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 and make place. The significance of place and belonging to our lives is thus often overlooked, yet it is key to understanding who we are, both individually and collectively. Through embodied and material practice research, underpinned with theories of new materialism, this monograph will enable the reader to learn and understand how our ways of knowing and learning place and belonging are entangled with embodied and material pedagogies, and how our bodily engagements in and with the material world are intra-actions of the who with the where. The aim of this project is to: explore these entanglements through vitalist accounts of matter as agentive, demonstrate the complex pedagogy in the spaces between bodies, places and everyday social relations of power and to argue that placemaking is the very experiential fact of our existence but, it is also a necessary one.