Studying Places/Spaces

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Studying Places/Spaces

• CI5410, Fall, 2007

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Identity, Agency, and Power

• Identity can be considered an enactment of self
  made within particular activities and
  relationships that occur within particular spaces
  (geographic, social, electronic, mental,
  cultural) at particular points in time. These
  enactments are always situated in and
  constitutive of histories and of power relations.
  (Moje, 2004)
• Agency might be thought of as the strategic
  making and remaking of selves identities
  activities relationships cultural tools and
  resources histories and possibly, but not
  necessarily, relations of power. Agency is
  always socially and culturally produced, and
  enacted within structures of power. (Moje
  Lewis, in press Lewis Moje, 2004)
• Power is produced and enacted in and through
  discourses, relationships, activities, spaces,
  and times as people compete for access to and
  control of resources, tools, identities. Power
  can constrain, but does not necessarily prohibit
  agency. (Moje Lewis, in press, Lewis and Moje,
  2004)

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An Activity Perspective

• What is the activity?
• What are the tools used in the activity?
• Who are the participants?
• What are the goals of the activity?
• What is the activity system?
• Who are the participants?
• What are the goals of the system?
• In this activity, who acts/talks?  When?  How?
• What is the content of their utterances, and how
  is that content shaped by the activity?  The
  relationships?  The tools?  The activity system?
• How do the actions (talk and other actions) vary
  across participants?
• What do people learn in this activity?

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Critical Discourse Analysis

• What are some of the features of this social
  activity?
• What discourses (or ideologies) surface in this
  discussion?
• What social identities are enacted in this
  exchange (through language use, discourses,
  generic features, actions)?
• What relations of power are enacted and/or
  produced in this exchange?
• How are these power relations locally produced?
• How are these power relations tied to and
  reproductive of larger systems of power?
• What aspects of the talk, silence, or action
  could be considered agentic? How? Why?

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How Do Identity, Agency, and Power Shape
Learning? (Moje Lewis, in press)

• What is learning? (Another tentative
  definition)
• Learning is the acquisition or appropriation of,
  the resistance to, and/or the reconceptualization
  of skills and knowledge that have the potential
  to make and remake selves, identities, and
  relationships, and
• Learning is ways situated in participation within
  discourse communities.
• If discourse communities produce and struggle
  over cultural tools, resources, and identities
  (both within and across communities), then
  learning is shaped by power relations.
• Therefore, agency, which is about the power to
  control how ones self, identity, relationships,
  etc. are made and remade, is critical to
  understanding learning and to mediating learning
  environments.

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Performance Theory

• What positions, spatial or discursive, do
  participants take up in relation to each other?
• What positions, spatial or discursive, do
  participants take up in relation to the text?
• What social codes are available to participants
  in this context?
• What ways of talking, not talking, acting are
  performed in this exchange? What do these ways
  of talking, not talking, or acting suggest about
  individual or group identities?
• How are these performances tied to larger
  systems of power?

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Agency drama adopt perspectives of expert

• Allows students to
• experience what it means to be perceived as
  expert or authority
• Step out of familiar student role to adopt a
  professional role
• Learn to cope with dialogic tensions and
  challenges through verbal arguments
• NCLB use of genres associated with engaging in
  formal debate

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The value of place-based learning Knowledge

• Robert Brooke (ed. Rural Voices, NCTE), If we
  understand our local place well enough to grasp
  how it came to be this way, the forces that shape
  it, and how it compares to other places, we will
  have developed a robust and extensive knowledge
  base (p. 63). 

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Place--gt Meaning of Space

• Place the actual physical site, event, or
  activity in lived or text worlds
• Space the meanings we associate with place
• Subjective
• Autobiographical
• Social/cultural
• Power

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Frames Phenomenological Subjective

• Attachment to place Uniqueness
• Uniqueness vs. homogeneity and standardization
  McDonaldlization (1 in sales in France)
• What if everything looked the same?
• Celebrating the local challenge top-down
  imposition of corporate sameness and standards as
  standardization

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Michael Perry Population 456 subjective New
Auburn

• I am happy here, but my gravitation to place has
  always been balanced by my need to move. I crave
  a contrapuntal mix of shiftlessness and
  stability. In bed at night, I can hear the
  trucks out on the highway. Sometimes a driver
  drifts across the white line, and when the tires
  hit the rumble strip, the rubbery howl makes me
  want to drive away in the night, fills me with
  the urge to go west, makes me think the finest
  sort of freedom is found at sunrise in a South
  Dakota rest stop. Contentment, it turns out, can
  be a matter of global positioning.

