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LOVE: A Reading
jointly organised by
Cha and Bleak House Books
Date: Friday 17 September 2021
Time: 7:30 pm
Venue: Bleak House Books
Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Yi-Fu Tuan’s
Space and Place:
The Perspective of Experience

an excerpt

[Place is security, space is freedom.]

People tend to suppress that which they cannot express. If an experience resists ready communication, a common response among activists (“doers”) is to deem it private—even idiosyncratic—and hence unimportant. In the large literature on environmental quality, relatively few works attempt to understand how people feel about space and place, to take into account the different modes of experience (sensorimotor, tactile, visual, conceptual), and to interpret space and place as images of complex—often ambivalent—feelings. Professional planners, with their urgent need to act, move too quickly to models and inventories. The layman accepts too readily from charismatic planners and propagandists the environmental slogans he may have picked up through the media; the rich experiential data on which these abstractions depend are easily forgotten. Yet it is possible to articulate subtle human experiences. Artists have tried—often with success.

[Place is security, space is freedom.]

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Currently based at the University of Toronto, Ting Guo is a scholar of religion and Chinese & Sinophone studies, focusing on religion, politics, and gender. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh and was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and Purdue University. Her first book, Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press. She has taught at Gender Studies, University of Hong Kong and the Department of Chinese, Lingnan University and has published in journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Anthropology Today, and the Journal of Religion and Film. She co-hosts a Mandarin podcast “in-betweenness” (#inbetweenness #時差podcast #shichapodcast). [Return to Table of Contents.]