Food for Thought: Place, Journalism Libraries

For those in the Rochester area tonight, the following may be of interest!

Hi all,

I’d like to invite you to the following upcoming CIAS gallery events:

TODAY (Thursday 10/15) Join us at 5:00 pm in Carlson Auditorium for an artist talk with Terri Warpinski, as she discusses her exhibition of photographs — Surface Tension — exploring the divided landscapes of Berlin, Israel-Palestine, and the U.S.-Mexico borders. A reception will follow in William Harris Gallery (Gannett Hall, 3rd Floor) from 6-8 pm. Free and open to all, refreshments served!

TOMORROW (Friday 10/16), stop by Bevier Gallery from 4-6 pm for the opening of Transformations, a stunning group show curated by Juan Carlos Caballero-Perez that features the work of eight exceptional artists and alumni of RIT’s School for American Crafts. Free and open to all, refreshments served!

Hope to see you there!

John

John Aäsp
Gallery Director, Adjunct Professor
Gallery r | Bevier Gallery | William Harris Gallery
College of Imaging Arts and Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
Gannett Hall (7B) Office 2284
585.475.4977
John.Aasp@rit.edu
http://galleryr.rit.edu

CMC journal

Consumption Markets & Culture, an interdisciplinary journal  published 6 times per year by Routledge, has published a number of papers on issues relevant to place, narratives, and visualizations, including:

Just looking? Choice and constraint in practices of visual consumption at magazine newsstands, by Mehita Iqani.

"This article takes as its subject practices of looking that occur in London's newsstands (magazine retail displays). Taking an ethnographic approach inspired by the flâneur and emphasising the symbolic properties of consumption activities that take place in public retail space, it reports on an extensive participant observation of newsstands. A three-fold typology of visual consumption is put forward: “drifting,” “speed-shopping” and “free-reading.” These practices of looking are then critically analysed in the light of theoretical perspectives on visual consumption, in particular, the tension between arguments prioritising the pleasures and, conversely, the constraints that it entails. The analysis culminates in the argument that the most fruitful position is a dialectical one that acknowledges the conditional freedom of visual consumption."

Gettysburg re-imagined: the role of narrative imagination in consumption experience, by Anthinodoros Chronis, Eric Arnould, and Ronald Hampton.

"We investigate the role of imagination in the consumption experience and we theorize the ways in which important collective narratives are (re)imagined at storyscapes – consumption spaces where narratives are the focal object of consumption. We ground our empirical investigation in the historical narrative of the American Civil War and we explore ethnographically the ways in which this historical episode is (re)imagined and articulated in tourism at Gettysburg. Our research provides an alternative account to mental imagery theory that is based on restrictive cognitive conceptions of imagination and expands narrative-based theories of consumption experiences. We argue that the workings of imagination in tourism sites are inextricably linked to the production of cultural imaginaries, that is, socially important narratives invested with collective values; we illustrate the process through which cultural imaginaries are co-constructed at storyscapes; we develop theoretically the concept of consumer imagination; and we make a case for consumer imagination as a social process."

Synchronising retail and space: using urban squares for competitive place differentiation, by Gary Warnaby. 

German Christmas market (December 2009).

"This paper argues that the town/city square, through its role as an urban node, has an important potential role in the creation of competitive place differentiation, especially in terms of the activities occurring therein (with particular reference to retail activities, such as periodic markets), which can, in turn, be considered as contributory elements in existing conceptualisations of an urban place “product”. Drawing on the concepts of rhythmanalysis and synchronisation, the paper suggests the existence of a more overt temporal dimension which can contribute to the creation of a genius loci (or “spirit of the place”), which can be capitalised on for place marketing purposes. The paper considers such issues in the specific context of St Ann's Square in Manchester, in the north west of England."

The mobilities and post-mobilities of cargo, by Thomas Birtchnell and John Urry.

"Cargo is moved from factories through global production networks via supply chains to consumers, but this process is hidden from them by what Raymond Williams termed the magic system of marketing and what Allan Sekula and Noël Burch call the forgotten space of containerization. This paper addresses recent concern that the mobilities paradigm has neglected two domains relevant to cargo: global production networks and global cultures of consumption. These domains are examined in relation to three key elements in this paper: distribution, consumption and marketing. In assessing moving consumption from the perspective of the mobilities paradigm, this paper recommends that the future of cargo, the ease of which consumers take utterly for granted, is far from clear-cut from a strategic foresight perspective."

An emotional economy of mundane objects, by Alev P. Kuruoğlu and Güliz Ger. 

