Social theorising as emplacement: Encounters with Antipodean sociology and place materialities

In this article, I consider the idea of academic work as ‘emplaced’ activity. I contextualise myself as social theorist and sociologist by considering two parallel processes: my responses over time to Antipodean sociology, and my evolving relationship to landscape, geology and place. I offer exegeses of Beilharz's Imagining the Antipodes , Thinking the Antipodes , and the textbook Sociology: Place, Time and Division ; as well as the writings of novelist Tim Winton and landscape scholar George Seddon. My reading emphasises the importance of personal experience, landscape sensory experience, and place as relational, in such writings. My own complex and uneven relationship to Antipodean sociology is used to reflect on overcoming my own placeless-ness in modes of theorising; and why the landscapes I migrated to decades ago, and the local geology, proved decisive in my grasping the significance of place experiences, memories and materialities within scholarly thinking and writing.