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Subjective affiliation insider versus outsider

• The Laundromat, Larry Watson
• They hate us here and why not.
• Were the summer people,
• The cottage owners, lake dwellers,
• The city folks, the flatlanders,
• here to use every washer
• and dryer and on no special
• Schedule.
• You can tell , theyd like to say,
• bag your clothes and wash them at home,
• wear them dirty, beat them
• on a rock for all we care.
• But they cant they dont dare
• because we buy our groceries
• from Howard at the IGA
• And our malts from Tutts Tastee Freeze

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Poems about place Steve Athanases, UC,Davis

• Milwaukee suburb
• Home safe/pastoral
• Focus beyond the local
• Travel, cars
• Focus seasons
• Critique of sameness and consumerism

• Urban CA.
• Home danger
• Focus the local
• Parks, street corners,community
• Little about nature
• Critique of poverty and challenges of urban life

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Frame narrative or autobiographical

• Stories about a place
• Autobiographical recollections
• Family histories
• Fictional versions
• Tall tales
• Creation myths
• Documented historical accounts

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Perry time rural development

• Today, when I see the cornfields sprouting
  duplexes and hear my neighbors mourning the loss
  of the family farm--a decimation that began in
  the 1980s and is now virtually complete--my gut
  sympathies lie foursquare with the displaced
  farmers, but I cant help but think that this
  land has been lost before.

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Pedagogies of Place Design (Ellsworth, 2005)

• The experience of the learning self in the times
  and places of knowledge in the making, which are
  also the times and places of the learning self in
  the making
• Places speak to and about pedagogy indirectly
  through designthey are things in the making
  that provide us with a zone of historical
  indetermination that allows room for
  experimentation.

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Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial
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Linking internal imagination and external reality

• Lin I create places in which to think, without
  trying to dictate what to think.
• Pedagogy must create places in which to think
  without already knowing what we should think.
• Place confronts us from outside the concepts we
  already have, outside the subjectivities we
  already are.

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Public versus private spaces

• Rec Center face-time
• having ones face recognizing by another
  person or being able to see the face (or body) of
  a person whom one might be interested in
  meeting.
• Positioning opening-lines
• Strutting attention to oneself
• Timing being there at the right time
• Transgressions stalkers, roamers, lurkers

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Frame Categories regions/groups

• Geographic categories/regions
• Suburbia/urban/rural/small town
• Midwestern, Southern, West
• Small town
• Dying main street businesses WalMarts
• Value of sense of community

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Moje Latino youth hybrid identities in
different spaces

• Different neighborhoods
• Space for building ethnic identities
• Texts/dress for identification
• Malls sense of being different
• Space for othering and being othered
• Virtual spaces lowrider.com
• The ethnic community space of their lives
  remained dominant in their textual choices and
  literacy practices.

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Frame affiliation markers Perry lawn art

• In New Auburn, as in any place, lawn art is a
  form of public display as simultaneously trite
  and revealing as bumper stickers and nose rings.
  Between the porch and the road, iconography
  sprouts the bathtub Madonna, the milk-cow
  windmill, giant mushrooms carved from stumps,
  yellow Norwegian Crossing traffic signs--these
  images speak to who we are.

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Small-town Minnesota Summer Festivals

• Ron Lavenda Cornfests and Water Carnivals
• Celebration of town unity/coherence
• Display of expertise/resources
• Corn Days
• Socialization of new members
• Queens Pageant
• Demonstration of commitment to town values
• Gender identity associated with traditional
  values
• Assuming the role of representing the towns
  idealized expectations for young people
• Pleasure at witnessing commitment to conforming
  to these expectations

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Regional spaces Mediated by popular culture
Wild West

• Wild West portrayed in cowboys, Indians,
  10-gallon hats, saloons, guns, horses, frontier,
  ghost towns, tumbleweeds, ranches, sheriff, dirt,
  wind, dreams coming true, glitter and gold,
  Hollywood, movie stars, the pull of California
  etc.

