British Journal of Educational StudiesVol. 59, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 63–74

PLACE-RELATED IDENTITIES THROUGH TEXTS: FROMINTERDISCIPLINARY THEORY TO RESEARCH AGENDA

by EMMA CHARLTON, DOMINIC WYSE, GABRIELLE CLIFF HODGES, MARIA

NIKOLAJEVA, PAM POINTON and LIZ TAYLOR,, University of Cambridge

ABSTRACT: The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attract-ing growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paperdraws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulatea new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implicationsfor a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analy-sis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes.The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and rep-resent their place-related identities through reading and writing as inspiredby and manifested in texts.

Keywords: place, identity, text, literacy

1. INTRODUCTION

The implications of the spatial turn are attracting growing interest. As an intel-lectual movement the spatial turn increasingly recognises and promotes theimportance of space as a construct for analysis. Soja (2004, p. ix) resists the ideathat the spatial turn is primarily located in a single discipline in his observationthat it is transdisciplinary. Scholarship in relation to education has been affectedby the spatial turn, for example in literacy and its development (cf. Kostogrizand Tsolidis, 2008; Leander and Sheehy, 2004), identity (cf. Anderson and Jones,2009; Hagood, 2004; Moje, 2004; Newman et al., 2006), attitudes to the envi-ronment (cf. Grunewald, 2003; Gurevitz, 2000), attitudes to others (cf. Anderson,2004), social justice (cf. Comber et al., 2006) and educational policy/structures(cf. Gulson and Symes, 2007; Paechter, 2004a). New understandings of global-isation in relation to place and identity are reflected in this work. For example,framing globalisation as a compression of time and space can be seen to result ina trivialisation of place (Kostogriz, 2006); of creating a world in which lives occurin places that ‘could be anywhere’ (Cresswell, 2004, p. 43). But another feature ofglobalisation is increased mobility between places via migration, by those seekingrefuge as well as employment, resulting in diverse populations, particularly in theUK (Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, 2009; Salt and Rees,2006) and the associated benefits and tensions that are a feature of such migration.The tensions are often expressed in binaries of familiar/foreign, local/global andsame/other, resulting from a way of viewing the world that is territorial and politi-cal and a notion of place that connects a group of people with a site. This diversity

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within place is a socio-spatial formation that binds the local and the global, theparticular and the abstract (Kostogriz and Tsolidis, 2008).

While some point to the under-use of spatial theories in education (Kostogriz,2006; Paechter, 2004b; Usher, 2002), the spatial turn has resulted in new possi-bilities, for example, research into the ways people interpret and create the worldthrough reading and writing. However, there are concerns as to whether the appli-cation of this spatial turn is more than skin deep (Gulson and Symes, 2007; Smith,2004). In this paper we explore theory and research in relation to place and iden-tity, and the links with texts and text processes. In so doing our aim is to identifya promising line of educational research. But our aim can best be addressed if theaccount is built on an explicit methodological conception. Our a priori view is thatin order to develop new theoretical understandings in this area an interdisciplinaryperspective that builds on the substantive multiplicities represented in differentdisciplines is necessary. Such an approach is intended to ensure that uptake of thisspatial turn is not superficial. Like Sheehy and Leander (2004), we are interestedin more than the thin perspectives offered by words or the world.

In a broad sense, interdisciplinarity has been used to refer to a progressionof practices, from borrowing and solving problems, to increased consistencyof subjects and methods, to the actual emergence of an interdiscipline (Klein,1990). Central to interdisciplinarity is integration (Moran, 2002): the blending ormerging of concepts, methodology and/or theoretical perspectives from multipledisciplines (Repko, 2008; Rogers et al., 2005), or different fields of knowledge(Derry and Schunn, 2005), normally enacted by a group of people that is het-erogeneous yet interconnected (Klein, 2005). True interdisciplinarity is difficult,not least because multidisciplinarity, where multiple perspectives on a problemor object are drawn upon using tools, theories and methods from different dis-ciplines (Rogers et al., 2005), is an easier though still valuable outcome. Theprocess of integration that is key in interdisciplinarity entails a step in which thedisciplinary perspectives are taken into a new configuration where something alto-gether new results from integration (Easterlin and Reibling, 1993; Levin, 1993;Repko, 2008; Rogers et al., 2005). An interdisciplinary approach necessitates acommon vocabulary to allow communication between different disciplinary per-spectives (Epstein, 2005) yet it does not require entirely common ground. Theemphasis is to a certain extent on difference, because misunderstandings and con-flicts can be productive (Klein, 2005; Levin, 1993; Moran, 2002; Repko, 2008;Sell, 1994). The necessary creativity in interdisciplinary processes ‘comes notfrom integrating another discipline, but from resisting it, from the transformativeeffects of struggling with alien ways of thinking’ (Maza, 2006, p. 6). Thus an inter-disciplinary approach should take a group into a configuration where their rolesare not located within their original discipline. This is the difference between themosaic and the melting pot!

