Leverhulme Trust International Professorship grant - Professor John Sutton: the Sciences of Place and Memory

This project initiates a new interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Stirling, the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory. It addresses pressing questions about how people locate and orient themselves in space and time. Anchored in philosophy, the Centre draws heavily on cognitive sciences, social sciences, and the arts to break new ground in the study of spatial thinking, disorientation, and remembering. It aims to connect extraordinary recent advances in the cognitive neurosciences of space and memory to contemporary practical concerns about memory, emotion, and place, relating for example to migration and belonging, commemoration, or urban life and mental health. The Centre’s research is given focus by way of six workstreams: 1) memory, truth, and the past; 2) place knowledge and place memory; 3) collaborative wayfinding; 4) technologies of navigation and memory; 5) disorientation and difficult places; 6) cognitive ecologies of the city. Innovating in its mix of conceptual, experimental, and ethnographic approaches, the Centre’s mission is to implement an unprecedented intensity of interdisciplinary collaborative methods to advance knowledge of the dynamic relations between place and memory at multiple timescales and levels, producing new understanding of how people navigate together in space and time.