A Landscape of Student Experience

Abstract

Students at the University of Wisconsin create meaningful places through their own experiences across the UW campus and Madison downtown. As students bring meaning to different campus spaces, campus spaces in turn, help to create a collective student identity. Conceptions of nature play a role in constructing the unique qualities that define meaningful spaces of student experience. The University's power of representation also plays a role in the way some spaces are perceived. Archival information reveals a sense of timelessness of some UW campus spaces. Shared experience, collective identity, and behaviors and performances drive the sociospatial dialectic between students and campus. Ultimately, place is still a relevant concept that many students seem to engage with.