Metamorphosis and Place

If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language's importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software. Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others' meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.
About the Author: Joshua Parker has published work on place in fiction and comparative imagology in symploke, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The International Journal of the Humanities, Urbana and other journals. He is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Fatih University, Istanbul. Lucie Tunkrova is an Assistant Professor at Fatih University, Istanbul, specializing in European integration with focus on enlargement and theories of the EU's decision making processes. She is currently co-editing co-authoring the book The Politics of EU Accession: Turkish Challenges and Central European Experiences. Mohamed Bakari is Chair of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Fatih University. He was a Visiting Fulbright Professor at UCLA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the African Studies Center, University of Indiana, Institut fur Afrikanistik, University of Cologne, the University of Bayreuth, the Modern Oriental Institute, Berlin, and African Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies.