The study of sustainability transitions (STs) has been a flourishing field for some years now in the wider realm of sustainability research. Here, 'learning' has been identified and posited as an important factor for a successful transitions (van Mierlo et al., 2020). However, this attention has also been critiqued for lacking conceptual clarity on what is meant with 'learning' and a lack of empirical studies to evidence "that, what and how people are learning in practices striving for STs" (Van Poeck et al., 2020, p.303). To open up this black-box of learning, methodologies based upon Dewey (1934)'s transactional pragmatist philosophy (Van Poeck & Östman, 2022) have been elaborated. In particular these transactional approaches allow for the in action study of how people create educational settings and learn in concrete sustainability practices (Plummer & Van Poeck, 2021; Van Poeck & Östman, 2021). Particularly, the transactional model of learning (Östman et al., 2019) describes how the disturbance of a habit may trigger an inquiry to re-establish, i.e. ‘learn’, a functional habit. In so doing, the model enables us not only to investigate what (habits) get learned, but also scrutinise how the process of disturbance and inquiry led to this particular outcome.

The most recent research agenda for transition studies (Köhler et al., 2019), mentions so-called 'place-specific factors' as another important aspect in the unfolding of STs. However, simply identifying that there exist place-specific differences doesn't tell us why and how places and their specificity come to matter in transitions (Hansen & Coenen, 2015). Furthermore, Köhler et al. suggest future research to explore urban transitions and transitions in developing countries. This has been criticised by Binz et al. (2020) who fear that this agenda reduces the geography of transitions into diversifying the locations of empirical settings without delving into the intricacies of how place-specificity is made to matter. To go beyond such a static conception of place, geographers have proposed to work with theories of 'place-making' (Murphy, 2015; Håkansson, 2018; Lai, 2023). Herein places are thought to be continually and relationally reproduced through 'place-frames', which are partial representations of what a place is, ought to or can be (ibid.). Most commonly, these place-frames are thought to be constructed around the place aspects found in Agnew's (1987) widely accepted definition of place as consisting of a location (i), a locale (ii) and a sense of place (iii). Places need to be located, in either an absolute (i.e. coordinates) or relative sense (e.g. near the border) (i). They are constituted by materially, bounded objects (e.g. trees, houses, a highway) (ii). And they are sensorily available through the meanings we have attached, either personally or mediately to them (iii) (Murphy, 2015).

Similarly as in the case of learning, many of these place-framing processes remain black-boxed and require further inquiry into "how place-frames initially come into being, how processes of place-making unfold over time, and how, for example, the changing materiality of places matter" (Håkansson, 2018, p.36). A transactional approach serves a purpose here as it enables the study of place-framing in action. By reconstructing and repurposing transactional methods and the model of learning (Östman et al., 2019), this paper investigates how place-frames get disturbed and how collective inquiries may lead to their reconstruction. In other words, a transactional methodology allows us to observe learning and change in action. We use it to address the following questions:

• what types of place-frames exist in transitions?
• how do these place-frames co-evolve with a transition’s unfolding?
• how do collective learning patterns and place-framing mutually influence each other?

In this paper we apply a ‘place-frame analysis’ (PFA), which is based on place’s definition as location, locale and sense of place, and the idea that place-frames get dynamically reconstructed through ‘privileging’ (Wertsch, 1998). Privileging points to how in processes of meaning-making, people either include certain elements (e.g. a comment from an interlocutor or a picture on the wall) as meaningful and relevant and exclude others. This principle has been elaborated into established (transactional) analytical methods and models to better understand the dynamics of collective meaning-making. For instance, the method Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA, cf. Wickman & Östman, 2002) enables a first-person analysis of language in use which can be applied in combination with privileging to see how certain topics get picked-up or pushed out of a collective discussion. As such it is a useful tool that allows us to make a robust and consistent analysis of meaning-making in action. In this vein of thinking a ‘place-frame analysis’ will allow us to see how place-frames get reconstructed in action, by privileging only certain place aspects (e.g. some senses of place) as people construct meaning together. A PFA will be used in combination with PEA to study 3 cases of sustainability transitions in-the-making. These cases were selected with the criterion of maximum variation and consist of (1) a government-led mobility transition in a small town, (2) a community-led energy transition in a residential neighbourhood in a city and (3) a transnational social movement that strives for a world without mining to curtail intensifying exploitation in Latin America due to the resource needs of the European energy transition. Within each of these cases we study the (informal) learning processes and the diverse settings in which collective meaning-making around their envisioned transition takes place. Data was collected in the form of in situ (audio or video) recordings of collective meaning-making sessions, which are complemented with interviews to understand the setting-up and experiences of these sessions. Transcripts hereof reveal moments where place-frames become mobilised by participants, and sometimes even get disturbed and opened up to reconstruction. In following these moments over time, analysing them with the mentioned methods and interpreting the outcomes with the transactional model of learning (Östman, Van Poeck & Öhman, 2019), we open the black box of 'place-frame learning' and reveal how place-framing is done in action.

Expected outcomes from this study are Threefold. First, we develop a typology of place-frames found in the observed transitions-in-the-making, thereby shedding light on the content of place-frame learning. Second, we identify patterns of how these place-frames get disturbed and potentially reconstructed as the transition progresses. Doing so allows us to gain insight into how the learning process takes shape. Third, we identify the mutual influence of collective learning settings and the place-framing processes that happen. This provides knowledge about how the design of a setting and the interventions of participants affect what people learn, how places are framed and ‘made’, and how this influences sustainability transitions in the making. The results from this study serve a double purpose. On the one hand by embedding results within the wider 'Place-Based Education' (PBE) literature (Yemini et al., 2023), empirical contributions can be made for the advancement of current practices. On the other hand, this literature may clarify how place-frame learning processes can contribute to specific purposes in transitions such as environmental justice (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; Trott et al., 2023) or decolonisation (Stahelin, 2017). Furthermore, this research addresses the ECER conference's main theme by showcasing how the uncertainty of what STs should look like makes actors mobilise meanings of what a place was or is and reconstruct them into a place-frame of the future world they wish to inhabit.

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