RACKHAM INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP
Space,
Place, and Landscape
Autumn 2005 Schedule
The Early Modern Colloquium Presents a Graduate Student Workshop with Mary Bly, Professor of English, Fordham University
Friday 16 September, 10 a.m. to Noon.
Angell Hall 3222
CONSUMING LONDON: MAPPING PLAYS, PUNS AND TOURISTS IN THE EARLY MODERN CITY
Mary Bly is currently working on a book that explores the ways Londoners would have toured their city. She argues that each area in and around London had a distinct personality, and that our traditional division of London into the city proper versus the Liberties around London does not capture the particular knowledge Londoners had of their city. As readers of plays, we miss jokes when we don't catch the implication of a reference to Blackfriars, Southwark, etc (much like we’d miss important context if we didn’t know the difference between South University and Main Street in a joke about university life here in Ann Arbor). This work, like her previous book Queer virgins and virgin queans on the early modern stage (2000), relies heavily on recovering puns to access cultural knowledge.
If you would like a hardcopy of the readings, or have any other inquiries, please e-mail Marjorie Rubright at mrubrigh@umich.edu
PROFESSOR BLY WILL ALSO BE SPEAKING ON CONSUMING LONDON ... ON THURSDAY 15 SEPTEMBER, 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.
IN ANGELL HALL 3222.
Readings:
Urry, John. 1990. The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: Sage Publications. Chapter one.
Previous workshop sessions and events:
Friday 18 February, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
The Early Modern Colloquium hosts a graduate student conference. Several SPL participants are presenting papers, and the theme of the conference, Spatial Epistemologies, is central to SPL discussion. See the conference program, Spatial Epistemologies in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.
Saturday 12 February, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Itohan Osayimwese, an SPL participant, presents a paper in the Doctoral Program in Architecture annual conference, Homelands in Question. The theme and other papers will be of interest to many SPL participants.
Friday 3 December, noon until 2:00 p.m.
A discussion of some writings on place and its representation, and a return to Lefevbre. The Toxey article below is a good reflection on several of our recent discussions. The Choay chapter also looks at the history of heritage, which is relevant to several participants work related to representation, tourism and heritage.
Readings:
Francoise Choay. 2001. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Cambridge. Her chapter six. The introduction to this book was read in the winter term (in the previous sessions below).
Friday 19 November, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Dan Shoup will discuss his thesis work.
Abstract
In 2000, the closure of the Birecik Dam in southeastern Turkey flooded 30% of Zeugma, an ancient Roman city often called the 'Pompeii of the East' because of its archaeological significance and impressive state of preservation. Although the planning and construction of the dam began in the early 1990s, it was not until early 2000 that significant attention was paid to the imminent loss of a portion of the site - and it was the international press, rather than archaeologists, who broke the story. Intensive salvage excavations, funded by private western donors, uncovered impressive Roman mosaics, but were given only a short time to excavate the area that would be flooded.
In my presentation I will examine three distinct modes of representation of the Birecik/Zeugma project: those of Turkish state planners, archaeologists, and the western media. Each embodies a different narrative about the meaning and purpose of archaeological sites. All three narratives, moreover, approach archaeology with a point of view deeply imbued with Modernist attitudes. I am particularly interested in examining the audiences and power relationships of these three representational practices. I hope to gain a better understanding of why archaeologists, despite their large stake in site preservation, were less effective advocates for preservation than the Western press, which had an apparently smaller stake in the issue.
The readings below include two short scholarly articles and links to three
short news articles.
Readings:
Julian Thomas, "Archaeology's Place in Modernity". Modernism/Modernity Jan 2004; 11, 1.
Friday 12 November, 10 AM - 12 PM
Hatcher Graduate Library
room 806
Garett Sullivan (English, Penn State) leads a graduate student workshop on Space and Geography in Early Modern England. This event is part of the Graduate Student Workshop series and is also sponsored by the Early Modern Colloquium. It is open to graduate students only. Readings are available in the English Department Graduate Student Lounge (3rd floor, Angell Hall) in a file cabinet drawer marked "Early Modern Colloquium." Professor Sullivan gave a talk on Thursday.
