“The Frayed Knot”: What Happens to Place Attachment in the Context of Serial Forced Displacement?

People pass their lives in specific locations, and, through exchange and interrelatedness, develop complex and important emotional connections within and to those places. These specific locations are both bounded in a locale and linked to global networks and processes. Place is understood to be at once a geographic site and the social system organized at that location; it operates as a node in the complex global web of economic, social and physical relationships (Massey, 1995). Dis-PLACE-ment, is, by definition, a rupture of the geographic and the social. Disruptions of this kind force people to remake their emotional connections, including those we know as “place attachment” (Brown & Perkins, 1992; Fullilove, 1996; Chow & Healey, 2008).