The final program for next week’s conference is now available. The schedule is as follows:
Friday, March 2nd
Social Science Research Commons, Woodburn Hall
9:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Identities in the Landscape
Chelsea Wait, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Racialization of the Landscape
Ben Bridges, Indiana University Bloomington
Cultural Borderlands and Boundary Crossing in Contemporary Quechua Myth
Stephanie Mojica, Harvard Extension School
How the Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Brazil is Threatening Racial and Gender Landscapes
Cortney Anderson Kramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Art-Environment: A Spatialized Laboratory for Identity Expression
11:30 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. BREAK
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Cinematic Landscapes
Caleb Allison, Indiana University Bloomington
Our Shining Beast: The Technological Uncanny and Postmodern in the Qatsi Trilogy
Jesse Balzer, Indiana University Bloomington
Winning in La La Land: Prestige, Place, and the Cultural Geography of Movie Marketing
1:30 p.m. – 1:45 p. m. BREAK
1:45 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. Literary Landscapes
Harrison Baldwin, The Ohio State University
Landscapes of Memory: The Natural Archive in Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene
Richard Allberry, Indiana University Bloomington
Anthropomorphism and Cheap Labor in Jude the Obscure
Nathan Schmidt, Indiana University Bloomington
Poe and the Geocritical: Mapping the Literary Antarctic
3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. BREAK
3:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. Keynote I
Dr. Olimpia Rosenthal, Indiana University Bloomington
The Discovery of the New World in the Cartographic Imaginary of Early Modern Europe
Following Columbus’s famed “discovery,” the process of mapping the Americas fueled the imagination of European artists and cartographers. The image of the Americas that we see emerging in world-maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers as much insight into the cartographic developments of early modernity, as it does into the way in which European cultural projections produced an imaginative, and often fantastical, characterization of an exploitable New World. In his pioneering study on what the discovery—or in his words “the invention”—of Americas implied for Western epistemology, Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman anticipated many of the arguments that Said would later expound on in his well-known theory about Orientalism. Drawing from visual cultural studies, this talk traces the image of the New World that emerges in the cartographic imaginary of early modern Europe, and it offers a critical reflection of its implications. The primary focus of the talk is on the recurrent tropes that were used to represent this geographical space: including the depiction of the Americas as a woman, and the portrayal of many of its inhabitants as cannibals.
The conference participants (plus family and significant others) are invited to attend dinner at Le Petit Café (308 W 6th St.) at 7 pm. Please RSVP with the number of attendees to iulandscapeconference@gmail.com by February 25.
Friday, March 3rd
Social Science Research Commons, Woodburn Hall
9:00 a.m. – 10:15am Keynote II
Dr. Morgan Liu, The Ohio State University
How a Central Asian Patron Created a Public (of a Sort)
An ethnic Uzbek leader in the city of Jalalabat, Kyrgyzstan invested great economic resources and political capital into constructing urban institutions and space that served Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbeks – university, media, mosques, charities, cultural centers. Yet, those were positioned as loyal Kyrgyzstani institutions serving the common good of the republic, within a sensitive political context where any Uzbek communal initiative was seen as potentially seditious to the ethnic Kyrgyz in power. This Uzbek leader solidified his position as the city’s grand Uzbek patron by, I argue, creating a kind of public that allegedly transcended the social fissures of the republic and gestured toward Soviet-era ideals. An ethnographic look at the spaces of his “public”, however, suggests a more complex outcome. Field research builds on my 2012 monograph, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Societal Renewal in Osh.
