Places are not bounded, isolated entities; they are located in a series of economic, political, and cultural networks with varying geographical scope. As such, they are best thought of relationally, as spaces where the livelihoods of groups and communities are embedded. Many times person-place bonds and place meanings are confronted with societal proposals for change, such as new environmental laws or spatial development plans, which enforce multiple reconfigurations of the public and private space, including its frontiers, uses, and underlying power relations. The direction and pace of such changes are better understood if social change is considered as related to both temporal and spatial dimensions that concur for the construction of place meanings. Several questions may arise from such considerations: - Have certain spatial configurations and place representations become hegemonic in European/national/local scales, as well as in specific territories, like protected areas? How do political, science-based and local narratives intertwine to reproduce or resist such hegemonies? - How are place meanings enacted in discourses and transformed through communicative practices by local communities, governmental and non-governmental actors? Which place meanings are legitimized and reproduced and which are resisted, questioned or silenced? - What role is given to place attachment and social memory in narratives linked to the local uses of the space for debating and contesting new place meanings? How are spatial relations, and specifically the segregation of local groups and communities, sustained and contested through these narratives? In this thematic session we aim at discussing research that examines how place change is discursively supported and resisted in its intersubjective, intergroup, and political dimensions, and that brings evidence of how social memory is taken up for producing alternative discourses and introducing them into debate. We welcome proposals that combine the micro and macro-level of analysis, such as analyses of the rhetoric construction of ideological dilemmas or of the dynamics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic representations and discourses. Also, we are particularly interested in integrative proposals, which go beyond text analysis and attempt to provide insights for combining a discursive and an economic, political and social analysis of space in an interdisciplinary way.

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