Understanding Place

Governments are increasingly focused on place-based initiatives and recognise the importance of local involvement in service delivery. In this context, conscious engagement with the stories communities tell about themselves presents both a valuable resource for policy development, and also an opportunity to preserve and strengthen social belonging.

Our place-based historical method is a framework for orienting government, university, and development partnerships with communities. It holds that engaging with the ways communities understand who they are and where they have come from is crucial to enabling them to navigate change and build sustainable futures. It offers a set of tools for listening to, documenting, and making accessible individual and community stories as critical evidence to guide place-based approaches to policy and social change.

By engaging with community groups, and working with cultural institutions and state archives, we utilise oral history practices, community storytelling, data and photographic visualisations, and archival research to produce textured and community driven reflections. As well as the generative process of consultation, outputs might include archival collection, data sets, podcasts, immersive audio stories, walking tours, histories of place, interactive data visualisations, listening parties, community events as well as books and written reports.

Our Understanding Place prospectus details our team, our approach, and our place-based projects that leverage academic history, social research and audio story-telling for community and industry engagement.