The interdisciplinary focus in this paper comes initially from our group’sinterest in cultural geography, narratology, texts and the processes of readingand writing texts in the educational context of schooling. The heterogeneity of

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the group is represented by our expertise in education at a range of stages, inchildren’s literature, in literacy, and in geography. The new configuration that weseek to create is an interdisciplinary theory of place-related identity in order toframe a new research agenda. The main language of our common vocabulary isin the use of the words place, identity, text and literacy; however the ‘uncommonground’ that is part of the meanings of this vocabulary will be revealed during ourexploration in the paper as we seek to develop theory.

Place and identity are a combination of lived existence and social construct;therefore it has been argued that the social is geographically constructed (Cresswell,2004): a simultaneity of time and space/place constitutes identity. Featherstone(1995, p. 45) suggests that identity is a ‘bundle of conflicting quasi-selves’ in whichmultiple identities of self connect with the multiple identities of place. Thus placecan be seen as an event, as a ‘meeting place’ (Massey, 1994, p. 154), as ‘contactzones’ (Anderson, 2004, p. 45; Warren, 1997, p. 4), and as ‘the simultaneityof stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005, p. 9). Seeing place in this way emphasises theinseparability of time and place. Simultaneity of time-place or place-time is alsodiscussed by Massey (2005, pp. 47, 61) as a bundle of trajectories: ‘I am arguingfor an abandonment of that dichotomisation between space and time which positsspace both as the opposition of time and, equally problematically, as immobility,power, coherence, representation . . . If time unfolds as change, then space unfoldsas interaction’. Place and identity, like place and time, are co-constitutive becauseself and place are essential to the being of the ‘other’ (Anderson and Jones,2009; Casey, 2001; Sheehy and Leander, 2004). Recognition of multiplicity andheterogeneity depends on recognition of spatiality. One effect of this recognition, ofemphasising the relational and mutually constitutive context of the local and global,is that the spatial ideology that shapes understanding of different environments canbecome apparent (Massey, 1994, 1995, 1998). Making the relationships betweenlocal and global apparent opens up possibilities for negotiating different solutionsfor different issues in different places.

While place and identity are mutually constitutive, notions that suggest thatidentity is intrinsically tied to place need critical attention. Communities existwithout being in the same place, and multiple communities exist in each place.Thus the specificity of place comes from being constructed out of a particular con-stellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus,positively integrating the global and the local. In doing so the common associa-tion between penetrability and vulnerability that makes ‘invasions’ by newcomersso threatening is problematised. Rather than a sense of place defined by a closeconnection between place and a singular form of identity, and a need for a clearsense of boundaries around a place separating it from the world outside, place isa process, it is defined by the outside, it is a site of multiple identities and his-tories, and it is unique as defined by its interactions. Reflection on all places canoffer insight into the individual power-geometries through which particular placesare constructed. To understand a place the connections between places need tobe traced. A progressive, inclusive and outward looking notion of place is also

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a response to how a sense of a local place and its peculiarity can be maintainedwithin a context of globalisation (Massey, 2005).

2. PLACE AND IDENTITY AS NARRATIVE

We have shown that place and time are part of a complex relationship with identity.Representations of identity come in many forms but one of the most important ofthese is through narrative. Narratives act as a way of locating identity, the livingof lives through narrative is the personal element of this. ‘Stories’, both oral andvisual, are the means by which we make sense of our lives and develop a senseof knowing one’s place (Gulson and Symes, 2007; Skatterbol, 2005). Ultimatelythis sense-making draws on a ‘limited repertoire of available social, public, andcultural narratives’ (Somers, 1994, p. 614). Narrative is part of the constructionof social identities: an ontological condition of social life because social life is‘storied’ (Somers, 1994).

