On Feb. 1 audience members gathered to hear guest lecturer Liam Campbell talk about how people are ultimately connected to the place they come from.
Presented in Ball Hall Auditorium, the lecture Campbell gave was titled “A Sense of Place: Ecology, Community and the Human Spirit,” and it is the first of four lectures he will be giving throughout the semester. The main theme of the first lecture was about our sense of place within the world.
Campbell focused on six main points within the lecture, which included Loss and Grief, Land vs. Landscape, Scale of Place/ Belonging/ Parochial/ Townland, Bioregionalism and Duchas, Exile and Belonging/Deariocht and Duchas – effects of colonization and Place Naming.
“What I want to do tonight is look at how we feel we belong,” Campbell said. “And lessons we’ve learned about … from the past. And I think these things … they are deep within us, they are not lost but sometimes we just have to search really good for them.”
Throughout the lecture, Campbell used examples from his own life to show how one is connected to where they come from. In the part of the lecture about loss and grief, Campbell talked about how the town he had grown up in meant Oak, and how now many of the oak trees were gone. To show how much a person identifies with where they come from, Campbell told a story about how sports teams would first identify with the town lands they are from.
“In Gaelic games it’s kept very alive,” Campbell said. “Because it’s that sense of passion and power that comes from the local place.”
“A Sense of Place” showed audience members that they are more connected to the places they come from than they think they are because of traditions that stick with them.
“Please value your local places,” Campbell said. “It is a global world, we don’t want it to be parochial we want our families and our children to see other places, but I think there’s something in us … We are meant to be rooted in a sense of place.”
