ABSTRACT
The ethnographic study of space and place is critical to understanding the everyday lives of people whose homes and homelands are disrupted by globalization, uneven development, violence and social inequality. These dislocating processes encourage and, in many cases, force people to leave the communities and the neighborhoods where they grew up and to search for other meaningful places to live and place-based identities. There is a sense of urgency that the spatial effects of crises of poverty, neoliberal restructuring and global capitalism be recognized in north/south population shifts, refugee camps, urban gentrification, privatization of public spaces and profit-driven planning and redevelopment. The impact of competing claims to space and place and the ensuing territorial and cultural conflicts are transforming social relations among ethnic and religious groups, social classes, regions, states and neighborhoods. Contemporary world problems such as human-made disasters, civil wars, terrorist attacks, climate change and other environmental concerns are inextricable from the material, symbolic and ideological aspects of space and place.
