Studying Places/Spaces

1. Studying Places/Spaces CI8470,Fall, 2008

2. Performance Theory • What positions, spatial or discursive, do participants take up in relation to each other? • What positions, spatial or discursive, do participants take up in relation to the text? • What social codes are available to participants in this context? • What ways of talking, not talking, acting are performed in this exchange? What do these ways of talking, not talking, or acting suggest about individual or group identities? • How are these performances tied to larger systems of power?

3. The value of place-based learning: Knowledge • Robert Brooke (ed. Rural Voices, NCTE), “If we understand our local place well enough to grasp how it came to be this way, the forces that shape it, and how it compares to other places, we will have developed a robust and extensive knowledge base” (p. 63). 

4. Place--> Meaning of Space • Place: the actual physical site, event, or activity in lived or text worlds • Space: the meanings we associate with place • Subjective • Autobiographical • Social/cultural • Power

5. Frames: Phenomenological: Subjective • Attachment to place: Uniqueness • Uniqueness vs. homogeneity and standardization: “McDonaldlization” (#1 in sales in France) • What if everything looked the same? • Celebrating the local: challenge top-down imposition of corporate sameness and standards as standardization

6. Michael Perry: Population 456: subjective New Auburn • I am happy here, but my gravitation to place has always been balanced by my need to move. I crave a contrapuntal mix of shiftlessness and stability. In bed at night, I can hear the trucks out on the highway. Sometimes a driver drifts across the white line, and when the tires hit the rumble strip, the rubbery howl makes me want to drive away in the night, fills me with the urge to go west, makes me think the finest sort of freedom is found at sunrise in a South Dakota rest stop. Contentment, it turns out, can be a matter of global positioning.

7. Subjective: affiliation: insider versus outsider • “The Laundromat,” Larry Watson They hate us here and why not. We’re the summer people, The cottage owners, lake dwellers, The city folks, the flatlanders, here to use every washer and dryer and on no special Schedule…. You can tell , they’d like to say, bag your clothes and wash them at home, wear them dirty, beat them on a rock for all we care. But they can’t they don’t dare because we buy our groceries from Howard at the IGA And our malts from Tutt’s Tastee Freeze

8. Milwaukee suburb Home: safe/pastoral Focus: beyond the local Travel, cars Focus: seasons Critique of sameness and consumerism Urban CA. Home: danger Focus: the local Parks, street corners,community Little about nature Critique of poverty and challenges of urban life Poems about place: Steve Athanases, UC,Davis

9. Frame: narrative or autobiographical • Stories about a place • Autobiographical recollections • Family histories • Fictional versions • Tall tales • Creation myths • Documented historical accounts

10. Perry: time: rural development Today, when I see the cornfields sprouting duplexes and hear my neighbors mourning the loss of the family farm--a decimation that began in the 1980s and is now virtually complete--my gut sympathies lie foursquare with the displaced farmers, but I can’t help but think that this land has been lost before.

11. Pedagogies of Place: Design (Ellsworth, 2005) • “The experience of the learning self in the times and places of knowledge in the making, which are also the times and places of the learning self in the making” • Places “speak to and about pedagogy indirectly through design…[they are] things in the making [that] provide us with a ‘zone of historical indetermination’ that allows room for experimentation.”

12. Maya Lin: Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial

13. Linking internal imagination and external reality • Lin: “I create places in which to think, without trying to dictate what to think.” • Pedagogy: “must create places in which to think without already knowing what we should think.” • Place “confronts us from outside the concepts we already have, outside the subjectivities we already are.”

14. Public versus private spaces • Rec Center: “face-time” • “having one’s ‘face’ recognizing by another person or being able to see the face (or body) of a person whom one might be interested in meeting.” • Positioning: “opening-lines” • Strutting: attention to oneself • Timing: being there at the “right time” • Transgressions: stalkers, roamers, lurkers

15. Frame: Categories: regions/groups • Geographic categories/regions • “Suburbia”/”urban”/”rural”/”small town” • “Midwestern,” “Southern,” “West” • “Small town” • “Dying” main street businesses: WalMarts • Value of sense of community

16. Moje: Latino youth: hybrid identities in different spaces • Different neighborhoods • Space for building ethnic identities • Texts/dress for identification • Malls: sense of being “different” • “Space for othering and being othered” • Virtual spaces: lowrider.com • “The ethnic community space of their lives remained dominant in their textual choices and literacy practices.”

17. Frame: affiliation markers: Perry: lawn art • In New Auburn, as in any place, lawn art is a form of public display as simultaneously trite and revealing as bumper stickers and nose rings. Between the porch and the road, iconography sprouts: the bathtub Madonna, the milk-cow windmill, giant mushrooms carved from stumps, yellow Norwegian Crossing traffic signs--these images speak to who we are.

18. Small-town Minnesota Summer Festivals • Ron Lavenda: Cornfests and Water Carnivals • Celebration of town unity/coherence • Display of expertise/resources • “Corn Days” • Socialization of new members • Queen’s Pageant • Demonstration of commitment to town values • Gender identity associated with traditional values • Assuming the role of representing the town’s idealized expectations for young people • Pleasure at witnessing commitment to conforming to these expectations

19. Regional spaces: Mediated by popular culture: “Wild West” “Wild West” portrayed in cowboys, Indians, 10-gallon hats, saloons, guns, horses, frontier, ghost towns, tumbleweeds, ranches, sheriff, dirt, wind, dreams coming true, glitter and gold, Hollywood, movie stars, the pull of California etc.

20. Regional identities: values • Living well/valuing ecology/biology • Civic involvements • Know about/actively address local issues • Sense of economic worth • Know local opportunities • Spiritual connection to place • Belonging to a community

21. Regional identities • Being someone from a certain place/ region • Cheryl: “Therefore, I realized my racial identity was so inextricably connected to the space in where I grew up. Indeed, Los Angeles, itself, helped me identify who I was, and when I venture beyond its border, I realized my racial identity lost its meaning.” • Melissa Cook: Texas to LA • Gendered/culural spaces

22. Gendered space: Japanese department store

23. Reynolds: women and space: safety/control • Domestic spaces: oppressive • Public spaces: unsafe • Neighborhoods in music videos: • Male spaces • Feminist geography/ecocriticism

24. Classed space: Bettie: cultural capital and class • “Hard-living” vs. “settled-living” habitus • Lack of continuity/support • “White-trash” smokers: marginalized • Behavior: it’s there choice to behave • Awards ceremony: celebration of preps • Excluded from social school networking

25. Hard-living: poverty/instability • Problematic: Ruby Payne: culture of poverty • Shift from structural factors to blame on the “pathological” values of “poor families” • Sense of unfairness but not framed in structural, systemic terms • Blame victims vs. economic/political system • Lack of stable attachment to schools • Housing/changes: no consistency

26. Raced spaces • Suburbia/Exurbia: Whiteness: “white flight” • Homogeneity: fear of diversity • Segregated/gated communities • Political power shift: state legislatures • Cuts in funding for urban areas

27. Whiteness: positioning • White privilege/safety • Assumed as the invisible norm • Order, rationality,self-control, power • Colorblind racism: “we’re all the same” • Local pedagogy: • Understand race/power relationships • How one learned about race • Resistance to interrogating privilege

28. Costs of segregation • Sheryll Cashin,The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream • Racist real estate policies: “desirable neighborhoods”: higher housing prices • Gary Orfield (Harvard Civil Rights Project: will be at UCLA in 2007): housing segregation and schooling

29. McDermott: Meaning of white identity: context dependent • Observations: white/black interactions in convenience stores in similar working-class neighborhoods: different histories • Atlanta: no sense of working-class/ethnic solidarity • Whites perceived as “failures” • Boston: privileged as working-class whites • Strong positive identification with neighborhood

30. Interracial interactions in the stores • Misperceptions/stereotypes • “Jane (white) interacts with Sue (Black) as Sue--until Sue mentions her white boyfriend, or mistakedly insults Jane, or mentions the trouble her child has with the law; then Sue becomes a black person, and a whole set of group-based stereotypes can be activated. Conversely, Sue interacts with Jane as Jane, until Jane remarks about “those people” moving into the neighborhood…”

31. Frame: ecological perspectives on space “There is a real world, that is really dying, and we had better think about that” -Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country Jut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World--most resources depleted by 2060 http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/Advertising_EndOfWorld

32. Analyzing music/media fan spaces as “scenes” or “zones” • Scenes: Spaces to play • Buffy nights: fan responses in a bar • Fans sharing of knowledge/expertise • Monty Python's Spamalot • Bedroom culture as a “zone” • Soundscapes, memorabilia, multi-tasking, work • Music club as spectacle: “zoning out”

33. Three types of spaces (Soja) • Firstspace: Actual physical place • Secondspace: Intellectual/Imagined spaces • Idealized versions of what spaces should/could be • Thirdspace: tensions between actual and imagined

34. Space and positioning • How one is positioned by the spatial aspects/artifacts/social practices • Higher education: position working-class student as marginal • Fails to consider Thirdspace, borderland tensions between ideal and reality of working-class students’ lives

35. Frame: Power in space: Positioning/stance • How am I being positioned to respond to this experience, event, or the text? • Do I accept or reject how I am being positioned to respond? • What are the different “modes of address” Ellsworth?

36. In-between, hybrid spaces (Solomon, Boud, & Rooney) • On-the-job spaces • “Productive” vs. “non-productive” • Off-the-job spaces • Overlap, “in between,” ambivalent spaces • Work breaks • Talking spaces

37. Border Theory: physical/cultural borders • US/Mexico borderlands • hybridity, hierarchies, colonialism • Bejarano, C., (2005) Que onda?: Urban Youth Culture and Border Identity • 4 year ethnography: high school • Chicana/o vs. Mexicano youth • Distinct social spaces in the school

38. De Fina: social categories and narratives • Narratives reflect schema • “Membership Categorization Analysis” • Local practices in using categories • Being “Hispanic”: Mexican workers • Defining properties of categories • Relations with others • Storytellers: being Hispanic: discrimination

39. Erdreich and Rapoport, Reading the Power of Spaces: • Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University • Employed spatial literacies to transform oppressive spaces for own agency • Coping with borders between official/legal practices and resisting practices

40. Time: Canyon alternative high school program • Different uses of time from “official school chronotope” • Late passes, Saturday school, catch-up work • “factory/efficiency time” vs. “science time” • Value of alternative time schedules • Official school time controlled, segmented, decontextualized, contained

41. Mauk: Gordan Community College • “Students, themselves, in an academic third space are the intersection of academic and nonacademic spatialities--defined by their own bodies” • Interview people outside of school on issues of education • Nature of work in different places • How to correspond with politicians

42. Mauk: focus on nonacademic vs. academic spaces • Online spaces vs. campus spaces • Online writing feedback: U Writing Center • http://writing.umn.edu/sws/appointments.htm • Writing about nonacademic spaces

43. Ethnography methods • Adopting an “outsider” “Martian” cultural perspective • Problem: being a fish in water • Adopting an insider “emic” perspective • “Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar” (Erickson) • Finding insider informants • Extensive observations: fly on the wall • Interviewing • Understanding practices as reflecting discourses/cultural models • High school study: Cultural models of physical and intellectual control in the school

44. Field notes: Fieldworking • Focus: selective perception • Verbal snapshots: 5-10 details • Descriptive vs. general language • People’s practices/appearances • Use of photos/videos: digital storytelling • “Ethnography of a University”: video clips • Triangulate: cross-check with others

45. Mapping spaces • Where things are located • What type of people are sitting with whom (race, class, gender) • People’s body positioning/relationships • Leander: classroom maps • F-formation: position of lower body • Facing versus turning away

46. Immersing: Fast Food Restaurant/Cafeteria • Take dual-entry field notes on left side about specific aspects of the Décor, people, conversations, ordering rituals, language • Map the site noting who sits where; who interacts with whom and how • Reflect on the right side next to specific notes on the • Cultural norms, roles, beliefs, assumptions • Social interactions between people • One’s own relationship to the place • Sense of how you are positioned

47. Interviewing • Developing questions based on prior research about the person • Asking “grand tour” questions about the overall “big picture” experience • Asking open-ended vs. yes/no questions • Follow-up questions to foster elaboration • “Pointing” interviews to focus on specifics

48. Analyze transcript: Interview with your participant • the amount/rough percentage of time each person talked • the turn-taking and topic focus • the kinds of speech acts employed by each person • the voices adopted reflecting certain roles or stances and how these voices or stances positioned you or your participant (Ribeiro and Schiffrin chapters). • adoption of any discourses reflected in these voices or stances • the influence of the interview genre itself • nonverbal cues/markers on the exchange.