Place and the Power of the Particular
A case for place as the planet’s original teacher, trainer, trust builder
“Imagine Princeton as your training ground,” said Eddie Glaude, who had just joined the University’s faculty as an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Program in African-American Studies.
It was nearly a quarter century ago, and I was more than halfway through my undergraduate years, but Professor Glaude’s off-hand comment at an evening event in Wilson College struck me then, and has stayed with me since.
On the heels of 9/11, my classmates and I were restless, I think, and I was naïve, to be sure… looking to change the world.
“Serve here, master this place, first,” Professor Glaude counseled. “Let this place - its imperfections, its inspirations - be your template for all places.”
“Really?” I thought. “Princeton, New Jersey?”
In the decades since, I’ve tried responding to his call to see - and serve - the world through the prism of place: first, as an overly earnest campus “leader” who took himself too seriously, and in later years as a civic entrepreneur in Appalachia, foundation director in Detroit, and technology executive in Asia Pacific - one who actively chose to live and lead both in the American heartland and abroad... striving to be in markets, and of places.
Sure, contemplating and constructing a career on the basis of place has offered me a cleaner way to land otherwise-abstract corporate and civic metrics with more clarity and meaning… whether the deliverables in question had to do with customers converted and citizens connected or centered on market share and community care.
In that way, place can be a useful - and, often, hugely sharpening - unit of analysis.
But living and leading in place also taught me the market - and civic - value of attending to more than spreadsheets or slides can capture: the “soul of communities,” the stories of their days, the spirit of their times.
After all, here’s a hard truth in our age of career-by-LinkedIn: no matter your company or cause, have you really realized your full potential - with nothing left on the table - if you haven’t found your way into the zeitgeist of… a place? Be it near or far.
These days, I wonder: do Professor Glaude’s words carry new weight - and wisdom - in this age of AI and geopolitical shifts? At a time when people across sectors and seasons of life are dazzled - but burdened, too - by opportunities to master it all, with breadth, what if a more enthralling, stabilizing and caring path entailed mastering just a place, with depth?
Yes and yes.
Irish novelist and poet James Joyce was right when, a century ago, he remarked: “In the particular is contained the universal.”
Of late I’ve been moved by the breakthrough logic that undergirds AI: in their pretraining phase, large language models are exposed to vast numbers of “particulars” and trained, again and again, to predict what comes next. And yet, at scale, from these particulars, they begin to exhibit something like generalization - and even flashes of the universal.
What can - what should - this “power of the particular” teach us about how we humans learn - how we train, and pretrain? In a world striving, but struggling, too, to realize its caring potential - not to mention its approach to cultivating future-proof human skills at global scale - might answers lie within our immediate line of sight? Literally.
“If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world,” Joyce said, too. What if each one of us committed to getting to the heart of a place this year? Our hometowns, headquarters or far-flung communities we’ve otherwise “othered.”
Over the years, some have assumed my own experiences getting to the heart of places - as a policy leader for College Summit in Washington, a partnerships leader for Google in South Asia, a social entrepreneur and philanthropist in Michigan, a business leader for Twitter, Times Bridge and OpenAI in the Global South, and a humanities and higher education leader in Virginia and beyond - has entailed a kind of constant context switching.
Far from it.
In truth, it’s actually felt more like the harnessing of a single, place-based (er, place-obsessed!) sensibility: that is (1) first, the cultivation of a sensitivity to understanding a place’s past and promise; then, (2) the seeing and mapping of a place’s topography, its town squares and its leading voices; and then (3) finally, the narration of a breakthrough story with - and not to - usual and unusual suspects in place.
Surveying Detroit’s landscape of power and purpose taught me how to approach the people and promise of Twitter. Constructing a delicate approach to helping global missions realize influence in New Delhi helped shape my approach to helping storied American institutions open their doors to new ideas. The dots connect.
Purpose, potential and progress - from business buzzwords to social impact feel-goods - flow downstream from seeking and seeing place, I’ve discovered, and not the other way around.
As technology professionals, policymakers and philanthropists usher in a new era of experiences - to advance learning, to advance listening, to advance leadership and (gulp) to advance peace and understanding in this time - perhaps under our noses lies the starting point, and the planet’s most transformational curriculum of all: place.
It’s why I’ve tried to center place-based education and experience in some of my own missions of late, one of which seeks to harness the power of the particular to build bridges, and new capacities, in this AI-ascendant era.
I’m not alone in having awakened to the singular power that place-seeing, place-mapping, place-making have to offer us. Dr. Fei-Fei Li, known as the “Godmother of AI” whose work on ImageNet helped catalyze modern computer vision, argues in “The Worlds I See” that perception - and especially vision - sits near the heart of both machine learning and human understanding.
So, what if our culture imagined “sightseeing” as a pressing - and sacred - obligation? Through this lens, both civic engagement and a more immersive kind of cosmopolitanism take on new meaning.
It’s why, I think, de Tocqueville marveled two centuries ago at a young American republic’s commitment to place-based… everything. And why today, I marvel at so much: from Knight Foundation’s commitment to American places and National Geographic’s education-and-explorer ecosystem to the Teton Science Schools’ place-based experiences inspiring curiosity, Virginia Tech’s Creativity and Innovation District drawing attention to a new kind of geography and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s commitment to seeing - and stewarding - places as containers of memory, belonging and inheritance.
But still, unseen places are all around us.
Professor Glaude, who remains at Princeton, has in the years since published scholarship on a range of themes, including “Begin Again,” a book dwelling on the writer James Baldwin. In it, he - Dr. Glaude - writes that Baldwin argued “to live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself.”
Might 2026 be the year we begin to see places not just as meaning-making machines - where, yes, we see beauty, hear story and make memory - but also as sources of a new kind of teaching, training and trust-building superpower?
A superpower that trains - and, if you’re an AI, pretrains - us in the seemingly-flat particulars of place… particulars that ultimately give rise to peaks from which we see the universal.
