Abstract

I will bring some past accounts of places I have experienced and will enter into a dialogue with myself and others about those places. The event of the In Dialogue conference will reveal what more can be known about places there and then through being there together here and now. The dialogue will serve as a psycho-therapeutic travelogue as senses of self become a little clearer through working things out in dialogue. I will try and be honest, although sometimes one doesn’t get what one expects by bearing ones soul. This perhaps depends on how able we are to reveal the ontologies of place together in the present moment. I will employ elements of the stream of consciousness and the improvisational in an attempt to locate agency, but I am all too aware that as soon as we think we have got a grip on what a place really means to us, the stability of agency shifts again. I guess the best that I can offer is two or three half decent stories of self. A dialogic social space will be created that even the audience members who remained silent can say they were producers of. For that moment, in that space, we can perhaps lay claim to the formation of a community, hoping, in the words of Jean Luc-Nancy, ‘to be receptive to the meaning of our multiple, dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only make sense by existing in common'.