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Regional identities values

• Living well/valuing ecology/biology
• Civic involvements
• Know about/actively address local issues
• Sense of economic worth
• Know local opportunities
• Spiritual connection to place
• Belonging to a community

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Regional identities

• Being someone from a certain place/ region
• Cheryl Therefore, I realized my racial identity
  was so inextricably connected to the space in
  where I grew up. Indeed, Los Angeles, itself,
  helped me identify who I was, and when I venture
  beyond its border, I realized my racial identity
  lost its meaning.
• Melissa Cook Texas to LA
• Gendered/culural spaces

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Gendered space Japanese department store
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Reynolds women and space safety/control

• Domestic spaces oppressive
• Public spaces unsafe
• Neighborhoods in music videos
• Male spaces
• Feminist geography/ecocriticism

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Classed space Bettie cultural capital and class

• Hard-living vs. settled-living habitus
• Lack of continuity/support
• White-trash smokers marginalized
• Behavior its there choice to behave
• Awards ceremony celebration of preps
• Excluded from social school networking

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Hard-living poverty/instability

• Problematic Ruby Payne culture of poverty
• Shift from structural factors to blame on the
  pathological values of poor families
• Sense of unfairness but not framed in structural,
  systemic terms
• Blame victims vs. economic/political system
• Lack of stable attachment to schools
• Housing/changes no consistency

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Raced spaces

• Suburbia/Exurbia Whiteness white flight
• Homogeneity fear of diversity
• Segregated/gated communities
• Political power shift state legislatures
• Cuts in funding for urban areas

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Whiteness positioning

• White privilege/safety
• Assumed as the invisible norm
• Order, rationality,self-control, power
• Colorblind racism were all the same
• Local pedagogy
• Understand race/power relationships
• How one learned about race
• Resistance to interrogating privilege

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Costs of segregation

• Sheryll Cashin,The Failures of Integration How
  Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream
• Racist real estate policies desirable
  neighborhoods higher housing prices
• Gary Orfield (Harvard Civil Rights Project will
  be at UCLA in 2007) housing segregation and
  schooling

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McDermott Meaning of white identity context
dependent

• Observations white/black interactions in
  convenience stores in similar working-class
  neighborhoods different histories
• Atlanta no sense of working-class/ethnic
  solidarity
• Whites perceived as failures
• Boston privileged as working-class whites
• Strong positive identification with neighborhood

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Interracial interactions in the stores

• Misperceptions/stereotypes
• Jane (white) interacts with Sue (Black) as
  Sue--until Sue mentions her white boyfriend, or
  mistakedly insults Jane, or mentions the trouble
  her child has with the law then Sue becomes a
  black person, and a whole set of group-based
  stereotypes can be activated. Conversely, Sue
  interacts with Jane as Jane, until Jane remarks
  about those people moving into the
  neighborhood

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Frame ecological perspectives on space

• There is a real world, that is really dying, and
  we had better think about that
• -Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country
• Jut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the
  World--most resources depleted by 2060
• http//www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPolitic
  sAndMedia/Advertising_EndOfWorld

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Analyzing music/media fan spaces as scenes or
zones

• Scenes Spaces to play
• Buffy nights fan responses in a bar
• Fans sharing of knowledge/expertise
• Monty Python's Spamalot
• Bedroom culture as a zone
• Soundscapes, memorabilia, multi-tasking, work
• Music club as spectacle zoning out

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Three types of spaces (Soja)

• Firstspace Actual physical place
• Secondspace Intellectual/Imagined spaces
• Idealized versions of what spaces should/could be
• Thirdspace tensions between actual and imagined

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Space and positioning

• How one is positioned by the spatial
  aspects/artifacts/social practices
• Higher education position working-class student
  as marginal
• Fails to consider Thirdspace, borderland tensions
  between ideal and reality of working-class
  students lives

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Frame Power in space Positioning/stance

• How am I being positioned to respond to this
  experience, event, or the text?
• Do I accept or reject how I am being positioned
  to respond?
• What are the different modes of address
  Ellsworth?

