ABSTRACT
This book commits to recognition of deep connections and profound relationality in the life world as something that enriches the scope of our cultural geographies. When aligned with Indigenous epistemologies of place, this approach operates on the principle that we (humans) are nested within a relational sphere that is populated by a vast number of co-presences, each with the capacity for agency and sentiency. These co-presences, when understood as kin, enter into our axiological frame and emotional geography in ways that cannot be ignored. Neither agency nor sentiency are positioned as uniquely human qualities, instead they are faculties possessed by place itself, and place elements. Although few within social and cultural geography would cast place as a blank canvas painted to life solely by human imagination, or action, the push to more fully understand place as a spatial and spectral (essencefilled) element of life, populated by a vast number of multifarious agents that respond to human life remains a committed one.
