Singapore, 9-12 December 2024
Hosted by: College of Integrative Studies (CIS), Singapore Management University

Download the conference programme here.

Conference theme

Studies of culture, history, literature, and art provide insights into our multiple senses of place. The pull of place—not only as epistemological, cosmological, and ontological forces, but also as deep emotional attachments—is always political. Emotional connections and attachments to place are deeply imbued with the cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity of people, land, and sea relations as well as with relations of colonisation, positionality, and dominance. While sense of place can bring belonging, security, and safety, places can also become landscapes of fear.

In a world dealing with recent challenges of a pandemic, new and old political unrests, long-term rivalries, forced migration, and the impacts of climate change, places can also become spaces of disorientation, characterised by disorder, division, and socia strife. Yet counternarratives that speak of love for place can transform places into spaces of hope, reconnection, healing, belonging, and freedom for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples the world over.

The multiple ways in which we envision and metaphorise place; speak, write, illustrate, and produce our landscapes and seascapes; the politics of land use; and life on land or sea (or away from it) reflect human efforts to live locally and translocally. Studies of ecologies, landforms, weather, rivers, reefs, rocks, and other natural phenomena also tell us much about how people spatialise and make homes in the world. Culture, lifeworlds, and place are mutually constitutive, and knowledge is always situated.

People are shaped by the environments in which they live, and the knowledge they create out of their place-based experiences influences those environments. Knowing and knowledge systems are developed collectively through relations between peoples and places. When people travel, they take places with them, and the changing physical attributes of place can challenge locally developed knowledges. Yet it is precisely our situation in place that makes it so difficult to avoid parochialism and narrow thinking—and that makes it so necessary to grapple with the complexities of relations between people and place. Increasingly, we sense an imperative for engaged, place-based, and collaborative coexistence that valorises shared trust and respect.

About the conference and journal

Folk, Knowledge, Place (https://folkknowledgeplace.org) is a non-fee charging, open access, academic journal. The journal has its institutional home at the Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries / School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology and is published by Beewolf Press (Hong Kong).

The associated conference series seeks to build an academic community around the journal’s themes and in line with the journal’s objectives. We believe in the importance of scholarly exchange across cultures, disciplines, and personalities. The conference thus emphasises togetherness and the construction of long-term connections.

More information: To learn more about the conference, contact co-convenor Adam Grydehøj (agrydehoj@islanddynamics.org).

Conference Organisation
Co-convenors:
Adam Grydehøj (South China University of Technology, China), Orlando Woods (Singapore Management University, Singapore), & Yaso Nadarajah (RMIT University, Australia)
Sponsors: College of Integrative Studies (CIS), Singapore Management University & Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries / School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology
Organisational support: Island Dynamics