Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay uses a personal experience, the routine of daily activity at my local coffee shop, to illustrate the importance of places to the nature of human experience. Every day, I argue, the conversations and interactions that take place at the White Hen store nearby my house serve to reaffirm a number of important features of my life: (1) a sense of my own identity; (2) a sense of a larger community of people outside my family and close friends; (3) a sense of civility, of small kindnesses and courtesies among people who, on the face of it, seem very different from one another; and (4) an even deeper sense of stability and routine in the world, brought about simply because people reaffirm for me daily that, among other things, today is indeed another day, and that, in all likelihood, the sun will rise tomorrow as it has today. Having established these basic parameters to the significance of this place to my life, I then argue further for the broad importance of place to our understanding of human experience, noting, for example, that significant changes in the character of places, such as their actual physical destruction, often leads to a significant and felt sense of disruption in people’s lives.
Repository Citation
Orum, Anthony M.. "All the World's A Coffee Shop: Reflections on Place, Community and Identity." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 3, 2025, pp. 1–11. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss3/10
Included in
Community Psychology Commons, Personality and Social Contexts Commons, Place and Environment Commons