Place is more than a container or background for action, matter and thought. It is at one with the matter-action-thought of the body – a process of embodiment. There are many theoretical understandings of place with different epistemological underpinnings, and because of this theories of place have been on a journey through the history of philosophical thought. In this chapter I map this journey; through this process I have found ‘my place’, my positioning. Underpinned by new materialism I maintain that there cannot be place without the body, and that place is continually made and remade through the everyday repeated and learned social and material practices of the body. This intra-action of bodies with the socio-material results in our ways of knowing, making and also learning place, emerging in the between of our embodied engagement with the world. But this also suggests that the meanings of place are socially and materially made and learned. Consequently, the way we experience place, our knowledge of place and how we learn to make place emerge from and through repeated practices, and it is through these individual and shared placemaking practices that belonging is performed, and ultimately learned and taught.

But this mapping is by no means finished or comprehensive. It is a beginning that is generative in that I am playing with, or evolving, my positioning, and trying to understand the potential and possibilities of place, where, with everyday practices, our embodied and situated knowledges, the very intra-actions of matter and meaning, can be made visible/known/learned. But what is place? How are the body and place bound together, and how are the meanings of place learned and how do they emerge within, through and from these socio-material relations and practices? According to Casey (1998), we are placed beings to begin with, which means that we are always somewhere, so place can be considered pervasive. However, theoretically it is also very complex and more often than not very ambiguous. Through my examination and mapping of ‘place’ I have found many philosophers and theorists who have theorised place as a container, a location, a site, a region, an element of space and a process. However, the epistemological underpinnings of these terms vary enormously.