Friday 29 October, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
A discussion on some of the principal authors and writings
relevant to our group. The Elden work below discusses Lefebvre's writings on
space and place in several chapters; see especially the section
"the production of space" in this chapter on space and history. Also,
please read or skim the chapter by Edward Casey in Textures of Place,
the collection of essays provided to participants. Please see the reading from
Simon Schama when you have time, and the beginning of The Production of
Space; these are in the readings of earlier sessions, and other works of
Casey as well.
Readings:
Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum. Chapter 5, "Space and History, pp. 169-210. The "production of space' section begins on p. 181 (pp. 10-16 of the .pdf file).
Friday 22 October, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Luna Khirfan will present her work on tourism, representation, and the identity of place.
ABSTRACT
Tourism is an important economic sector for some cities, regions,
and even nations, especially Third World countries that have no other choice
for economic growth because of their location, limited resources, and the availability
of cultural heritage. Like any other industry, tourism is susceptible to cycles,
trends, and competition. Alternative tourism is one of these contemporary trends
that mark a shift from mass tourism (organized guided tours) towards experience-based
tourism. Especially in urban contexts, alternative tourism results in far more
complex relations than, for example, in confined resorts because tourists and
hosts share the same urban space and many of the amenities and services. The
consequences of this shift are identifiable at the demand side -i.e. tourists,
and at the supply side -i.e. urban destinations. On the demand side, tourists
are seeking urban destinations with distinctive local identities preferably
different than their own socio-cultural backgrounds, or the 'other'. As for
the supply side, urban destinations are striving to differentiate themselves
within an increasingly competitive global market by emphasizing and representing
their distinctive local identity. This representation is used in two ways: firstly,
prior to tourists' arrival at the destination through marketing and secondly,
once tourists are actually within the city through a first-hand experience of
and interaction with the urban environment. The purpose of this paper is to
investigate the relationship between marketed and actual representations through
understanding the underlying processes behind the production of each. It will
do so by analyzing the marketing, urban design, and anthropology approaches
to the formation of distinctively local representations through asking: How
is a tourism experience represented as a product? How and why are local cultural
expressions formulated in urban design? And how and why are self-representations
created? The paper argues that representations begin to emerge at the strategic
planning -product development stage of marketing.
Friday 8 October, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Julia Carlson will present on her work:
Pictorial Relief in the Age Numerical Accuracy: The Aesthetic Empiricism of Nineteenth-Century British Cartography
There are no readings, but we may continue discussion of the last reading if there is time. Julia's abstract follows.
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Pictorial Relief in the Age of Numerical Accuracy:
The Aesthetic Empiricism of Nineteenth-Century British Cartography
My talk is an excerpt from a chapter of my dissertation, “Romantic Emphasis: Poetry and the Culture of Notation, 1750-1850.” While the project as a whole situates Wordsworthian poetics within a broader British culture of sign systems and practice, the chapter from which this excerpt is drawn addresses the semiotic complexity and representational hybridity of Romantic-era maps, and its purpose is simply to use the Ordnance Survey’s troubling over its language of topographical rendering to make salient a troubling over the representational language of mind in Wordsworth’s epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude. My overarching interest is the historical conjuncture of symbolic instability and contention across cultural domains. This chapter begins to produce an intertextual account of cartographic organizations of space and poetic organizations of space and time that focuses not on total form but on particular effects and practices of meaning. As the following abstract demonstrates, however, the talk will focus on cartography, not poetry.
The British discourse of topographical representation lends itself to nationalist rhetoric, and interestingly so in the debates about the representation of the third-dimension that come to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century. My paper addresses a moment in the history of cartography when the cultural form of nation imaging was pulled between the practices of art and science. In the late eighteenth century, British mapmakers unanimously embraced mathematical calculation of horizontal space and the idea of accuracy it implied; throughout the nineteenth century, however, these mapmakers disputed the goals and modes of representation of the third-dimension. Between 1791 to 1851, vastly different methods for surveying and representing undulations of ground developed alongside each other?one followed principles of visual art; the others, principles of science. While continental cartographers experimented with measurement-based modes of representation, the British Ordnance Survey fostered the pictorial, field-sketching mode. The dominant continental mode privileged the precise determination of altitudes; the dominant English mode privileged the impression of slope to the eye. Each mode of rendering relief differently disposed lines across the two-dimensional surface of the published map, and each demanded different protocols of interpretation. My intent is to examine these competing marking systems and the ideas they were made to support, though I will focus on pictorial rendering and the epistemological modes it was seen to inscribe. The rhetoric of the pictorialists allies cartographic lines with national self-portraiture and makes topographical representation rhetorical by turning national cartography into an English vernacular: a language based in the abstract grammar of trigonometry but made meaningfully fluent by its marks of inflection.