10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. BREAK
10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Public/Private Spaces
Casey Munroe, Boston University
Space Between: The Function and Use of Screening Zones near Interstate 93 in Medford, MA
Pragya Paramita Ghosh, Indiana University Bloomington
How the Fearless Girl Challenged a Bull and Got Away With It
Robby Hardesty, University of Kentucky
Landscape and Atmosphere
Stephen Volan, Indiana University Bloomington
The Geography of School in Classical Athens and on the American College Campus
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. BREAK
1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Internet Connectivity and Space
Cole Stratton, Indiana University Bloomington
Accumulation by Connectivity: Infrastructure and Value in Facebook’s Global Expansion
Forrest Greenwood, Indiana University Bloomington
Navigating Local Spaces Through WiFi: The Case of the Nintendo DS and Digital Game Distribution
2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Cities, Violence, and Resistance
Clara Steussy, Indiana University Bloomington
The Shadow of the Sentinel: Relationships to the Wyoming Landscape during Japanese American Incarceration
Lior D. Shragg, The Ohio State University
Can’t Keep Quiet: The Sounds of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington
Sanchari Mukhopadhyay, Jawaharlal Nehru University
The Emerging Spaces of Urban Imaginaries Amidst the New Urban Walls: Anecdotes from the People at the Margin of the Capital City of New Delhi, India
Ian Spangler University of Kentucky
Google, Airbnb, and Reproducing “The 73”
Abstracts
Alphabetical by last name of presenter
Richard Allberry, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of English
Anthropomorphism and Cheap Labor in Jude the Obscure
This paper argues for a connection between class consciousness, anthropomorphism, and ecological awareness. Recent geographical and ecocritical scholarship calls for nature to be recast as organized by and working for capitalism rather than being acted upon by it passively. Less attended to is what this reconceptualization means for the animal and its relation to the human and its (exploited) environment. When nature is reimagined as a just another proletarianized source of cheap labor, where does that leave the animal—the being who depends on nature’s labor but extracts none of its value? And how might this reimagining complicate animal/human boundaries and hierarchies?
To answer these questions, I turn to a close reading of an early scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) in which a young Jude earns wages as a human scarecrow in a local farmer’s cornfield. Informed by Jane Bennett’s readings of Darwin and Jason Moore’s “double internality” hypothesis of late capitalism working through nature and vice versa, this analysis reveals that compassion for the animal Other alone insufficiently accounts for Jude’s belated ethical treatment of the rooks he is paid to scare away. Rather, it is Jude’s anthropomorphic, narcissistic projections of human traits onto the rooks that enables a sympathetic forfeiture of the corn to the rooks and a resulting forfeiture of Jude’s wages. These projections illuminate the interdependencies between Jude’s body and the rooks’ bodies, an illumination that must happen in the collision between the cornfield as Jude’s work space and the cornfield as the rooks’ feeding ground. In doing so, this essay aims to recuperate anthropomorphosis as an act that need not end in denying animal subjectivity, but instead might unexpectedly inaugurate a deeper ecological awareness.
Caleb Allison, Indiana University Bloomington, The Media School
Our Shining Beast: The Technological Uncanny and Postmodern in The Qatsi Trilogy
Spanning nineteen years between 1983 and 2002, Godfrey Reggio’s The Qatsi Trilogy, comprised of Koyaanisqatsi (1983), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), offer varying yet cohesive perspectives on the destructive consequences of humanity’s increasing reliance on technological advancement at the expense of nature, connection, and spirituality. Eschewing any traditional narrative devices the trilogy uses montage, associative editing, time-lapse, slow/fast motion, found footage, and CGI to construct its critical commentary. Integral to the series is a focus on the moralistic tension between the natural and the artificial, the intimate and the distracted, meaningful places and devoid spaces.
This proposal addresses how the innovative use of formal devices and subject matter may be understood through Scott McQuire’s concept of the technological uncanny. Each film relies on distinct formal devices to represent the rapidly changing spatio-temporal configurations of late capitalism and postmodernity, through what David Harvey terms time-space compression, and its production of new paradigms of communication, mobility, capital and culture. A close textual analysis of these films and their formal and thematic devices alongside relevant theoretical contributions from spatial humanity scholars, particularly Harvey and Doreen Massey, expose the innovative and deeply uncanny effects the series produces. Historically contextualizing this series in the lineage of city-symphony films also reveals a cyclical rhetoric regarding the annihilation of space and time, critical to understanding the position of this series in the perpetual evolution of discourses regarding technological advancement and anxiety.
Harrison Baldwin, The Ohio State University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Landscapes of Memory: The Natural Archive in Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene
In her work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt hierarchically categorizes three essential human activities: labor, work, and action. Each of these activities exploit nature in its own way, whether to fulfill biological needs, cultivate durable use-objects, or embed such use-objects (particularly art) with immaterial significance to extend the memory of a human life beyond its natural limits. In all of her descriptions of these activities, however, mankind ultimately dominates and excludes nature from any kind of agency, reducing it to a state of timeless chaos, incapable of remembering itself.
I contend that Max Frisch refutes this monopoly on memory in his 1979 novella Man in the Holocene (Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän) by depicting metaphors of natural landscapes alongside meditations on the impermanence of human memory. The work follows the ailing Mr. Geiser as he unsuccessfully tries to prolong his biological memory through the construction of mnemonic devices throughout his home. The main timeline, however, is occasionally interrupted by vivid memories of trips to desolate, even hostile, landscapes. By juxtaposing these geologically-formed landscapes of his past with the construction of his mnemonic devices, Frisch demonstrates that not only is nature capable of producing memory and storing it in natural archives, these archives will also outlast those produced by mankind. This realization spurs a palpable schism in Herr Geiser’s psyche, where he still clings to the belief of man’s dominion over nature while simultaneously feeling his own insignificance in the vastness of deep time. Furthermore, by rejecting his natural body, he isolates his mind from the immortality that these natural processes could potentially offer.
Jesse Balzer, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Communication & Culture
Winning in La La Land: Prestige, Place, and the Cultural Geography of Movie Marketing
Unlike the annual Oscars and Emmys, which serve as publicly-oriented spectacles for the American film and media industries, the annual Clio Entertainment Awards (formerly The Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Awards) is a non-televised, industry-focused award show for the best work in entertainment promotion: honoring the best trailers, posters, and social media campaigns for Hollywood blockbusters, video games, and new original series. These award shows establish standards and codify the “creative excellence” of film and media marketing. The Clio Entertainment awards play a key role in structuring the value of promotional media texts and the labor involved in creating them, structures which otherwise (at other times, and in other places) render such labor relatively invisible and subservient to the larger demands of studios and copyright holders. In this paper, I analyze the winner of a Grand Clio Award, La La Land (2016), in order to illustrate how these award shows qualify the value of promotional media labor, and do so through the use of short trailers which sell the effectiveness of a given marketing campaign to a jury comprised entirely of peers in the advertising industry. I argue that the value of these awards – perhaps best exemplified by the award given to La La Land’s marketing, as well as the award shows’ placement in Los Angeles’ most prestigious theaters – must be understood as reliant upon, and participating in the continued circulation of, industrial myths about Los Angeles as the principal place of Hollywood glamour. More generally, I argue that obscured award shows like the Clio Entertainment Awards prompt us to consider not only how the value of media labor is constructed, but most crucially where it is constructed, and how these places of prestige participate in the larger stratification of media work in and around Los Angeles.
Ben Bridges, Indiana University, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Cultural Borderlands and Boundary Crossing in Contemporary Quechua Myth
Situated at the intersection of folklore, anthropology and international studies, this paper explores the relationship between tourism and mythology among the indigenous Quechua in southern Peru. Interviews, participant observation and direct observation were used to collect data relating to how myths are perceived, shared and applied in the Sacred Valley community of Huilloc. In a setting where tourism and religious syncretism are ubiquitous, the Quechua in Huilloc are in an interesting position regarding cultural change and adaptation. Quechua myths provide particularly useful commentary on the ways community members negotiate interactions with tourists and construct a Quechua identity specific to Huilloc. Boundary crossing surfaces as one of the predominant themes in Quechua myth both historically and contemporarily, making it a useful tool for navigating spaces of intercultural contact during moments of colonization and globalization. Analysis of myths illuminates not only the difference between outgoing and incoming boundary crossings, but also the distinction between how community members perceive and evaluate individuals’ movements from one state to another. The creator god Viracocha, the miraculous Niño Melchor, and various trickster animals are all key characters in myths that reveal how Quechua villagers navigate tourism, an industry rooted in boundary crossing. As a result of tourism, the Quechua throughout the Sacred Valley have commodified their myths and mythic figures for economic benefit and cultural exchange while simultaneously taking advantage of the opportunity to reinvigorate and reinterpret local lore and their ancient Inca past. The thematic focus parallels previous studies on Quechua narrative response to globalizing forces such as mining and oil drilling, but the dearth of scholarship regarding narrative responses to tourism-especially through myth-creates an important area for analysis.
Pragya Paramita Ghosh, Indiana University Bloomington, The Media School
How the Fearless Girl challenged a Bull; and got away with it.
This paper will attempt to look at the debates raging over the ownership of public spaces and how the idea of public space is being re-defined. With the increasing privatization of these spaces and the creation of POPS (privately-owned-public-spaces) the question emerges who does this ‘public’ space belong to? Are they still public if they are being monitored and surveillance. In an age of shrinking spaces, these public spaces remain the only sites not just for protest but also for leisure and recreation accessible to the everyday man.
I will also attempt to look at how these spaces are being used as canvases for protests. The idea is to not merely use the streets and public spaces as site for the protest but also reclaim these sites through art as a way of protest. The aim of this paper would be look at various such movements place across various cities of the world. For example, in Nairobi, the people have collaborated with a local NGO to create a superhero called Upendo Hero who was the defender of public space, an enemy of the gentrification and fought against the privatization of these public spaces. Similarly, the Lagos Photo Festival , an annual month-long photography festival of exhibition and workshops has become one of the biggest art festivals which looks at incorporating the community in art practices to highlight how community spaces could be used for creative purpose. What becomes important is that there is a continual search for newer spaces that could be incorporated into the larger global movement, from walls, to parks to buildings.
While there may be the ‘unknown’ Bansky creating his works as a means of protests, there are several other such Bansky who are voicing their protests through art activism to reclaim social geographies by asserting their presence and bodies in these spaces and their manifestations and representations across social media.
Forrest Greenwood, Indiana University Bloomington, Dept. of Communication and Culture
“Navigating Local Spaces through WiFi: The Case of the Nintendo DS and Digital Game Distribution”
Studies of space in video games have, to date, largely focused on exploring the simulated spaces navigated by the player or the ways that game play itself works to transform its surrounding spaces. Less explored are the ways in which games navigate and exert influence upon the spaces of industrial distribution that deliver game media to their end users. While industry and fan discourses surrounding the “digital” distribution of video games (distribution through the internet rather than on discrete physical media like cartridges or disks) frequently adhere to a rhetoric of dematerialization, the history of game developer and publisher Nintendo begs a consideration of the materiality of digital game distribution. For beyond Nicole Starosielski’s argument that the supposedly-dematerialized internet is, in fact, thoroughly and inescapably grounded within the terrestrial and aquatic environments through which signal-bearing cables pass (Starosielski 2015, 6-7), and beyond even Paul Dourish’s argument that the very “protocols, representations, models, and interactions” that comprise computer networks and the internet are inherently material (Dourish 2015, 184), Nintendo’s approach to digital distribution with its DS handheld gaming system highlights the spatial specificity of Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) networking.
While competing gaming devices used WiFi functionality to browse the web and download content from remote servers, the DS instead used WiFi to facilitate short-range wireless connections between DS systems for networked play, and to wirelessly connect to retail distribution kiosks at physical stores. In so doing, the DS emphasizes the use of WiFi not so much to connect to a global, seemingly-dematerialized internet, but rather to connect to devices that share the physical space of the user. This presentation seeks as well to explore the ways in which the DS’ approach to WiFi reflects Nintendo’s longstanding history of engaging with localized, often urban, space as a means for digitally distributing software.
Robby Hardesty, University of Kentucky, Geography
Landscape and Atmosphere
My paper animates the lived intensities of everyday life in cities, centering around the embodied experience of surveillance during a surreal walk into the New York City subway during morning rush hour. From surveillance cameras to looming bank towers to the tensed shoulders of precarious labor, forces take shape the city, everywhere dominating. Our world comes riddled with traps: how does it feel to find yourself stuck in them? I use fantastic figures and images to demonstrate the feeling of the force of flows of power and control, in an attempt to capture the affective atmosphere of the urban landscape. The landscape itself is figured as the unconscious production of a dreaming, delirious collective. It takes shape as an inherited pattern of flows of force. How is it that power relations become stabilized into bodies and landscapes and naturalized as “where social order happens” (McKittrick 2006, xiv)? And how do we break the inheritance?
Cortney Anderson Kramer, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Art History
The Art – Environment: a spatialized laboratory for identity expression
“People are their place and a place is its people, and however readily these may be separated in conceptual terms, in experience they are not easily differentiated.” (1)
This essay will present three Wisconsin art-environments as exemplar that the art-environment phenomenon operates as a laboratory for personal expression through the embrace, practice and transformation of non-artistic materials and skills. I will argue that the artist’s combined qualification for place and identity – especially ethnic and regional identity – are the common thread of the art-environment. Thinking of art-environments in this way counters the literature’s tendency to sentimentalize the artist’s biography and naivete, romanticizing “visionary” artists as though their work exists in isolation of social influence. (2)
The notion of the secluded outsider contradicts the wayside nature of the art-environment, which frequently showcases public signage visible to passer’s-by, large sculptural structures, towers and brilliant colors, all of which are the product of and create local ethnic and regional identity of the artist and his or her community. Many of such artists are fueled by religious fervor, choose to express their ethnic heritage, and employ their sometimes-non-traditional artistic skills in the construction of their immersive environments. Altogether, these Wisconsin artists share a creative impulse to transform their home into a place that functions as a work of art and an expression of their spatialized identity.
Stephanie Mojica, Harvard University, Extension School, graduate student
How the Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Brazil is Threatening Racial and Gender Landscapes
With evangelical Christianity on the rise in Brazil, female members of Afro-Brazilian religions are being treated as outsiders and attacked for alleged “devil worship.” However, if these attacks were about “devil worship,” extremist Christians would attack Satanists.
Leaders and spirits/orixás in Candomblé, Umbanda, and other Afro-Brazilian religions are overwhelmingly black women and known for their healing powers (just like many evangelical Christian clergymen). Annually, at least 10,000 people from all over the world honor Yemanjá in Rio de Janeiro by dressing in white and placing offerings such as white roses into the ocean. Such a public display honoring a central divine feminine figure in the Afro-Brazilian religious world surely incites the prejudices of overly zealous Christian men.
Because male evangelical Christian and Afro-Brazilian female religious leaders are known for their healing powers and work with spirits, this creates competition in Brazil’s expansive religious marketplace and also threatens the patriarchal nature of fundamentalist Christianity. Therefore, it is not shocking that 61% of religiously fueled hate crimes in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 were against Candomblé and Umbanda practitioners and/or worship spaces.
With U.S. President Donald Trump calling African and Latino nations “shithole countries” and conservative Rio de Janeiro Mayor Marcelo Crivella denouncing Carnaval (an iconic annual event that at least tolerates drag queens, transvestites, and scantily clad women), it is no wonder conservative men in Brazil are attacking non-Christian women of color with impunity. With the current national and global political climate, even the divine feminine is not safe in Brazil.
Casey Monroe, Boston University, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Space Between: The Function and Use of Screening Zones Near Interstate 93 in Medford, MA
Whether driving or being driven on them, along them, below or above them, or even walking around them, encountering highways and their supporting infrastructure is an inevitability in 21st century America. What are easily overlooked in these encounters, however, are the often landscaped liminal spaces that delineate highway boundaries. As outlined by the 1965 “Landscape Design Guide”, published by the American Association of State Highway Officials, these screening zones serve the intended purpose of retaining value in multiple ways and for multiple parties. For the motorist, they preserve the aesthetic experience of the highway—offering visual respite from the road’s monotony; while, for the homeowner whose property abuts a noisy and polluted roadway, the screening zone breaks the cacophony and retains real estate value. Typically meant to remain untrodden and uninhabited, these spaces consequently lose their visibility, becoming overlooked spaces that fade into the milieu of the American urban landscape. As an unintended consequence of this inconspicuousness, they are often appropriated by individuals and communities they were not initially intended for. Using as a model the screening zones around exit 31 of Interstate 93 in Medford, MA, this paper argues that screening zones determine classed experiences of the American landscape.
An exploration of these screening zones in Medford, MA reveals multiple well-established encampments as well as other indications of semi-permanent inhabitation. Meant to delineate exclusive, official landscapes intended for property owners, screening zones then become inclusive spaces utilized by those without. These spaces then perform a dual screening: for those who wish not to see, and for those who wish not to be seen. These screening zones, which themselves are the product of American highway and transportation infrastructure, shape classed perceptions and experiences of the American landscape.
Sanchari Mukhopadhyay, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for the Study of Regional Development
The Emerging Spaces of Urban Imaginaries Amidst the New Urban Walls: Anecdotes from the People at the Margin of the Capital City of New Delhi, India
The concern of my research has been based on two sets of processes; the increasing urban affiliation of the working class leading to enormous migration and the continuing process of gentrification of the city leading to constant demolition of slums and squatter settlements to make a place for the ‘exclusives’. With the presence of two such processes, I found this interesting to understand how the urban poor are making a sense of their place where increasing cosmopolitanism as well as aestheticization of the capital city is continually pushing them out to the distant peripheries, denying their due share in the city-space and its benefits. The research ideally contrived upon the Marxian theory of substructure and superstructure where I have tried to understand the present form of society through the life of the working class as a substructure that manifests and maintains the interest of the ruling class and the dominant ideologies of neoliberalisation, and vise-versa. With the sole objective to take out the real-life stories of hope and despair, the present work therefore tries to inquire about the life in a city where I anticipate this attempt to provide a useful lens for evaluating the on-going urbanisation process and the nature of inclusiveness of the poor into the city-space. The study is completely based on both quantitative and qualitative interviews across various working-class colonies in peri-urban Delhi where I expect the narratives to throw lights upon the way the people are trying to establish a stake in the city and accomplish an actual sense of the ‘right to the city’. The surveys essentially aimed at documenting people’s experiences in the city before and post eviction and their current situation of basic services and living condition. The interviews with the key-informants have also deeply looked into their association with the ‘urban development’ to essentially give them a voice as active citizens. I believe, the way space is imagined by this majority can be a useful tool to explore how the process of place making is contemplating the global economic and political conditions of lived-spaces in an urban setting and how identity is being shaped by the place and vice-versa.
Nathan Schmidt, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of English
Poe and the Geocritical: Mapping the Literary Antarctic
Taking up Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s suggestion that worlds of literature and nature are not separate from each other, but follow each other in an “aparallel evolution,” Bertrand Westphal inaugurated the critical methodology of geocriticism. Since the book and the world evolve together, Westphal posited a “geocentric” method of critical inquiry, as opposed to an “egocentric” method of literary criticism that always begins with the author or perceiver of the text. Geocriticism starts with a place as the focal point of analysis and builds interpretations of the place by mapping the constellation of texts that represent it.
After introducing the basic methodological paradigms of geocriticism, this paper explores what happens at the convergence of a place and its representations – in this case, the place is Antarctica, and the representations are Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the maps of Antarctica that Poe consulted while writing the novel, which advertises adventures “beyond the 84th parallel” into the South Polar regions. Studying the intersection of map, text, and place yields interpretative conclusions that would be impossible if any part of the triad were considered by itself. While this fact alone suggests a key understanding of ecological interconnectedness, this paper explores the ways that its multifold cartographic and literary representations reveal Antarctica as a place that is always pushing against human attempts to represent it, with its own uncanny interior agency. The intersection of map, text, and place shows that Antarctica is a place where the terms of what Deleuze and Guattari call “smooth and striated space” are constantly being renegotiated – the cold, dead landmass at the end of the world is actually alive within itself, anarchically smoothing over human attempts to striate it, or map it completely.
Lior D. Shragg – Ohio University, Department of Ethnomusicology
Can’t Keep Quiet: The Sounds of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington
This presentation examines the songs and improvised chants that were performed during the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. My study of the protest reveals that the urban environment of Washington D.C. acted as a synchronic musical landscape that fostered the creation of new music which reflected the socio-political agenda of this revolutionary event. This newly created musical content can be seen as an indication of future revolution and change. Kutschke (2015) posits that urban environments are “good cradles for protest.” By supporting this research with interdisciplinary scholarship, I aim to show how the acoustical environment of Washington D.C. functions as a musical landscape that triggers revolution. This presentation will draw upon conducted interviews and musical analysis in an effort to examine the power and weight of song and chant in protest. The musical output of this revolutionary event is directly correlated with the identity politics of its creators. I argue that these politics combined to create a “stronger together” dynamic that has guided this movement and continues to fuel it forward. There is a sense of great pride and individuality amongst the participants of this march and a desire to make their voices heard. Music is the tool with which they project their messages of persistence and hope.
Ian Spangler, University of Kentucky, Department of Geography
Google, Airbnb, and Reproducing “The 73”
Since 2014, a debate has raged in New Orleans over the practice of short-term home rentals (STR’s). As one of the most popular digital STR platforms, Airbnb has received a bulk of criticisms, which range from accusations of gentrification to harming the social fabric of neighborhoods. In this paper, I explore Airbnb’s role in the reification of “official” neighborhood boundaries in New Orleans, arguing that the platform represents a vision of the city that is founded on securitized geographical knowledge. Specifically, I draw from semi-structured interviews with New Orleans residents, and – using shapefiles from New Orleans’ open data portal – conduct a comparative analysis of different interpretations of neighborhood boundaries. First, I review how neighborhoods in New Orleans were produced and their boundaries ossified through various mechanisms of urban planning, the most notable being GIS shapefiles (Campanella 2014). I then reprise critiques of GIS through the 1990’s and beyond (Schuurman 2000, Kwan 2002) to challenge the authority of the official neighborhood boundaries that circulate in digital media like Google Maps and Airbnb. Finally, I describe how the production of a dominant neighborhood shapefile operates as a technique of securitization, which Crampton defines as “the efforts made to anchor, control, and discipline” our ways of knowing geographically (Crampton 2010, 5). In contrast to Donna Haraway’s call for feminist objectivity, which emphasizes the need for a “politics of engaged, accountable positioning” in knowledge production, I argue that such securitization works to re-inscribe a top-down spatial epistemology of New Orleans via Airbnb’s web application (Haraway 1988, 590).
Cole Stratton, Indiana University Bloomington, The Media School
Accumulation by Connectivity: Infrastructure and Value in Facebook’s Global Expansion
Around the world, in rich countries and poor, a remarkable process is underway: Governments, NGOs, telecom companies, electronics manufacturers, Internet companies, and multinational corporations are working competitively and cooperatively to connect every human being to the Internet. The numbers are staggering: Since the year 2000, the number of people online has grown by over 900 percent. With a global population today of roughly 7.5 billion, close to half of the world is now connected to the Internet in some way. This number is growing, and one of the most important players in this process is Facebook. Through its Internet.org initiative, global partnerships, and technical innovations, Facebook is at the vanguard of making universal connectivity both possible and profitable. In this paper I examine Facebook’s global expansion in order to elucidate the disposition of the infrastructure space the company is helping to create. To do this I explore some of the discursive frameworks Facebook deploys to explain its actions, and contrast these with a political economy reading of the actual business decisions it has made. Then, in conversation with ongoing debates about value in informational capitalism, I propose we read this process of global Internet expansion as a form of primitive accumulation which, in addition to forms of dispossession, is predicated on possession of a connected device. Such (dis)possession is a necessary precondition for telecommunications and Internet companies to extract value, and I argue that these preconditions help explain the global push for universal connectivity. Thinking about Facebook in these terms allows us to see the larger systems of which it is a part, and helps us to better situate ourselves within a global context. It also helps us better grasp the peculiar dynamics of informational capitalism and with it some of the fundamental forces at work in the constitution of our everyday lives.
