Geography of experience: place and region

The geography of experience has been a prominent theme in late twentieth and early twenty-first century geography, and the concepts of place and region along with other core geographic terms have played a central role its development. Unlike many academic concepts, place and region appear to move with relative ease between the language of the human sciences and the conversational language of everyday life. The semantic elasticity that makes such a smooth transition possible may also help explain the persistence of these concepts in research despite the highly fragmented theoretical and meta-theoretical character of geography. The expanded meanings of these concepts are testing new limits, however, as more materialist and reductionist orientations are posited that limit or significantly reduce the role of the geographic subject as agent. Recent discussions of place and region are reviewed in light of the history of research on the geography of experience.