Friday 1 October, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
We will begin discussion of some of the principal authors and
works on space, place and landscape, and focus on Henri Lefebvre. Please read
his 'Plan of the present work" from the Production of Space and
then the beginning of 'Social Space.' This is long, but reads quickly, and his
verbal illustrations will help clarify his discussion.
Friday 24 September, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Mapping Pleasure Island: Representing and Shaping Place
Crystal Fortwangler
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology and School of Natural Resources
& Environment
The presentation discusses the dominant ways in which the Caribbean island of St. John has been "mapped" for the world to enjoy over the past hundred years. The images and discourses have varied over the century but the island has been consistently framed in a pleasurable way for outsiders and visitors, primarily persons from the continental United States. The island -- of course -- is much more than this; it is a community of people and places saturated with history, politics, and cultures. St. John nonetheless has been represented primarily as a place of recreation and sport, a rich man's playground, islands of fun & sun, paradise found, an excellent real estate investment, a health resort, a place of curiosity (re: "native peoples, lands, and exotic wildlife"), adventure and discovery island, a place to escape mainstream attitudes and ideologies, a laid-back place ("island time"), a pristine wilderness, of scenic beauty (picture perfect, beaches lined with palm trees, the view), virginal lands, and a place of peaceful co-existence among all peoples.
This framing process has linked visual images with discourses (e.g. postcards send written messages as well as visual ones, magazine and newspaper articles carry words and pictures, books guide your imagination). As such, the presentation looks at the "mapping" of the island through the mixing of discourses with images. The presentation is both chronological and thematic, pulling together major themes but also providing a historical accounting of the mapping process. The images and discourses have been collected from postcards, travel brochures and books, novels, newspapers (especially the New York Times), real estate ads, settler's guidebooks, internet discussion groups, and maps.
The impact of such representation has been considerable. First and foremost
a large sum of money has been made off of "pleasure island". The tourism
and real estate industries have profited the most (and these are primarily owned
and operated by the people who have moved to the island from the mainland United
States). Second, these powerful images and discourses encourage large numbers
of people to move to or visit the island. They bring their images and (mis)understandings
about the island with them. They seek what they were promised, they find it
or they make it so. Some leave because the island is not what they thought it
was going to be. Others make peace with what they describe as the realities
of island living (which is based in part on adventure and laid-back images of
island) or moved to the island because they wanted to 'live simply". The
newcomers shape the island in ways that are compatible with the images and discourses
etched in their hearts and minds. These are often (but not always) in stark
contrast to the worlds lived and experienced by the Afro-Caribbean peoples of
the island (St. Johnians). The images and discourses of "pleasure island"
then have become part of the struggle for St. John -- the struggle over what
the place is and should be.
Stepan, Nancy Leys. 2001. Introduction (pp. 11-30) from Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Friday 17 September, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
A discussion of some of the principal writers on space, place and landscape.
Winter and Spring 2004
SESSION 11: Friday 23 April, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher Graduate Library room 806
Crystal Fortwangler will lead the discussion this week, and begin with a presentation on a dissertation chapter focused on and we will then watch a film, Stranger with a Camera (2000). Crystal has used this in class, and the film "discusses an event in 1967 involving the murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor by Hobart Ison, which took place while O'Connor was filming a documentary in eastern Kentucky. Producer/director Elizabeth Barrett explores why this happened by trying to understand the people and culture of eastern Kentucky in different socio-economic backgrounds."
The first reading by Kahn below relates to the film, and also to themes in Crystal's chapter, and on our discussions of representing and understanding places. Please focus on the first reading if your time is limited. Crystal will present for about 20 minutes, the film is an hour, and then we will have ample time for discussion.