Clara Steussy, Indiana University Bloomington, Archaeology, Department of Anthropology
The Shadow of a Sentinel: Relationships to the Wyoming Landscape during Japanese American Incarceration
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. As a result, over 120,000 Japanese immigrants and their American-born descendants (collectively called the Nikkei) were forcibly exiled from the West Coast to ten concentration camps located in the western interior of the USA, without any due process of law. Later analysis declared that the mass “internment” was not the result of military necessity, but wartime hysteria combines with deep-rooted racial prejudice. One of those camps was located in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, in the shadow of Heart Mountain. During the war, this camp was the third largest city in the state, with over 14,000 inhabitants when at peak population. For the past two years, I have been investigating the Heart Mountain camp, with a particular interest in how the forcibly relocated Nikkei related to the landscape they found themselves in. On the one hand, the relocation was traumatic, with Nikkei forced to give up hard-won homes and farms with no assurance they would ever return home, to be sent to a barren landscape marked by sage-brush desert and endless, dust-laden wind. At the same time, they established a remarkably successful agricultural program that not only helped feed their population, but allowed them to export produce to other camps. They also often spoke of the mountain overlooking the camp as a protective guardian, rather than an ominous presence. Here, I would like to summarize this ambiguous relationship of a forcibly relocated population to a landscape that was both a prison and a home.
Stephen Volan, Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Geography
The Origin of the Campus in Classical Athens
This paper proposes direct parallels between the most famous Greek philosophers of the 4th century BCE and their geographic influence on the development of colleges in the United States two millennia later. It explores the origin of words like “school” and “campus” through the institutions created by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno, the relationship of each to the city-state of Athens at the height of its military, political and cultural power, and the influence they had on the creation of physical plants by American colleges from Harvard to the Civil War.
Chelsea Wait, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Architecture PhD Program (Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures)
Racialization of the Landscape
In broad conversations across society, we have seen the return of injustices we had believed to be in decline such as segregation. While it should be shocking that this is our reality more than half a century after the dismantling of Jim Crow Laws, isolation and segregation are and have been enmeshed within the everyday world and built environment. I argue that the contemporary segregation of American cities, and Midwestern cities in particular, can be examined, better understood, and perhaps dismantled by looking at the role of cultural landscape and built environment in shaping our daily lives and our perceptions of space and place. We are taught to read the world around us in ways that normalize whiteness as safety and quality while marginalizing people of color and non-white communities.(1) We racialize the world around us through social mechanisms of political and interpersonal discourse, visual and material culture, and embodiment of space.(2) This happens when we talk about race and place, when we learn to correspond certain patterns and imagery with race, and as we develop a sense of comfort or unease in a place. Race is written into vernacular architecture and the perception of neighborhoods, which is both rooted in and stems from political and economic power. By using the methodological lenses of discourse analysis, material culture, visual culture, and embodiment or performance studies, I analyze the racialization of the landscape. In this presentation, I will use several examples of how we racialize our world without specifically referring to race: neighborhood facebook pages, montages in films and television depicting ‘urban’ scenes, and the perception of boarded-up buildings as an indication of safety. My work also explores the ways that we deracialize the world as we cross boundaries, change the way we talk about places, and learn to question spatial stereotypes.
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IU Landscape, Space, and Place Conference 