Browsing by Subject "Cultural geography"
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Item Dancing the local : two-step and the formation of local cultures, local places, and local identities in Austin, TX(2016-04-22) Ronald, Kirsten Marie; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Meikle, Jeffrey; Davis, Janet; Hartigan, John; Mellard, Jason; Rossen, RebeccaThis dissertation uses Austin’s two-step country dance scene to examine the construction of the local in American culture. Two-step is a social dance that is central to country music culture in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Southwest. Without a central governing body, the form and social norms associated with the dance vary across dance communities, which means that dancers use two-step to both construct and express their local culture. In Austin, the local two-step scene is a conservative response to neoliberal globalization, which many dancers feel is destroying Austin’s unique identity and culture. Here, the local operates along four interrelated dimensions. As a scene, the local is constituted through the performance of traditional gender roles; as a place, it is preserved and policed via social and structural constraints; as a form of belonging, it is a whiteness that is shaped by the Mexican and Mexican-American bodies and practices that it excludes; and as a scale, it is a terrestrially bound social formation that is inextricable from the global culture it purports to resist. Many cultural theorists emphasize the progressive potential of the local. However, the inner workings of Austin’s two-step scene suggest that the local can just as easily espouse an insular, exclusive politics, even in a supposedly progressive city.Item Marfa, Texas : a historical and cultural geography(2014-05) Shafer, Mary Kathleen; Adams, Paul C.; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Butzer, Karl; Lewis, Randy; Zonn, LeoMarfa is a town in far west Texas, three hours to the nearest commercial airport and one hour from the U.S.-Mexico border. The cultural landscape of Marfa includes a historic yet dying ranching community plagued by drought, as well as the remnants of a former military fort turned modern art museum. Marfa’s slow shift from being just another small town to the darling of the art world has taken over twenty years, and its placement on a global cultural map has contributed to the commoditization of its place. Its evolution has been the work of its full and part time residents: those artists and arts patrons who were inspired to migrate to Marfa because of the artist Donald Judd. These people stayed because they saw the same potential and beauty that originally drew the legendary artist in the early 1970s, and by way of their actions Marfa has developed into a remarkable center of tourism that is no longer dependent on Donald Judd’s vision. The goal of this study is to investigate the space and place of Marfa using a range of methods from cultural geography and will contain a visual component. This multiperspectival approach will provide a historical picture of Marfa’s shifting identity from ranching and railroad to art and tourism, against a background of a largely Hispanic community.Item “Mi Pueblo no es del pueblo” : buying and boycotting culture and politics in a Latino supermarket(2016-05-10) Hill, Josephine W.; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Hoelscher, StevenTaking Mi Pueblo Food Center, a nineteen-store chain in Northern California, as a case study, this report will examine Latino supermarkets as sites of both cultural preservation and community building and of legal vulnerability and instability, particularly for undocumented individuals and their families. Mi Pueblo is family-owned and founded by Juvenal Chavez, once undocumented, whose model minority narrative has become central to the store’s public image. It offers a shopping environment that transplants an archetype of a traditional Mexican village marketplace into a contemporary American supermarket, resulting in a combination of cultural nostalgia and modern convenience. Mi Pueblo has successfully engaged crossover markets, and has become a significant resource to Latino/a communities. However, its success has also attracted government suspicion and scrutiny: in 2012, following a mandatory Immigration and Customs Enforcement audit, Mi Pueblo voluntarily participated in the E-Verify program, requiring employees to confirm their employment eligibility and resulting in the loss of 80% of the franchise’s employees. This massive turnover spurred widespread protests, and the switch to fair-wages and documented labor standards led Chavez to file for bankruptcy in 2013. Focusing on media discourses surrounding the food, theming, and politics of the stores, this report examines Mi Pueblo as a stage for dialogue between the management and protestors about the potential for Latino/a activism, sovereignty, and citizenship within a broader context of contemporary immigration politics and undocumented labor economies. Throughout this research, I draw from news articles, blog posts, protest ephemera, and video footage in order to explore Mi Pueblo as site for politics of consumption, cultural preservation, and reform.Item Mobility and environmental intimacy in Italian volcanic zones(2019-12-05) McQuaid, Megan Louise; Sturm, Circe, 1967-This thesis explores human and environmental movement and mobility in various Italian volcanic zones. Places and sites are typically thought of as stable, locatable in a specific location, pin-pointable. Places are not generally considered “mobile.” Stromboli, Italy and other volcanic sites force the ethnographer to reconcile a certain tension between movement and place. Volcanic sites are worlds that are materially and socially constituted through movement. How tectonic plates move creates volcanic activity, how lava moves up and out of the volcano transforms the landscape, and how people move to, from, around, through, up and down the volcano creates a volcanic social world. How do humans navigate this environment, and how does the environment agentially present itself as a force to be circumnavigated? Movement and mobility serve as a framework for theorizing human social relations with their environment