SESSION 10: Friday 16 April, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Erica Lehrer will lead the discussion this week, and begin
with a presentation of her work on developing a guide to Jewish Krakow. A description
of her project follows. She has several readings that will provide a context
for her work, and a short description of the guidebook project. Her readings
will provide a sense of both (1) general issues of what she calls 'the extents
of place,' or how far beyond its terrestrial boundaries a space actually reaches,
and thus how visitors can arrive having pre-saturated it with meaning; and (2)
some of the issues of Jewish Poland specific to this place.
Readings:
Erica Lehrer. 2001. "The only Jewish bookshop in Poland." Pakn Treger, number 36 (summer 2001)."I have memory here"
Visiting Jewish Kazimierz: Dialogues and Diatribes
A guidebook by Erica Lehrer & Neil ThelenProject summary
I am in the process of creating an "alternative" guidebook to Kazimierz, the historical Jewish quarter of Krakow, Poland. The neighborhood, revived following its WWII population decimation and a Communist era of decay in part by the on-location filming of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, it has become a popular site for Jewish "Holocaust tourism."
Based loosely on the concept of "humanities-" or "community-mapping," the guide will addresses issues not found in other available guidebooks of the area. It will be a multi-perspective document composed of images of places and people, and statements and writings from various participants in the Jewish tourist industry in Kazimierz. The content is based on original ethnographic research from my dissertation fieldwork, and the design and layout is being done in collaboration with, and executed by, Neil Thelen, a graduate student in the School of Architecture.
The project aims to identify previously overlooked information about Jewish-Polish inter-ethnic dialogue and reconciliation that occurs within a landscape generally seen in terms of inter-ethnic animosity and remembered suffering. I intend the guide to reveal (1) the significance of this formerly Jewish district with respect to Polish-Jewish relations; (2) a range of interactions, dialogues, and collaborations between locals and visitors (Jewish and non-Jewish); and (3) responses on the aforementioned themes by Jewish tourists in Poland. In doing so, I am (4) attempting to disrupt stereotypes that tourists and locals bring to Kazimierz, and instead highlight individual experiences and reveal meaningful relationships between them and their historical and cultural environment; and (5) make visible the generally overlooked experiences of Jewish-Polish interactions that occur through tourism that suggests desires for or processes of reconciliation.
Aimed at an audience of Jewish and Polish educators, educational travel organizations, and local Polish tourist venues - all of which can disseminate the guide to Kazimierz visitors - my central goal is to enable short-term Jewish tourists to experience Poland (and Poles to experience Jewish tourists) through my longer-term observations, thereby highlighting diversity, interconnection, and potential around Jewish-Polish issues.
SESSION 9: Friday 9 April, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Avi Kempinski will lead the discussion, beginning with a presentation of his work on W.G. Sebald. Please read the selections from The Emigrants and the background reading from Geography of the Gaze. If you have already copied the Sebald reading, Avi has added some pages that make a more natural break in the chapter entitled Max Ferber. These are now attached to the original reading, but if you printed it earlier, these additional pages are below.
Readings:
W.G. Sebald. 1996. The emigrants. New York: New Directions. Translated by Michael Hulse from
the original Die Ausgewanderten, 1992.Additional pages (170-181) to read from The emigrants if you copied Sebald the reading before 1:30 pm Thursday 8 April.
SESSION 8: Friday 2 April, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806
Valerie Kivelson will present and lead our discussion. As background,
please read the two chapters in King below. His notes for the chapters and the
complete bibliography are included.
Geoff King. 1996. Mapping
reality: an exploration of cultural cartographies. New York: St. Martins.
ch. 1 & 2
SESSION 7: Friday 26 March, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806 (the classroom adjacent to the Map Library)
Crystal Fortwangler will discuss her work, and a paper she
is currently writing, entitled "In Pursuit of the Same Ground: Landscape
Interpretation at Virgin Islands National Park,"
that she will present at the American
Society of Environmental History conference later this spring.
Two readings and the introduction to Crystal's paper follow.
Bender, Barbara. 2001.
Introduction , in B. Bender and M. Winer, eds. Contested landscapes:
movement, exile and place. Oxford: Berg. pp 1-18.
Cronon, William. 2003.
