Browsing by Subject "Space and place"

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Assembling place : Buenos Aires in cultural production (1920-1935)
(2009-12) Poppe, Nicolas Matthew; Shumway, Nicolas; Bernucci, Leopoldo; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Pereiro Otero, José Manuel; Zonn, Leo
In works of cultural production, interpretations of the built, natural, and social environment engage a hierarchy of readings of place. Formed by a totality of interpretations—accepted/unaccepted, dominant/subordinate, normal/abnormal, and everything in between—this hierarchy of readings frames place as a social understanding. Interpretations of place, therefore, are social positionings: kinds of individual delineations of the meaning of place as a social understanding. Collectively, these social positionings compose and comprise our understanding of the meaning of a place. In this study, I examine the different ways in which the understanding of Buenos Aires as a place shapes and is shaped by the avant-garde urban criollismo of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry of the 1920s, the five plays of Armando Discépolo’s dramatic genre of the grotesco criollo, Robert Arlt’s dark and portentous binary novel Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas (1929/1931), and three early Argentine sound films [Tango! (Mogila Barth 1933), Los tres berretines (Equipo Lumiton 1933), and Riachuelo (Moglia Barth 1934)]. To get at the mechanisms that drive the interaction between these works of cultural production, which are social positionings, and the social understanding of Buenos Aires as a place, I draw from Manuel De Landa’s notions of assemblage theory and non-linear history. Wholes such as porteño society of the 1920s and 1930s are assemblages of an almost limitless number of parts whose functions within the greater entity are not always clear. Place, therefore, is an assemblage whose meaning is made up of indeterminable interpretations of space. It is also a non-linear social understanding in that its meaning is irreducible to its components (i.e. social positionings). The mutual interactions and feedback within assemblages such as Buenos Aires are indicative of how meaning is ever changing through processes of destratification, restratification, and stratification in its components, including Borges’ early poetry, Discépolo’s grotesco criollo, Arlt’s Los siete locos/ Los lanzallamas, and the films Tango!, Los tres berretines, and Riachuelo.
Goodbye Brigadoon : place, production, and identity in global Glasgow
(2011-12) Sanson, Kevin Lee; Kumar, Shanti; Fuller, Jennifer; Havens, Timothy J.; Kackman, Michael; Staiger, Janet
Goodbye Brigadoon examines the shifting role media production plays in the economic and cultural strategies of global cities in small market nations, specifically Glasgow, Scotland. In particular, this project focuses on the formation of a digital media village along the banks of the River Clyde to argue the site constitutes a logical component to Glasgow’s ongoing transformation into a cosmopolitan center. Yet, as the regional government’s economic strategies and policy directives work to transform the abandoned waterfront into a center of cultural activity, this project also underscores the contradictory cultural dynamics to emerge from media production’s new role in the post-industrial city. At its core, the media hub reveals a regional government more interested in the technology used to deliver “national” stories than the manner of the stories themselves or the cultural practices responsible for creating them. Indeed, Goodbye Brigadoon is most interested in how media professionals based at the emergent cluster negotiate a sense of cultural identity and creative license against the institutional constraints, policy matters, and commercial logic they also must navigate in their workaday rituals. Ultimately, the conclusions offered in this project argue for a more complicated conception of the global-local location where these professionals work. Glasgow’s digital media village, in other words, is much more than an innocuous site of competitive advantage, urban regeneration, and job growth. It is best understood as a site of intense social struggle and unequal power relations where local mediamakers often find the site’s impetus for multiplatform media production an institutionally enforced false promise at odds with the realities of creative labor in the city.