The narrative world does not entail a mimetic relationship between fiction andactuality but there is a bidirectional exchange: ‘in one direction, in constructingfictional worlds, the poetic imagination works with “material” drawn from actual-ity; in the opposite direction, fictional constructs deeply influence our imaging andunderstanding of reality’ (Dolezel, 1998, p. x). The reality/fiction duality relatesto a basic ontological position: actual existence is independent of semiotic rep-resentation whereas fictional existence involves semiotic construction (Dolezel,1998). Bakhtin articulated an extensive distinction between the actual world andthe world represented in the work of literature, including reflections on the pas-sive listener/reader of one’s own time compared to the listeners/readers of variedperiods who recreate and renew the text. Thus Bakhtin (1981) argued that thereare two events in the text: the event that is narrated in the work and the event ofnarration itself. These two events take place in different times and places and yetthey remain united in what Bakhtin (1981, p. 255) refers to as the ‘totality of all itsevents’. Bakhtin’s chronotope points to the inseparability of time and place, refer-ring to the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that areartistically expressed in literature. . . . Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh,becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive tothe movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). As a formallyconstitutive category of literature the chronotope defines genre and generic dis-tinctions, and posits that all literary images are chronotopic. These chronotopesare the organising centres for narrative: the chronotope is the primary point fromwhich scenes in a novel unfold. Out of the actual chronotopes of the world thecreated chronotopes of the world represented in the text emerge. These ‘real’ and‘represented’ worlds mutually interact. The space in which this interaction occursis itself a chronotope – a creative chronotope. Chronotopes are therefore organis-ing centres for significant events within a setting, whatever that setting might be;however, they are the ground for activity rather than visible entities (Brown andRenshaw, 2006; Morson and Emerson, 1990). Thus the chronotope can be seen as

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‘an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the culture system from which they spring’(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 425).

The chronotope also reveals the interdependence of ‘self’ and ‘other’ throughthe idea of a meeting place. This meeting place is another creative space; it isa point of departure in meaning-making and identity-making. The creative spaceand creative potential depends on openness to difference and various ‘experiencedhorizons’ that participants in interaction have (Bakhtin, 1990). The meeting placeis the chronotope of dialogical encounter that explains the interdependence of selfand the other in spatial-temporal terms (Kostogriz and Tsolidis, 2008). Bakhtinstressed the importance of being located outside the object of creative understand-ing in time, in space, and in culture. He located such chronotopic encounters in thespace of outsidedness: ‘In the realm of culture, outsidedness is the most powerfulfactor in understanding. It is only through the eyes of another culture that foreignculture reveals itself fully and profoundly’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7). This outsided-ness is the only location where a genuine dialogue between differences can takeplace and where new transcultural meanings can be created.

As we have shown, the spatial turn is represented as trajectories, as narratives,and can be applied to our understanding of texts and therefore literacy. The liter-ary process comprises the construction of the text, whether read or written. Thisbroad definition links well with the questioning of boundaries that is a featureof spatial theory. When we look at semantic features, the contesting of bounded,unified and homogeneous conceptions of space as represented by texts highlights,for example, that texts are informed by the crossing of nation/state boundaries(Kostogriz and Tsolidis, 2008). In addition, just as identity and place are mutu-ally constitutive, spatialities and literacies are similarly part of a process of mutualconstruction (Soja 2004). Sheehy and Leander (2004, p. 3) argue, ‘When we usewords, we are always situating ourselves; when we read contexts, we are alwaysreading words and discursive relations extending into other space-times’. Hence,the spatial turn can be seen as part of the ‘social turn’ in literacy studies (Gee,2000; Kostogriz and Tsolidis, 2008; Street 1984, 1993), further underlining themultiple connections between place, text and identity.

Texts present a significant manifestation of the way the world is interpretedand explained to children. Literary geography reveals the way that narrativelogic and representation strategies in children’s literature have their own spatialpolitics (Bavidge, 2006, p. 328). Van der Burgt (2008) recommends challeng-ing stigmatising narratives of rural/urban difference, what Nelson (2001) callsnarrative repair, through the telling of counter-stories which expose power rela-tions between authors, texts and readers. For example, within British culture thedepiction of the rural idyll is a common feature (Bavidge, 2006; Nikolajeva,2000; Vanderbeck and Morse Dunkley, 2003 – although realist writers like KevinBrooks, Meg Rosoff and Michael Morpurgo present rural life in very differentways; see also Jill Paton Walsh’s Gaffer Samson’s Luck and the discussion of thistext in Cliff Hodges et al., 2010). This depiction presents a safe, secure and happyplace that contrasts with the complexities of real lived experiences of young people

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in these places (Giddings and Yarwood, 2005). The social features of children’slives in rural and urban areas are not so clearly differentiated, because places areincreasingly shaped by spaces and ideas far beyond their locality (Garland andChakraborti, 2006; Massey, 1994; Nairn et al., 2003), hence the need for criticalattention to such depictions.