"The Riddle of the Apostle Islands. How do you manage a wilderness full
of
human stories?" in Orion, May-June, pp.36-42.
An online copy of Cronon's article can also be found at the Orion Online website.
In pursuit of the same ground: landscape interpretation at Virgin Islands National Park
Introduction
The focus of this panel is to discuss how federal agencies interact with local communities and the effects this has on working landscapes - and to look especially at how agency culture and ideas about nature shape those interactions. Here I examine how interaction between the National Park Service and a local community is hindered because (1) NPS focuses on certain interpretive and protection programs to the detriment of others and (2) NPS institutionalizes ideas about nature and what a national park should be that are not necessarily compatible with local understandings. I pursue this examination by focusing on working landscapes of the past --- landscapes where people used to work. These landscapes are now situated within a federally protected area, the Virgin Islands National Park, located on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands (an unincorporated U.S. territory). These retired working landscapes are ones to which the local St. Johnian population has direct and strong ties - in the first case to the worked plantation landscape their ancestors slaved for hundreds of years, and in the second to the twentieth-century worked subsistence landscape that their parents or grandparents, and in some cases they themselves, labored for decades - a landscape of farming, cattle-raising, sailing, charcoal-making, basket-making, and bay rum production. The plantation landscape, the subsistence landscape, and the park landscape comprise the same physical ground but recall different worlds. The memories of both working landscapes still carry through the park; indeed for some St. Johnians are still embodied in the jumbies (spirits) who inhabit the land. The plantation landscape situated within the park ended in the mid to late 19th-century and the subsistence one ended when the park was created.
Within the park's boundaries we find physical remains and traces of both landscapes and St. Johnians carry memories of and stories with them. But not all of this history has found its way into interpretative programs and cultural resource protection efforts - and some elements of that history are being managed in a way that removes them (e.g. exotic animals, see below). For many St. Johnians not enough attention has been given to the post-emancipation years (1848 and on), especially to the thirty or so years before park's creation, or to certain aspects of the plantation landscape, such as documenting and preserving slave cemeteries. This complicates park relationships with native residents whose personal past history is deeply embedded in the park's landscape and whose recent history is rooted in the past hundred years. Relationships are additionally complicated as the park service institutionalizes a certain understanding of nature and how it should play out in the park's landscape. For example, the park service plans to reduce donkeys, goats, and boars within the park because they are exotic species (deliberately introduced by people) that are damaging what they deem natural and native resources. These same animals are the animals that were raised and utilized by St. Johnians during and after slavery - and for some still today on private property. Many St. Johnians consider these animals native, part of the worked landscape of the island and they should stay. It seems to some St. Johnians that the park is attempting to return the island to a pre-Columbian landscape, a pre-St. Johnian landscape, a so-called natural landscape. Defining nature, ideas of nature, are strongly contested.
The "working landscape" presented by the park then does not cover the same ground as the one remembered, lived and experienced by native St. Johnians. The paper looks at factors contributing to the incomplete landscape interpretation and agency emphasis on a certain idea of nature, arguing that the National Park Service would benefit considerably by focusing greater attention and resources towards a more inclusive and broader interpretation and protection program. The relationship between NPS and the St. Johnian community is often stressed. While the park and community may not find the same ground, they can move towards a more similar ground when it comes to landscape interpretation at the national park.
SESSION 6: Friday 19 March, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Seminar
Room, South Alcove of the West Lounge, Second Floor, Rackham Graduate School
We will discuss space, place & landscape as it relates to memory, history and sites that will be presented and discussed in the symposium Activating the Past that several from our group will attend. Please see the conference website for the schedule and 'Answers to frequently asked questions ...' on the conference; there are several suggested readings and related websites (only one reading is available online).
The following texts will help connect our interests and work
to-date with the conference theme, and ground our discussion this Friday.
Copies of the readings and colour plates are available in the Map Library or
can be quickly printed there.
Choay, Françoise. 2001. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Cambridge. Her introduction.
Shama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf. His introduction and especially the prologue to part one. Please also see the colour plates.
Colour plates from Shama's introduction.
SESSION 5: Friday 12 March, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806 (the classroom adjacent to the Map Library)
This week, Luna Khirfan will lead our discussion in presenting her work.
