Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Description

In this remarkable and often dazzling book, Paul Carter explores the conditions for sociability in a globalized future. He argues that we make many assumptions about communication but overlook barriers to understanding between strangers as well as the importance of improvisation in overcoming these obstacles to meeting, offering novel ways of presenting the philosophical dimensions of waiting, meeting, and non-meeting.

Paul Carter is professor of design (urbanism) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minnesota, 2010).

"Paul Carter's commentaries on cross-cultural encounters have long been philosophically sophisticated and deservedly influential. His new book raises the question of what the value of meeting is, in whose terms. It takes us to the very heart of the histories of encounter and confrontation that have proven so intractable for so long in Australia and elsewhere." -Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge "The Meeting Place, Carter's latest foray into colonial and postcolonial encounters of peoples, epistemologies, and longings, exposes what he foregrounds and reiterates as a 'meeting place' of desired belonging and social union. It is an imaginative, referentially capacious, formally demanding, as well as theoretically inventive book." -Rob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz