Cultural Practices of Place

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Sarah Earnshaw

   Abstract

   The notion of sense of place has been developed across disciplines in studying the range of experiential, relational, and emotive attachments between people and spatial constellations. It is an evolving concept used to explore how locations are defined and categorised, as well as a means to tease out the factors that generate a unique character—whether conceived as innate or as a conscious construction. It is also a framework through which insecurities and anxieties about place, from individual to global scales, have been articulated.

3. (Im)Mobilities: Placing In-Betweens

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 2. Circular Hybridity: Reconciling Identity and Place in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home

      Shurouq Ibrahim

      Abstract

      Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2009) is a Bildungsroman which follows its protagonist through the Arabic-speaking world and to the United States, offering along the way a complex perspective on the transnational configuration of home and identity. This paper illuminates how Jarrar's coming-of-age novel negotiates home and identity in relation to concepts such as (anti)nostalgia, borders, and hybridity. Drawing on Doreen Massey's (1990) theory of “places as processes,” or places as spaces which are defined by personal experiences and social relations, A Map of Home offers what Carol Fadda—Conrey calls an “antinostalgic” stance on the Arab homeland. Antinostalgia is used to reflect on conditions of war and occupation, dispossession, and intergenerational traumas. Spotlighting the trope of blended or obscured physical and cultural borders, this paper contends that A Map of Home champions hybridity, in the terms of Jarrar's protagonist, as “circular”—in continuous motion/transformation yet paradoxically whole. Hybridity in the novel is detected in linguistic idiosyncracies within the Arabic language as well as heterogenous renditions of practicing Islam in the homeland and beyond. In the end, Jarrar's novel illustrates how personal experiences are what define a place as home. Home, therefore, can be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

   3. Chapter 3. Environmental Sensemaking and the Body as Cartographic Organizing Principle in the Poetry of the London Underground

      Craig Melhoff

      Abstract

      This analysis draws on recent work in situated cognition and the phenomenology of embodied Experience, considering first how passengers navigate and cognitively map underground transit system to confront the disorientation and confusion induced by subterranean spaces, and then examining literary representations of such mapping processes in action. I demonstrate how for poets of the London underground such as Donald Davie, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney, the movements and nonvisual sensations of the body, organized according to the coordinates of what cognitive scientists call the spatial body framework, provide means of mentally mapping the environment that compensate for deprivations and distortions of sight below-ground and constitute sensorimotor alternatives to visual cartography. In “Londoners” (1990), Davie shifts sensory emphasis toward sound, departing from a disembodied, ocularcentric privileging of the visual; in “Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941” (1985), Duffy proposes embodied movement rather than sensation as the basic for stable identity and interpersonal connection; and in “District and Cricle” (2006), Heaney holds out the possibility of physical and social orientation within the otherwise alienating and confusing urban milieu via a “coembodiment” between self and other. Such poetic representations of environmental sensemaking, I argue, help to articulate what we might mean by a nonvisual cartography of underground places.

   4. Chapter 4. Framing Places of Concealment, Invisibility, and Disarray in Christina Fernandez’s Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D

      Sheila Brannigan

      Abstract

      What is noticed in the street environment and what goes unnoticed? What can be viewed neutrally in the urban landscape, and by whom? What might the street environment conceal? Christina Fernandez’s Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D (1996–2000) poses these questions in photographs and an embroidery text panel that interrogate garment factories in the urban landscape of the Eastside of Los Angeles. Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy (2001) argue that ‘representation in its wider meaning modifies, augments or displaces the circumstantial […] to bring other kinds of order, meaning or “truth” to visibility’ (p. 38). This chapter examines the visual representations Fernandez’s mixed media work constructs around garment factories in the Eastside neighbourhood.¹ Histories and representations of communities are contested and critical, particularly in regard to minority communities, as Hodgkin and Radstone (2003) suggest. Therefore, I consider how Fernandez engages with the urban landscape of the Eastside and social and historical dimensions in the work. This chapter investigates how works portraying the urban landscape indicate the photographer’s own positionality regarding the places and communities they photograph.

4. Struggle: Placing Contestation

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 5. Place Making, Pomparles Bridge and Public Space Protection Orders

      Emma Patchett

      Abstract

      In order to decipher the complexity of the entanglement between law and place, it is important to start from the position that ‘place’ can be critically understood as neither a boundaried container of locality nor wholly a disconnected, itinerant shape shifter (Massey, 2009, p. 416).

   3. Chapter 6. Inventing ‘Ecotopia’: Experimental Urban Design in 1970s California

      Anthony Raynsford

      Abstract

      In his 1975 novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach imagined a near future in which a large section of the American west coast, including the states of Washington, Oregon and the northern part of California, had seceded from the United States in order to build a new society, entirely based on principles of ecological stability and long-term human survival. Callenbach’s fictional vision, in many ways, extended the logic and forms of radical urban design experiments that had already been proceeding in Berkeley and other parts of Northern California. What Callenbach observed in the early 1970s were various attempts to generate, sometimes through direct action, an alternative ecological pattern of living that came to be thought of as ‘ecotopian’ but which, I would argue both preceded and extended beyond and after the particular novel of that name. Investigating these reciprocal and intertwining histories of ecotopian urbanism, this paper crosses back and forth between literary imagination and architectural place-making.

   4. Chapter 7. Contested Space and Creative Placemaking in Selected Projects by African American Artists Dread Scott and Theaster Gates

      Sophia Hörl

      Abstract

      As prominent members of the African American activist art scene, Dread Scott and Theaster Gates have supported the recent Black Lives Matter Movement in various ways. This is reflected not only in several of their artistic projects, but also in their political statements, like Scott’s commentary ‘America God Damn’ on the killing of George Floyd and the history of racialized police violence in the US in The Art Newspaper.

5. Epistemes: Placing Knowledge

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 8. Thinking-with Sounds: Spatial and Epistemic Configurations

      Rémy Bocquillon

      Abstract

      ‘Listen around you before reading this statement’. This instruction is both a Magrittean paradox, and a confession about the overwhelming presence of the eye (the I) in experiencing, observing, and taking part in the world. It is also—and perhaps above all—an invitation to listen to our surroundings, to pay attention to the ‘sonic milieu’ taking place.

   3. Chapter 9. Autoethnography as a Creative Methodology: Exploring Place and Identity Through Autobiographical Narrative Landscapes

      Ian Grosz

      Abstract

      Expanding on key concepts across anthropology and cultural geography that have provided a starting point for practice-based, doctoral research into the different ways landscapes shape senses of place and identity, this paper shows how incorporating the principals of autoethnography into a creative writing practice helped to deepen and broaden more usual authorial perspectives. Autoethnography as a methodology ‘seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’ (Ellis et al. 1). As an approach to qualitative research, the researcher’s own experience may be reflexively incorporated within the context of a broader framework by utilising creative writing techniques that engage readers in potentially more evocative ways, challenging ‘canonical ways of doing research and representing others,’ by using ‘tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product’ (Ellis et al. 1). Writing in this context is ‘a way of “knowing”—a method of discovery and analyses’ (Richardson 923). This approach naturally lends itself to narrative non-fiction in particular, enabling an enquiry that goes beyond works of traditional travelogue and memoir by transcribing experiences of landscape through personal narratives that together offer new perspectives on our deep and dynamic relationships with place.

   4. Chapter 10. The Spatiality of Social Media: A Social-Phenomenological and Practice-Theoretical Approach

      Suraj Chaudhary

      Abstract

      As everyday practices are increasingly transferred to or mediated by digital technologies, spatial concepts such as ‘online social space’ are often used to characterize online interactions, colloquially and academically. However, it remains unclear whether and how digitally mediated interactions constitute social spaces. This chapter contributes to recent literature examining the spatiality of online social interactions using a phenomenological framework. Taking as a starting point the social-phenomenological insights found in the works of Alfred Schutz, the paper pursue three lines of argument. First, it shows how two recent applications of Schutz’s ideas to online social interactions fall short. Second, it argues that Schutz’s notion of immediacy and the emphasis on nearness in the phenomenological theories of place can be effectively applied to the question of online social spaces. Using this social-phenomenological framework, the paper shows how social media platforms constitute social spaces. Third, it argues that ideas in practice theory can shed further light on the spatiality of social media platforms, characterizing them as novel venues for older practices and thereby strengthening the social-phenomenological account. The chapter concludes by briefly noting two implications of viewing social media platforms as social spaces: first, for countering youth mental health issues related to social media use, and second, for making online public spaces more accessible.

   5. Chapter 11. Afterword: Place as a Necessary Social Construct

      Tim Cresswell

      Abstract

      At the heart of this book are explorations practicing place and the practice of placing. Notions of place are brought into lively conversation with forms of mobile fluidity that sometimes make, and sometimes undo place. Place and the practice of place are center stage in the practice of, and resistance to, forms of power and domination. Collectively, these essays make it clear that thinking about place, and specifically its links to practice, is an intellectually ongoing business that brings a conceptual and political liveliness to the ways we contemplate and act in the world.

   6. Chapter 12. Reorienting Place Research: Upcoming Perspectives and Positions in ‘Practicing Place’

      Sarah Earnshaw, Robert Schmidt, Christian Steiner, Hans-Martin Zademach, Michael Zimmermann

      Abstract

      This short concluding piece considers ‘sense of placing’ as part of a research agenda in Practicing Place, from which the collection originated. Presented as a bricolage, itself a practice of positioning across disciplines and theoretical slants, the following excerpts touch upon the multiple scales, subjects, areas, and approaches of a Practicing Place lens which goes beyond the constitutive dyads of public/private, political/personal, institutional/informal, existential/every day. Gathering perspectives from sociology, geography, art history, and cultural studies, we consider future directions for the study of terrains of conflict, spatial planning, new epistemologies, more-than-human approaches, and the workplace. While serving as a closing text, we also intend this assembly of research impulses to extend an invitation to reflect upon the practicing of place and placing of practice.

6. Backmatter