This chapter employs narrative analysis to examine how people who live in the shadow of carbon-intensive industries imagine a just transition to net-zero emissions. The analysis rests upon an interview study with local politicians, civil servants, union representatives, and citizen groups in the Swedish west-coast city of Lysekil, home to Scandinavia’s largest oil refinery. By mapping stories of climate (in)justice told in view of Sweden’s efforts to decarbonize, this chapter illustrates the cultural dimensions of carbon lock-ins and why some people resist transformative change. In the city of Lysekil, the refinery is not only an important source of local employment but also deeply entangled with community identity and sense of place. However, the chapter also points to the multiple interpretations of just transitions to climate neutrality and the power of narrative to open-up possibilities for decarbonized futures.

This chapter expands on what we generally conceptualize when we think of Irish narratives’ attention to the natural world. Folklore, Bairbre Ní Fhloinn writes, “speaks with the authority of the group and with the sanction of accumulated tradition”; it has at its disposal “a ready-made vocabulary.” In many ways, folklore suggests a radically different form of epistemological and aesthetic practice when compared to the Gaelic annals. It is worth noting here that indigenous epistemologies and vernaculars are not only important for historical reasons but also, as the field of Traditional Ecological/Environmental Knowledge (TEK) testifies, paramount for contemporary sustainability measures. Ní Fhloinn demonstrates Irish folklore’s place in a global tradition that is inspired by oral narratives and local histories and committed to environmental activism.

This chapter strikingly demonstrates the importance of medieval literary representations of the environment for more contemporary concerns. Amy Mulligan analyzes the medieval figure of the Sovereignty Goddess in literature written in the Irish language and shows its centrality in the environmental education of male rulers. Further relevance of the medieval for the contemporary ecological regime is revealed in treating medieval literature as one that provides a systematic understanding, often surprisingly scientific, such as Gerald of Wales’s accounts, “of Ireland’s birds and fishes” that are “invaluable in describing species, some of which are now extinct” and can act as guide to understand the nature of “ecological imperialism” in Ireland. Mulligan concludes that “All these medieval practitioners of Irish nature-writing develop a mode of thinking about the environment as a creative and generative space, one which is highly anthropocentric but which, through adoration, wonder, even recognition of something divine in the trees, soil, water, and animals” makes continued human habitability on this planet a historical possibility.

Storytelling among indigenous peoples is central to the intergenerational transmission of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK), allowing for human adaptation to new social-ecological contexts. However, little attention has been paid to the potential applications of storytelling in guiding climate change adaptation efforts. In this chapter, we present a number of case studies from all over the world in which indigenous stories and traditional oral narratives have been applied to inform culturally sensitive climate change adaptation strategies. We contend that greater consideration of indigenous ontologies, as transmitted through storytelling, can contribute towards making climate change communication and adaptation more acceptable to local communities, facilitating intercultural discussions and bridging worldviews. Our chapter shows that attention to and promotion of indigenous storytelling can lead to enhanced understanding of diverse values and perceptions around climate change, hence allowing climate change adaptation strategies to become tailored to the local contexts where they are implemented.

In this chapter we examine multiple, competing senses of place in a rapidly changing city in the USA through a lens of critical theory. In particular, we analyse discourses around urban change in the city of Seattle, one of the fastest growing and most dramatically changing cities in the USA, in order to uncover how hegemonic discourses are constructed and deployed to establish a normative order, and how those dominant narratives are challenged by divergent perspectives. Although the specifics of the urban change and discourse we highlight are fairly unique to Seattle, the broader dynamics around multiple competing senses of place vying for expression pertain to any city undergoing transformation. In analysing competing narratives and demonstrating the power of dominant discourses to create a falsely homogenised sense of place, this chapter offers a cautionary tale for vigilance against the erasure of multiple senses of place.

Given global social and environmental change, understanding how resulting place change affects people–place bonds is of pressing importance. However, given traditional views of these bonds as static, understanding the fluidity of people’s relationship with place remains nascent. We examine how people’s sense of place relating to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef changed over a four-year period during which the reef suffered climate-change-induced mass coral bleaching. Operationalising sense of place with seven indicators representing place attachment, identity and meanings, we found increases in attachment, identity and two meanings (pride, biodiversity) and decreases in three meanings (lifestyle, aesthetics, scientific value). We suggest that place change heightened the emotional and intangible elements of sense of place, while having a negative effect on the more instrumental meanings. Our results challenge a notion of people–place bonds premised on fixity, stability, and low dimensionality, instead suggesting the need to consider them as dynamic and multidimensional.

The chapter focuses on people’s experiences of natural places and changes in their sense of place through the use of social media. It explores how social media are linked to senses of place and experiences of nature from a social–ecological–technological systems perspective. This is illustrated through four empirical cases representing specific people–place–tech systems, i.e. systems where different social, ecological and tech contexts interact. From a system perspective, those couplings are integrated parts of people’s experiences of nature that bridge virtual and physical worlds, thereby facilitating and communicating cognitive, affective and behavioural social-ecological interactions. These interactions foster novel individual and co-constructed meanings of place and thus plural senses of place; they can also mobilise people around shared meanings of place that are used to question dominant views. Thus, it is argued that social media can mediate and proliferate plural meanings of place, leading to new conceptualisations of senses of place.

