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Languages of Place and Discourses of Power: Constructing New Senses of Place

The concept of “sense of place” typically is used to refer to an individual's ability to develop feelings of attachment to particular settings based on combinations of use, attentiveness, and emotion. Despite the assumed positive values of a sense of place, critics point out that places are more than simply geographic sites—they are also fluid, changeable, dynamic contexts of social interaction and memory, and they “contain” overt and covert social practices that embed in place-making behaviors notions of ideology, power, control, conflict, dominance, and distribution of social and physical resources. This paper traces emerging scholarship about sense of place as a social construction, and offers examples from leisure, outdoor recreation, and tourism development. Place and sense of place are seen as socially constructed, always in the process of being created, always provisional and uncertain, and always capable of being discursively manipulated towards desired (individual or collective) ends. A research program about leisure and the politics of place awaits development, but should focus on language and discourse, and should begin with the question: how are leisure places socially constructed with political consequences?