental/urban planners. Places, like culture in general, are locales of both consensus and discord, ripe with multiple meanings and histories of difference. In this session we will discuss and evaluate a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying place-from telephone surveys to ethnography. Central to our discussion will be a concern about the tradeoff's between scale (sample size and sample heterogeneity) and depth ("richness of data") inherit to various approaches for studying place.

READINGS
Basso, K. H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. Pages 53-90 in K. H. Basso and S. Feld, editors. In Senses of Place. School of American Research, Santa Fe. Abstract | Publication

Johnson, S. 2006. "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." New York: Riverhead Books. Abstract | Publication

Low, S. M. 2003. The Edge and the Center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear. Pages 387-407 in S. M. Low and D. Lawrence-Zunigais, editors. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Blackwell Publishers, Malden. Abstract | Publication