We address the intersection of place-based identity and environmental outcomes. We focus on an indigenous tribal community, the Bodos residing both within and in proximity to one of the key spaces for biodiversity conservation in north-eastern India – the Manas Tiger Reserve. We illustrate that the Bodo sense of place, the meanings they ascribe to the landscape, is indelibly linked to identity. We conduct a historical exploration of the politics underlying the development of a modern Bodo identity and the implications of its deployment for the governance of Manas. The strategic manipulation of place meaning for political and territorial gain by the Bodos lies in contrast with much of the sense of place literature that has predominantly focused on the essential role of place for human well-being. Our account moves beyond the static depiction of place meaning to reveal the social, historical and political processes that shape and contest place-making.

Social-ecological transitions are fundamentally about places – especially how place meanings and attachments act as lenses for interpreting change. Our chapter focuses on energy transitions in rural agricultural landscapes in New York. Agricultural place meanings underpin attachment for many residents, but are challenged by proposals for large-scale renewable energy development. This chapter explores how people interpret these proposed facilities using the perspective of social representations of place. multiple interpretations of proposed facilities are promoted by different groups based on their position towards the development: developers and energy advocates strategically portray solar installations as ‘farms’, replete with images they believe support agricultural meanings; those who resist these developments emphasise the large-scale industrialisation of the landscape and the loss of services such as open space and amenity value. These narratives of place contribute to understanding perspectives on energy transitions and broader rural change.

Since the mid-1980s, China has experienced an unprecedented wave of internal migration from rural to urban areas. However, due to the lack of formal residential registration status (Hukou in Chinese), these rural–urban migrants have faced difficulties in re-establishing a sense of belonging to the host city. By using a nationwide survey (2013, n = 12,807) and multilevel logistic regressions, this study has found that, beyond social capital, institutional and financial support are most likely to help migrants adapt to their new lives. The Hukou reforms indeed are helping to construct their belonging to the host city. This study and its emphasis on place-related belonging enriches the meaning of sense of place, especially as it encourages a pluralistic concept. It attempts to understand place-related belonging as an embedded relationship between the individual and the local structure, a relationship that arises from the institutional, social and economic context.

Climate change adaptation demands a deeper appreciation of plural senses of place and how these pluralities can create synergies as well as frictions in adaptation practice. In this chapter we aim to explore one highly overlooked dimension of this global challenge – the plural temporalities embedded within senses of place. Here we explore the dimensions of time in place-focused adaptation efforts by drawing on a series of case studies that utilise scenario-based futures methods. These methods have rapidly become critical tools in tackling the exigencies of the climate crisis but too often they presume a singular temporal mode and marginalise other temporalities and senses of place. This chapter concludes by offering new ways to reconceptualise plural senses of place and time in both theory and practice.

Living under the Israeli occupation continues to affect all aspects of Palestinians’ everyday lives. This chapter considers the testimonies of Palestinians who were displaced after their homes were damaged during the urbicidal 2002 Israeli Ejtiyah on the old town of Nablus. This analysis is to assess the fundamental role of a sense of place, and the significance of its multiscalar nature, in gaining stability through rebuilding of damaged homes. The Palestinians experience home as a place where sense of place is lived and interpreted in multiscalar forms of spatial justice that relate to everyday life, community and socially constructed meaning, a state of mind, and as they relate to nostalgic memories and fear of displacement. Urban violence not only ruptures the spatial incubator of the Palestinians’ sense of place but also demonstrates the ways in which the colonial power dominance is controlling their homeland in general, and the very place where they intimately nurture it at home. In this context, Palestinians’ relationship with home and sense of place is considered a form of moqawameh (resistance) and sumoud (steadfastness) against the Israeli colonial strategies.

In this chapter, we propose a material–semiotic epistemological approach to understand the changing senses of place resulting from socio-environmental disasters. This perspective involves investigating the simultaneously symbolic, corporeal and geographical relations that characterise the production of new senses of place in post-disaster contexts. We propose the notion of assemblage as a conceptual tool to understand how senses of place are generated within a complex and dynamic network of influences and reciprocal variations between subjective, social and spatial aspects, articulating at the same time the relationship between individual experiences of place and social and institutional processes. To present, discuss and illustrate this material–semiotic approach, we draw on a part of the results of a study conducted in Chile, addressing multiple case studies of post-disaster situations.

In this chapter, the private and public roles of memorial architecture are addressed in respect to three relevant topics: collective remembrance and competing memories, the process of bereavement, and the possibilities of architecture as an element of agency in remembering and dealing with a difficult past. Since rituals are articulated through space, the investigation then turns towards a distinction of underlining spatial concepts that are essential in modern memorial architecture. The commemorative potential of cemeteries and landscapes is explored in a brief analysis of the symbolic language and transitional qualities of both funerary and memorial architecture.