AustLit

'This special double issue of PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature invited authors to curate an essay on the theme of place. The aim was to open up a dialogue between contributors from a multitude of disciplines, making space for analytical, creative, structured, argumentative, open, discursive and ruminative reflections fuelled by creativity and lived experiences. To curate is to take care (L. curare). In our view, the coming together of the manifold kinds of biotic and abiotic existence that are familiar through the medium of subjective human experience—and its literary and essayistic modes of representation—collectively produces notions of the ever-unfolding and plural becomings of 'place'. Place is both the site of and active agent in diverse subjective experience of space, which we have brought into conversation in PAN12. Locating residual ethical contours in the essayistic, photographic, lyrical and narrative modes, and disclosing affective insights in their analysis and critique, these essays of caring can be understood as forms of emotional practice, which we have brought together into three loose clusters, named 'dialogue', 'response' and 'exegesis'. ' (Introduction)