"My work in progress deals with the impact of spreading
tourism from
one place (monument/site) into the urban space on local residents: I
discuss the impact from the three perspectives of anthropology, urban
design and local economic development and of course how these three are
related. Specifically I focus on the concept of representation: how new
meanings of space are created, and how these are related to identity
and self representation and finally how this all fits in with local
economic development."
No reading is assigned this week.
SESSION 4: Friday 5 March, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher
Graduate Library room 806 (the classroom adjacent to the Map Library)
Dan Shoup will lead the discussion this Friday. Please see his readings:
Raban, Johnathan. 1974. Soft city. London: Hamilton.
Tuan, Yi-fu. 1977. Space and place: the perspective of experience. Minnesota.
SESSION 3: Friday 20 February, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Director’s
Conference Room, Hatcher Graduate Library room 818
Laura Williamson
Laura will discuss her work and has provided some excerpts from John Mandeville's Travels. a fourteenth century text with an interesting history. She has provided an outline and some excerpts, and will also refer to medieval mappamundi, in particular the Hereford Map. For background, see the following first few pages of chapter one and the discussion of the sources of the map in chapter three in P.D.A. Harvey's work.
Harvey, P.D.A. 1996. Mappa mundi: the Hereford world map. Toronto.
SESSION 2: Friday 13 February, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Hatcher Graduate
Library 806 (the classroom adjacent to the Map Library)
Simone Pinet, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Cornell University
Simone will discuss cartography and space in her work on medieval and early modern Spanish texts, and will draw on the work of Brian Harley (readings) and other writers.
A biographical note on Simone from the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell
We will also continue discussion of concepts and central readings, drawing on another work of Edward Casey.
Readings:
SESSION 1: Friday 6 February, noon until 2:00 p.m.
Director’s Conference Room, Hatcher Graduate Library room 818
Agenda: Participant introductions,
outline of workshop goals and planning for the schedule.
Discussion
Theme: Introduction: Approaches, Definitions, and Theories
Readings:
Tilley, Christopher Y. 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths, and monuments. Oxford: Berg.
Philip, Marlene Nourbese. 1997. “Earth and sound: the place of poetry” in A genealogy of resistance
and other essays. Toronto: Mercury Press.
Casey, Edward S. 2001. “Body, self, and landscape: a geophilosophical inquiry into the place-world.”
in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Paul C. Adams, S. Hoelscher, and K.E. Till, eds. Univ. of Minnesota Press.
Agenda details: We will make introductions, briefly discuss the ideas and themes you have shared, and follow with our outline of the workshop. Crystal, Dan and Avi have been working from questions and exchanges with each of you on a tentative plan and schedule for the workshop. We will discuss that plan, and work through our schedule for the term. Many of you wish to present on your own work, or some relevant readings, and we will be able to accommodate that.
While each week will vary in form, and the directions of our discussions will inform subsequent meetings, an outline of each session will be something like this:
Each will have some combination of presentation on published work( following on our shared interests and themes relevant to our students' writing), and work in progress by many of the student participants. There is a great diversity of expressed interests from everyone, and we can work to make some connections, and coherence, but also expose everyone to something new and divergent.
The presenters will choose 1 or 2 readings, and others may suggest complementary readings. One or more participants will prepare brief comments on the readings, and ideally these comments will come from disciplines other than those of the presenters.These presentations, comments and discussions should bring attention to the definition and use of terms, assumptions (stated and unstated), similarities and contrasts with other approaches, and inconsistencies or conflicts with other disciplines. We will try to do this in each session to insure that we understand how terms, objects and ideas are used, to see how meanings are conveyed, to be aware of biases, and to understand the diversity and validity of observations, writings and approaches to the study of space, place and landscape.
For those presenting on their recent work, or work in progress, those writings
will also be shared in advance, and we will have discussion and suggestions
directed to that writing. Where possible we will have some thematic links across
all presentations and discussions on each day. As all know, the Rackham interdisciplinary
workshops are directed to the writing (and hence thinking) process for the participants,
especially those working on their dissertations, and to bring those with a shared
interest together for a sustained period to allow interaction that may not occur
in the confines of each person’s department or workspace. We will endeavor
to bring a broad perspective and expect to find much that will be new for each
to consider in her or his work.