3. PLACE-RELATED IDENTITY AND LITERACY

Although we have addressed the semantic and structural components of literature,the processes of reading (and writing) also reveal aspects of place and identity.The reader plays an active role in decoding a text, contributing to establishingmeaning with his or her experience and understanding. The interaction (Iser, 1978)or transaction (Rosenblatt, 1994) is a dialogue between the text and the reader.While there are other terms that have been used to refer to the product of thisinteraction (Rosenblatt (1994) refers to it as a ‘poem’, Barthes (1974) refers to itas a ‘text’, and Iser (1978) refers to it as the ‘work’), we will refer to the productof this interaction as a reading. This reading is an event in time rather than anobject and is centrally related to the identity of the reader and the context of thereading. The emphasis on transaction is also addressed by Bruner (1986) whoargues that the reader and the text condition each other in a transaction that istime and environment specific. Possible worlds are created by the mind yet areconstructed out of worlds created by others. An understanding of place-relatedidentity in texts requires attention to the transaction between the reader and thetext because the reader’s identity is brought to the fore in the act of reading.

The situatedness of linguistic practices is increasingly emphasised in liter-acy, including the spatial dimensions of practices (Leander and Sheehy, 2004).A situated literacy has a spatial perspective on literacy events (Barton et al.,2000); emphasis is given to the relational aspects of place rather than the lim-its of the local (Brandt and Clinton, 2002; Kostogriz and Tsolidis, 2008; Street,2003). The concept of situated literacy also relates to the context for reading andwriting. One important situational context is teaching and learning in school. Inthis context reading can be a narrow process, where whole texts are not the normbecause of the decontextualisation that is a feature of narrow skills-based learn-ing, or because teaching is based on text extracts and therefore isolated from theholism of place and space. The opportunities to read authentic texts may be limitedby provision of school texts such as textbooks and basal readers/reading schemes.Children’s choice of the texts that they read, for example preferences for fictionalversus non-fictional narratives and/or poetry, preferences for particular authors,genres, topics, styles etc., can provide another important link with their identity,but this choice is often denied by education systems.

Reading and writing are, of course, united as literacy. But a further link isshown in Bruner’s (1986) understanding of the reader-text transaction that he sawas writing because of the composition of a virtual text in response to the actual.Choice is once again a key element, in writing just as it is in reading. If writers

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are able to exercise choice then their identity is reflected in the topics on whichthey choose to write, the ways they express those topics, the forms they adopt, theconversations they have with collaborators, and their attitude to the task of writing.Conversely if writers are not able to make choices their identity may be maskedby the school-oriented tasks that they are required to carry out.

Key empirical studies in the field of place, identity and text can be seenin the work of Kostogriz and Tsolidis (2008) and Leander and Rowe (2006),as well as in the collection of edited chapters by Leander and Sheehy (2004).Like Massey, Kostogriz and Tsolidis (2008) emphasise the political in their dis-cussion of place, similarly responding to intensified flows of texts and peopleacross nation-state boundaries. However, they further connect the spatial poli-tics of place, e.g. the nation-state, with the politics of literacy. Their researchrelates to diaspora in Australia and the tensions of inclusion/exclusion of ‘other’within a place. Data were provided by students who, after completing a unit ofwork on identity, constructed multimodal texts about their sense of belonging.Students’ trajectories across different places and spaces were traced through thetexts, photographs, cultural artefacts and drawings these students presented astheir self-representations. Kostogriz and Tsolidis observed a transcultural scale ofidentification relating to travel, communication with family abroad, learning aboutcultural heritage, and international pop-culture. In presenting a spatial perspectiveon these literacy events, Kostogriz and Tsolidis promote transcultural literaciesas a response to the dynamic, contradictory and relational nature of place-making,meaning-making and identity-making. Transcultural literacies require making vis-ible connections between textual practices and identities, border-crossing eventsand semiotic hybridisation; they require transcending bounded views of culturalspaces and productive points of cultural overlap as well as points of contesta-tion. From this perspective Kostogriz and Tsolidis re-imagine the abstract spaceof literacy and territorial boundedness of local literacies.

Leander and Rowe (2006) make connections between literacy, identity andspace in their consideration of performed literacy events. In the ‘talking spaces’research project they attempt to sketch the complexly configured and layeredidentity space of performed literacy events. While their research focuses on a num-ber of performed literacy events, the 2006 paper focuses on one event involvingthree boys presenting a poster they had created. Through their analysis Leanderand Rowe suggest the methodological and theoretical challenges associated withinterpreting literacy performances relate to the problem of reading space and ofreading space. The problem of reading space relates to how space is produced.Leander and Rowe argue that performances produce spaces: that textual mean-ing and spaces are co-emergent and that subject positions are characterised bydynamic linkages and associations. The problem of reading space considers howpeople perform literacy spaces in addition to how analysts trace meanings ofperformances. Thus they suggest reading performances non-representationally,moving away from fixed meanings to the virtual ‘becomings’ of literacy perfor-mance. Leander and Rowe suggest that multimodal student identity practices and

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embodied features of classroom events are useful for understanding the kinds oftextual interpretations students are making, the kinds of texts they are producing,and the links between student identities and engagement with literacy.

