Special Issue on Place

Abstract

Place is a fundamental part of the occupations of everyday life. In 2008 Rowles advocated seeking knowledge of how person and place come together in humans’ search for meaning, attending to how ‘being in place’ is created through actions, routines in time and space, familiarity with life spaces, and emotional responses to place. Attention to place in occupational science has continued to grow in recent years, shaped by the current global context as well as theoretical and empirical work in occupational science and beyond. Globally, there are significant challenges to sense of place and engaging in occupation in place that have prompted research, for example experiences of marginalization and oppression in place among multiple individuals and collectives; immigration and displacement highlighting the impact that a change in place can have on daily life; and consequences of measures to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as restricting one’s life spaces. A transactional perspective of place and occupation, which has been developed and applied in occupational science over the past decade or so, holds that they are co-constitutive and impossible to separate. That is, occupation is a transaction that joins person and place, with such transactions extending over time, as the person transacts within their past, current, and future contexts toward their vision of the future (Dickie et al., 2006). Several articles in this issue employ this approach. This issue presents nine articles related to occupation in place. Four are from Canada, four are from the United States, and one is from the United Kingdom. The articles examine place empirically, theoretically, and methodologically.Many drawon place-based theory such as transactional perspectives of occupation, place integration, sense of place, and emplacement. This issue addresses topics of immigration, aging ‘out-of-place’, human-canine interactions, mothering, online gaming, exclusion among older adults, embodiment and emplacement, and place-based research methods. All relate to ideas of built, natural, social, cultural, societal, temporal, and/or historical aspects of place and context. The first two articles in this issue focus on refugees and the process of re-establishing place and identity through occupation. Khan et al. (2023) conducted a narrative inquiry to explore occupational transitions among Syrian youth who had experienced forced migration to Canada. Part of the authors’ positionality was that they viewed “forced migration from one’s homeland as a life-altering experience that involves the process of re-establishing one’s identity and place through continuous negotiation between one’s own cultural values and the norms of the new society” (p. 8). The authors found that displacement from one’s home country meant an ‘unfolding’ of occupational possibilities, which were shaped by sociocultural and political contexts. The Syrian youth sought to find a place in society through education and employment, at times accessing opportunities that had not been available to them in their home country. Place-based factors such as societal attitudes, sociocultural norms, and stigma related to lack of language