Soren Larsen
Ph.D., Geography, University of Kansas
M.A., Anthropology, University of Kansas
B.A., Anthropology & English, Illinois State University
Cultural geography: place and landscape; place identity and sense of place; cultural landscapes
I am a cultural geographer with teaching and research interests in the politics of place, sense of place, and Indigenous philosophies and activism. My regional expertise is focused on rural and resource-dependent areas of North America, particularly Canada and the U.S. West. My methodological interests are ethnography, case study, qualitative analysis, and place-based methodologies. I have spent much of my career working in collaboration with the Cheslatta Carrier Nation of British Columbia, punctuated by other projects on exurban land-use change in Colorado and Indigenous activism in the Wakarusa Wetlands of northeastern Kansas and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds on the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I welcome inquiries from anyone looking to study Geography at the undergraduate or graduate level.
Geography 1200: Regions and Nations of the World
Geography 1550: Introduction to the Humanized Landscape
Geography 3580: Placewriting
Geography 8760: Geographic Thought
General Honors 2230: Learning from Place
Graduate Seminars in Place, Landscape, and Geographic Thought
Recent & Significant Publications
Under contract. Key Ideas in Geography: Place. London: Routledge
2025. A line of flight through Yi-Fu Tuan. GeoHumanities, 1-10.
2024a. Map cards: creative mapping for place dialogue. GeoHumanities 10(2): 258-270.
2024b. Using collaborative art as a method for decolonizing the research relationship with Indigenous peoples. In Sage Research Methods Cases for Diversifying and Decolonizing Research, ed. Elsie Elder. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Ltd.
2024c. Place. In Introducing Human Geographies (fourth edition), ed. Kelly Dombroski, Mark Goodwin, Junxi Qian, Andrew Williams, and Paul Cloke, pp. 62-74. London: Routledge.
2024d. Examining student responses to game layers in cultural geography: a study about game spatiality in a role-playing game design (L Xue, E Pierce, SC Larsen, DM Oprean). Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Serious Games, ed. Jan Plass and Xavier Ochoa, pp. 97-107. New York: Springer.
2023a. Collect that coin: efficacy testing of platformer game mechanics with adult learners (DM Oprean, HR Gould, and SC Larsen). Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning 17(1): 459-466. 2023b. Exploring in-game scaffolds for higher-order learning in a case-based RPG learning game (DM Oprean, D Brown, N McGorry, B Pieper, SC Larsen). Proceedings of European Conference on Games Based Learning 17(1): 467-474.
2022. Gift of art/gift of place: boundary work for Indigenous coexistence. Journal of Cultural Geography 39(1): 117-130.
2020. Boundary work, art, and place (S Larsen and M Zurba). International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (second edition), ed. Audrey Kobayashi, pp. 381-384. London and New York: Elsevier.
2019. Refreshing methods: reflections and provocations (S. Larsen, M. Lobo, and A. Maddrell. Social & Cultural Geography 20: Virtual Special Issue on Methods.
2017. Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More-Than-Human World (S. Larsen and J.T. Johnson). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2016. The agency of place: toward a more-than-human geographical self (S. Larsen and J.T. Johnson). GeoHumanities 2: 149–166.
2016. Regions of care: a political ecology of reciprocal materialities. Journal of Political Ecology 23: 115-203.
2014. Ethnographic fiction for research and writing in cultural geography. (M. Jacobson and S. Larsen). Journal of Cultural Geography 31: 179–193.
2013. A Deeper Sense of Place: Stories and Journeys of Collaborations in Indigenous Research. (S. Larsen and J.T. Johnson). Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.
2012. Toward an open sense of place: phenomenology, affinity, and the question of being. (S. Larsen and J.T. Johnson). Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102: 632-646.