Introduction to understandings of place: a multidisciplinary symposium

Place is central to Environmental Studies and Sciences. As a colloquial concept, it informs and structures the ways we teach, undertake research, and communicate about environmental problems. Place is often used to bring meaning to observations of change in impersonal analytical categories, where it proves to be essential and at times imprecise. Our goal with this symposium, and the conference panels and lecture series that generated it, has been to explore and clarify how place can be a useful descriptive and analytical concept for Environmental Studies and Sciences. Place, and our strategy for examining it, align with the experiences of those us working in Environmental Studies and Sciences who share common experience that broad advances in environmental knowledge usually require disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches together with humility about what we know and don’t know as individuals and as disciplines