Some of the output of the critical component of my PhD project is a chapter in this book of collected essays, edited by Sarah Earnshaw and published just this month by Palgrave Macmillan:

Cultural Practices of Place.

Things take a long time in academia and it’s great to see this out in the world three years on from its origins at the ‘Here, There, and Somewhere In-between: Practicing, Placing, Configuring’ conference at the Practicing Place Centre, University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, in November 2022.

The collection pulls together contributions from literature and the humanities, the social and political sciences, and cultural studies, to offer a truly multidisciplinary examination of the different ways place features, and is expressed, in our lives.

Cultural Geographer Tim Creswell, writes in the Afterword:

‘Collectively, these essays make it clear that thinking about place, and specifically its links to practice, is an intellectually ongoing business that brings a conceptual and political liveliness to the ways we contemplate and act in the world.’

Place for me is at the heart of things, and my contribution explores the methodology of relating place to self through a creative practice and others’ lived experience.

From the Introduction by Sarah Earnshaw:

‘Ian Grosz […] embarks upon an interdisciplinary reflection on his autoethnographic creative writing practice in Chapter 9 to explore the role of landscape in individual and collective senses of place, and thus, in the formation of identity […] Weaving perspectives from social scientific literature with [British] nature writing alongside his personal narrative with the stories of interview partners, Grosz’s contribution exemplifies the dynamic and relational practices of place through an inquiry on the bread and butter of knowledge production—narrative writing, the stories we tell and share.’

I feel very privileged to feature in this collection of essays and to have met the people in and behind its publication.