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Border Theory physical/cultural borders

• US/Mexico borderlands
• hybridity, hierarchies, colonialism
• Bejarano, C., (2005) Que onda? Urban Youth
  Culture and Border Identity
• 4 year ethnography high school
• Chicana/o vs. Mexicano youth
• Distinct social spaces in the school

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De Fina social categories and narratives

• Narratives reflect schema
• Membership Categorization Analysis
• Local practices in using categories
• Being Hispanic Mexican workers
• Defining properties of categories
• Relations with others
• Storytellers being Hispanic discrimination

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Erdreich and Rapoport, Reading the Power of
Spaces

• Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew
  University
• Employed spatial literacies to transform
  oppressive spaces for own agency
• Coping with borders between official/legal
  practices and resisting practices

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Time Canyon alternative high school program

• Different uses of time from official school
  chronotope
• Late passes, Saturday school, catch-up work
• factory/efficiency time vs. science time
• Value of alternative time schedules
• Official school time controlled, segmented,
  decontextualized, contained

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Janette narrative chronotope

• Carnival space challenge to traditional norms
• Sojas thirdspace alternatives to official
  second space chronotopes
• Identity of tattooed freak
• Girls Room poem rejection of traditional focus
  on appearance

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Mauk Gordan Community College

• Students, themselves, in an academic third space
  are the intersection of academic and nonacademic
  spatialities--defined by their own bodies
• Interview people outside of school on issues of
  education
• Nature of work in different places
• How to correspond with politicians

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Mauk focus on nonacademic vs. academic spaces

• Online spaces vs. campus spaces
• Online writing feedback U Writing Center
• http//writing.umn.edu/sws/appointments.htm
• Writing about nonacademic spaces

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Campano, Immigrant Students and Literacy

• First mandated classroom space
• Official instruction
• Second classroom spaces
• Students interests, leads, desires, stories
• Before/after school, lunch, homes, etc.
• Funds of knowledge outside official school
  spaces

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Lakoff menu mediated minor identities

• Knowledge of food types markers of cultural
  capital and ethnic differences
• Chez Panisse vs. Oriental Restaurant
• Relationship between space and identity
• Expectations of character, interaction, and role
  to be played the menu merely validates and
  underscores those assumptions and sets the stage
  for the main act, the food and eating of it,
  again according to personal expectations.

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Chez Panisse tonight 100.00

• A Dinner with Christine Campadieu of the Domaine
  de la Tour Vieille
• Grilled leeks and chicories with Catalan sauce
• Baked Atlantic cod with black olives and garlic
• Cattail Creek Farm lamb shoulder braised in
  Grenache wine with almonds with potato and
  celery root purée and winter greens
• Warm chocolate fondant with toasted hazelnut ice
  cream

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Ethnography methods

• Adopting an outsider Martian cultural
  perspective
• Problem being a fish in water
• Adopting an insider emic perspective
• Making the familiar strange and the strange
  familiar (Erickson)
• Finding insider informants
• Extensive observations fly on the wall
• Interviewing
• Understanding practices as reflecting
  discourses/cultural models
• High school study Cultural models of physical
  and intellectual control in the school

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Field notes Fieldworking

• Focus selective perception
• Verbal snapshots 5-10 details
• Descriptive vs. general language
• Peoples practices/appearances
• Use of photos/videos digital storytelling
• Ethnography of a University video clips
• Triangulate cross-check with others

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Mapping spaces

• Where things are located
• What type of people are sitting with whom (race,
  class, gender)
• Peoples body positioning/relationships
• Leander classroom maps
• F-formation position of lower body
• Facing versus turning away

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Immersing Fast Food Restaurant/Cafeteria

• Take dual-entry field notes on left side about
  specific aspects of the Décor, people,
  conversations, ordering rituals, language
• Map the site noting who sits where who interacts
  with whom and how
• Reflect on the right side next to specific notes
  on the
• Cultural norms, roles, beliefs, assumptions
• Social interactions between people
• Ones own relationship to the place
• Sense of how you are positioned

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Social construction of spaces as relational

• Physical positioning power relations
• Leander study Naureens English class in an
  alternative school-within-a school
• Derogatory Terms Activity Huck Finn
• Language/power relationships
• List words used to put down others
• Put words on a banner

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Interviewing

• Developing questions based on prior research
  about the person
• Asking grand tour questions about the overall
  big picture experience
• Asking open-ended vs. yes/no questions
• Follow-up questions to foster elaboration
• Pointing interviews to focus on specifics

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Analyze transcript Interview with your
participant

• the amount/rough percentage of time each person
  talked
• the turn-taking and topic focus
• the kinds of speech acts employed by each person
• the voices adopted reflecting certain roles or
  stances and how these voices or stances
  positioned you or your participant (Ribeiro and
  Schiffrin chapters).
• adoption of any discourses reflected in these
  voices or stances
• the influence of the interview genre itself
• nonverbal cues/markers on the exchange.