"This article illuminates the affective potentialities of objects. We examine the circulation of Kurdish music cassettes in Turkey during the restrictive and strife-laden period of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We find that the practices comprising circulation – recording, hiding, playing, and exchanging cassettes – constituted tactical resistance and generated communal imaginaries. We illuminate the “emotional economy” that is animated by a mundane object: the cassette, through its circulation, becomes saturated with emotions, establishes shared emotional repertoires, and habituates individuals and collectives into common emotional dispositions. Cassettes thus play a part in shaping and reinforcing an emotional habitus that accompanies the emergence of a sense of “us,” the delineation of the “other,” and the relationship between the two. We thus demonstrate the entwinement of materiality and emotions, and examine how this entwinement generates emotional structures that shape and perpetuate the imagining of community as well as the enactment of resistance."

Review Essay: Frank Cost, Bricks and mortar: offline shopping in online America, by Thomas O'Guinn.

Review of RIT photography professor's Frank Cost's book produced by wearing a GoPro camera during twelve shopping trips in the Rochester region.

More information is available on the journal's homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gcmc20/current

Invitations to Contribute to the Blog

Good morning and thank you to everyone who participated in our labinar focusing on the fundamental concept of placemaking, that is the connection between people, culture, contexts, geography/site, and design. We have sent invitations to everyone who joined us. And, we invite you to contribute to this blog as you wish. Please also let us know if there are others who might be interested in participating. We look forward to continuing the conversation. Sincerely, Juilee, Andrea, Roger, and Mindy, co-organizers (PS to Jonathan, please post the link to your journal!)

Mitsitam Espresso

Mitsitam Espresso

Developing Sense of Place through Travel Experiences and Online Information

My research focuses on the motivating factors behind travel choices, including destination, mode and path choices, with an emphasis on non-motorized sustainable modes. Trained as a civil engineer, my work bridges the gap between engineering design and behavior by understanding the interrelationships between the built environment and travel, including destination choices.

With respect to sense of place, my attention is on two contributing factors: (i) how our journey to destinations and spatial mobility affect our perception of place and (ii) how the internet or online reputation of locations compliments or detracts from this perception. The overarching vision of this work is that non-motorized travel improves sense of place by exposing travelers to their environments. Given the pervasiveness of mobile information and communication technologies (ICT), online reputation of locations may further adjust this perception of sense of place.

I currently have an ongoing funded project looking at the link between (i) non-motorized travel access; (ii) online reputation and (iii) sense of place. The study focuses on three sites in Rochester: (a) Public Market; (b) East End and (c) College Town. Intercept surveys are conducted at each of these sites, collecting attitudinal and travel access information from site visitors. Additionally, a built environment audit is used to characterize the design attributes of each location. Finally, online sites that collect feedback from users, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Twitter are data-mined to provide sense of place metrics for each site. An analysis of all three sources of information is conducted to characterize the interrelationships. 

                                                                     Public Market

East End

Journalism, Place and Citizenship

Chinatown in Seattle, WA.

I conduct research on how various transnational populations, like immigrants, diasporas and refugees, are portrayed in mainstream media, and how and why they create their own niche media.

My research on diasporas explores how geographically dispersed groups forge group identity through new media technologies.  When I began my research on immigrant media several years ago, I set out with a similar agenda - to see how immigrant media in the U.S. were adapting to the "digital age."

Me (right) visiting a Vietnamese newspaper in Seattle.
Photo by my co-author, Kristin Gustafson. 

I soon learned I was asking the wrong question.  Small, geographically-based foreign-language newspapers can still be profitable, buoyed by non-English speakers and advertisements targeting their specific communities.

Most all of the editors I interviewed said they wished they could do more with digital media, but
lacked the time and resources to invest in it either for news gathering or for content delivery.

Ironically, despite being ambivalent about social media and mobile news in their news organizations, many interviewees were heavy users of technology and would show me videos and photos on their phones. Furthermore, when pressed, they talked about how informal digital communications, texting, in particular, were used in their communities to share important social news.  For example, in North Carolina I learned immigrants would text each other about police road stops to avoid if they did not have a valid driver's license.

All of this has lead me to reconsider the value of the communities of residence in transnational communities. Too often, perhaps, research has focused on digital ties at the expense of the smaller geographic communities and their mediated but informal public spheres. As such, I'm eager to move my focus from producers of transnational media to transnational audiences within small geographic communities.

