Making Place, Making Self (2005) is a remarkable book exploring our relationship to place. Inger Birkeland is a human geographer from Norway. She becomes fascinated by what draws people to make a journey to the most northerly point of mainland Europe, the North Cape in Norway. While on the surface it would seem to be yet another tourist destination, Birkeland takes a look at the deeper layers of what motivates people to go to the compass point “North”.

She is first inspired by a Spanish woman, Sofia, who makes the newspaper headlines by walking the 2,100 km from Oslo to the North Cape. Sophia is propelled by the feeling that she is missing something in life and, despite everyone around her believing she is crazy, she gives up everything in her 30’s and sets off. Her mother thinks she has ‘lost her North’, a Spanish saying to describe someone who has lost direction in life and who has decided to do something out of the ordinary.

After this, Birkeland interviews a series of people and devotes nine chapters of her book to exploring their very different stories and reasons for making their journeys. She  draws on post-lacanian and feminist psychoanalytic thinking, as well as phenomenology and existentialism to develop themes related to place and space, home and home-coming, sexual difference and subjectivity, travel as rite of passage, chora and the metaphysics of place.

Birkeland’s capacity to weave together personal accounts with well argued academic theory makes for a compelling read, and a major contribution to the developing theoretical base of ecopsychology.