Editorial

Abstract

Rethinking spaces and places offers critical opportunities for reconceptualising policy. This can define learner experiences, learning environments, and many bodily, spiritual or affective encounters in formal and informal educational contexts. Learning spaces and places can be inviting and inspiring, and create expectations and open up possibilities. Places and spaces can also have the opposite effect, however, limiting learning and inhibiting opportunities. Openings and limitations arise in relational entanglements connecting embodiments of learner experiences, notions of space and place, and learner subjectivities. One view is that individuals access the world through their bodies and that the knowledge they develop is always embodied. The body inhabits the world, and learners' corporeality can therefore be tied to spaces and places-individuals are affected by and affect the space and place in a mutual interplay (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). Spaces and places, then, can be seen as complex webs of historicised, localised or other social or material realities (Alerby, Hagstrom & Westman, 2014). Mutual ontological, epistemological interdependencies and affects arise in these multiple entanglements. They can be variously encountered and