In their edited collection Leander and Sheehy (2004) consider how literacypractices turn spaces into places; how real and imagined geographies constrainand enable movement outside and in-between; and how spatialities and literaciesare in a process of mutual construction. For example, Sheehy and Leander (2004)consider how space constructs those within it, and how discursive practices aresimultaneously located in space and productive of space. Similarly, Moje (2004)looks at how material spaces and places are shaped by and reflect the social, ethnic,identity and literate practices of those that move through them. Hirst (2004) arguesthat theories of literacy need to address the connections between the constructionof social identities and the construction of national, corporate and global socialrelations. These authors emphasise the political dimensions of spatial researchwhich is strongly implicated in relations of power.

Our consideration of trajectories, narratives and literacy processes provides atheoretical frame for a research agenda. The shift from the singular place-relatedidentity into the plural place-related identities that are an outcome of multiplicityprovides the grounding for our new configuration of place, identity and text. Thismultiplicity emphasises the dialogue between binary divisions, such as the localand the global, presenting such binaries as mutually constituted. This mutual con-stitution, this complementary relationship, implies an ongoing dialogue in whichrelationships are constantly renegotiated. Outsider and insider perspectives areadopted to create transcultural meanings through a dialogue of similarities anddifferences. Texts reveal place-related identities through their chronotopes, thetransactions they offer, and the wider processes of reading, and writing. The the-oretical meets the empirical in the need for research that explores the creation oftexts that shape and reveal place-related identities in order to evaluate theory. Thechoice of texts, and understanding of texts both written and read, requires analysisof narrative features and of reading and writing processes.

In more specific terms the key questions for a productive research agendamight be: how do children perceive and represent their place-related identitiesthrough reading and writing? And, in what ways do children’s response to andcreation of texts shape their place-related identities? The choice of sites or placesfor the research would be fundamental. In order to explore both binary relation-ships and multiplicities, contrasting sites are likely to be productive. For exampleschools in both rural and urban environments allow for the binary of rural/urbanto be challenged by the search for the global in the local. The rationale for whatwould be purposive sampling is the expectation that, in view of the focus on spaceand place in the research and the contrasting settings that the schools will rep-resent, the analysis of data from these different environments would be morelikely to lead to the kind of thick description necessary to address the researchquestions. The data might include texts that children read and write, and inter-views and discussions with children and teachers about the reading and creation of

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texts. An ‘abductive’ (Lewis-Beck et al., 2004) orientation would allow a prioritheoretical frameworks, such as the one developed in this paper, combined withconstant comparison of data, to inform the analysis. Atkinson and Delamont(2005) acknowledge that, methodologically, attention to place and space has beenlacking in the analysis featured in many accounts.

4. CONCLUSION

Our aim in this paper was to articulate a new configuration of place-related identityin relation to texts, and to identify a promising line of research. To do so we drewon a methodology of interdisciplinarity. The research we are pursuing focuses onthe ways that children perceive and represent their place-related identities throughreading and writing, as well as the way that their response to and creation of textsshape their place-related identities. This is seen as a promising line of educationalresearch not only in a contemporary context of intensified flows of people and textsacross boundaries but because the simultaneity of place and time is an increasinglyimportant area. Our new configuration links identity with the spatial turn, andlooks to texts, narrative, and reading and writing processes as evidence for theseconnections.

In taking up this research agenda we seek transformative effects. Bruner pointsto culture itself as an ambiguous text in need of interpretation. He suggests thatthe world is a ‘stipulation couched in a symbol system’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 105) andthat seeing in this way allows us to deal with the narrative and scientific forms thatreality can take. Being socially constructed, place, identity and literacy are openfor reconstruction. This has practical and political dimensions – the potential toimprove literacy practices as well as a means of addressing issues of social jus-tice that relate to globalisation, including environmental issues stemming from agreater awareness of place. Furthermore, a refinement of methodology for inter-disciplinary research in educational settings may have potential for application torelated issues, such as better understanding of the development of cross-curricularapproaches in the classroom, something that a focus on place-related identity callsout for. This agenda of transformation points towards a new space created fromthe transcending of disciplinary perspectives.

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CorrespondenceEmma CharltonUniversity of CambridgeFaculty of Education184 Hills RoadCambridgeCB2 8PQEmail: ekc24@cam.ac.uk