J. Decker introduction to Place: Narratives, Visualizations, Access and Contexts

     My research over the past two decades has centered on place, first through scholarly research in the field of reception theory, resulting in an examination of an engraved series of prints that showcased a region that became a 19th century tourist attraction; then and, in a more sustained manner, through my work as a practitioner as well as a scholar of public art. As a conservation and education practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio, I managed the public sculpture collection for the city, researched the city’s historic and contemporary collections of public sculpture, worked with contracted conservators to determine risk assessment, wrote grants for conservation treatment, and managed volunteers to take care of the sculptures—their sculptures—each summer. While working very closely at sculpture sites, I began to see first-hand how critical such spaces, places, and sites were to the construction of identity—in terms of individuals, communities, and regions. Then, I turned my attention toward researching monuments (particularly memorials tied to the American Civil War) and the ways in which they construct, deconstruct, and (even) obfuscate identity and memory.  

John Constable's English Landscape, Art Institute of Chicago

Re-dedication of public sculpture to Ohio educator, Harvey Rice. See here.

I am leading a public history site visit based upon my research on site and memory
(paper: "Louisville’s Confederate Monument: Narratives of Commemoration, Loss, and Gender")

I Skuggan av Kriget: Museet som Flyktingförläggning, Malmöhus Slott, Malmö MuseerJune 2015

Thus, my interest in the topic of place relates to the ways in which we construct place and in which place is constructed — physically as well as conceptually. What narratives are invested in these sites? How do we visualize the narratives as well as the experiences at sites over time? How do we gain access to them? Who garners control over that? And what, ultimately, contributes to a site's context—and our context?

My first visit to Malmö in June/July 2015.
The Turning Torso is in the back left of this frame;  
Ribersborg beach is in the foreground. How does each of these sites constitute place?

Introduction to our Labinar Topic

Place: Narratives, Visualizations, Access and Contexts 

A "labinar" (lab/seminar) held in conjunction with the Malmö University-Rochester Institute of Technology Symposium October 8-10, 2015

Welcome to our blog which is intended to offer a space for discussion and dissemination. If you wish to contribute to our blog, please email me jdgsh [at] rit.edu & I will add you to our list of contributors.
    Our labinar takes its cues from the fundamental concept of placemaking, that is the connection between people, culture, contexts, geography/site, and design. By engaging in conversations about place, we ultimately seek to frame discussions about people and their association to a place or places and its extension as a form of individuation or community. What narratives emerge from place? How is place visualized? How do we obtain access to place? And, what is the cultural context(s) of place? What role does/can/should technology play in creating meaningful experiences in locales that have a strong sense of place? 

   The four co-organizers come from Museum Studies, Communication, Industrial Design, and Sustainability—disciplines that look critically at sites, narratives, objects, the built environment, and locations as emblems of context. By inviting conversation around the topic of place we hope to engage in discussions that ask us to think about the ways in which individuals and communities obtain access to and navigate through their environments; how they engage with place on familiar and unfamiliar terrain, in the short-term and long-term; and how they engage with the other members of the communities surrounding them.
   We see this topic as appropriate for the Malmö symposium due to five factors—two related to academia and three to community: 1) the nature of the academic institution such that students are transient though faculty and staff tend to be less so—how is our understanding of our campus(es) framed in light of this?; 2) RIT’s accomplishments and further initiatives in study abroad through global campuses and partnerships; 3) the historical past of Rochester as a manufacturing center, Flower City, Flour City, and its current move toward high-tech sciences; 4) Malmö’s transition from a shipbuilding industry to a knowledge industry; and 5) the highly complex constitution of Malmö’s population, as impacted by transitional industry and immigration, as well as very new efforts in Malmö to become the world’s most international city (“Little Big Malmö).

   Co-organizers will establish a blog for the labinar in advance of the symposium (here). That site will house our introductions to this topic and the lenses through which we view Place: Narratives, Visualizations, Access and Contexts. Each participant will be asked to contribute to this blog during/after the labinar to introduce themselves and their work (brief) and to provide a space for discussion and dissemination, as well as engagement with those unable to attend the symposium. 

Place: Narratives, Visualizations, Access and Contexts  is co-organized by:

Juilee Decker, Ph.D. Assoc. Professor, Museum Studies, College of Liberal Arts
Andrea Hickerson, Ph.D. Assoc. Professor, School of Communication, College of Liberal Arts
Roger Chen, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, Department of Sustainability, Golisano Institute for Sustainability
Mindy Magyar, M.F.A., Asst. Professor, Industrial Design Program, School of Design, College of Imaging Arts & Sciences