and other non-humans. Thinking through mobility captures the unique limits and affordances that volcanic environments offer to their human, plant, and animal residents. Scholars differ on whether or not we can call a landscape “alive,” “lively,” or “vibrant.” This thesis argues that the answer to this question is based in observations about movement. That we can, in fact, locate agential capability in the way that a subject moves. The ability to move is the condition for agency.Item Sites of humanism : intimate encounters within Black feminist geographies(2020-12-14) Davis, Kiara Icely; Pinto, SamanthaSites of Humanism: Intimate Encounters Within Black Feminist Geographies explores Black women’s creation and engagement with places and spaces. In particular, these selected essays consider Black women’s ability to turn oppressive or constraining structures, systems, and theories of knowledge into what Dr. Ashanté Reese calls, spaces of “containment but not confinement.” The collection begins by reflecting on two Black geographical frameworks of the human problem, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Veil/veil and Sylvia Wynter’s demonic. I consider material accounts of these racialized geographies in The Souls of Black Folk and Harriet Ann Jacobs’ slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The piece closes by reading Saidiya Hartman’s use of critical fabulation in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as an aspect of the demonic grounds, and a site of opportunity for an important epistemological break for our understanding of the human. The next essay analyzes Black exploitation in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Film offers a level of visibility that is reminiscent of Western geographic practices that privilege seeing as knowing. Additionally, photographs of two Black women are included in the film, yet there are not any Black women characters. The film reminded me of the demonic, and I wondered what did it mean for these photographs to be included, and could they be read oppositionally? The final paper posits that the Humanities have an integral role in imagining being human anew. In particular, the novel is a medium of possibility. Its form can reach the conceptual crevices and excesses that lie beyond our epistemic boundaries. I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts as an ushering in of Sylvia Wynter’s demonic.Item Sports and the city : the rhetorical construction of civic identity through American football teams(2011-08) Duda, Emily Jo; Adams, Paul C.; Doolittle, WilliamSports fandoms can form a key site of identity formation, particularly as they gather and merge numerous threads of identity, including gender, socio-economic status, and civic affiliation. The connections formed between members of the fandom, the fandom and the team, and the fandom and the place in which it is grounded can be a strong force for social cohesion. This cohesion becomes particularly relevant during times of crisis, when some turn to sports as a unifier. However, these relationships can also be fraught with tensions, within the group and without. Forces such as nostalgia and the ‘othering’ of those outside the group become import methods in creating and sustaining these Andersonian “imaginary communities” of fans, mitigating difference. In examining this process of identity creation, two cities were chosen for their intense team attachments: Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Qualitative analysis of discourses surrounding the teams in these cities reveals the complex ways in which nostalgic fantasies about the team and its relationship to the city are created and maintained, hierarchies of space and time are formed, and the identity of the community is shaped by its relationship to team and city. Analysis of the sporting landscape, created through a complex network of material culture, media, and the repetition of certain fantasy themes, reveals how geography is complexly implicated in the production of sporting fandom.Item Turning the city inside out : shifting demographics in American cities(2013-05) Swartsell, Nikolas R.; Minutaglio, Bill; Jensen, RobertNarratives around many of America's inner-city neighborhoods have changed significantly in the past decade. Once portrayed by the media and pop-culture as blighted, dangerous areas to be avoided, these neighborhoods have become hip epicenters of a new philosophy in urban planning-- "place-making," a concept popularized by economist and urbanist Richard Florida. Place-making claims to be a kinder, friendlier kind of urban renewal emphasizing tolerance and diversity-- but is this the case? Through both physical changes and city-lead branding efforts, place-making seeks to draw young professionals, specifically those in the rising "creative class," to inner city areas in hopes these young workers will in turn draw employers. Unlike past gentrification, which often happened through the actions of private developers, these redevelopment efforts often entail municipal or quasi-municipal and corporate intervention in the guise of non-profit redevelopment companies, whose mission is not just to build a few profitable buildings, but to change the entire face and meaning of a neighborhood. More than a decade into the place-making project, planners and developers have successfully shifted narratives surrounding neighborhoods as different as Austin's east side and Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and drawn a new population of mostly young, highly educated, and upper middle class residents. But in doing so, these efforts have created huge economic divides and displaced long term residents. Using Cincinnati and Austin as case studies, this report tells the story of this shift from these residents' point of view, as well as gain insight from the young professionals moving in to the area. While doing so, I will also delve into the blight narratives that lead to place-making in the first place-- charting the change in news media and pop culture from the "urban blight" era to today, comparing residents' perceptions with news coverage to uncover the long-term, hidden vibrancy in neighborhood ignored by both the media and contemporary developers engaging in place-making projects.