Concept of Place
Throughout the semester the subjects of place, the concept of place, and place-making have come up a couple of times. When discussing story maps, digital humanities, and doing my story mapping project; I have been paying special attention to “place” and place-making throughout the whole semester.
My digital story specifically focuses on a sense of place and my personal experience with shifting senses of place (Huggins). I have been interested in concepts of space throughout my whole academic career and in my other global studies classes. It has increasingly been a part of global studies discourse because of changing and shifting global communities. While my project does not focus on the global aspects; I was inspired by past discussions to reconceptualize my reality.
Many discussions have influenced my perceptions of places and their transformations of them. As stated above my discussion of place will include any place-based analysis on how places transform and connect. I would first like to draw upon the ideas of Maylei Blackwell from her article “Geographies of Indigeneity: Indigenous migrant women’s Organizing and trans-local politics of Place,” which specifically focuses on “trans-local community Formation.” Despite the larger takeaways, I specifically was struck by the idea of translocality and community formation. Indigenous communities are cementing their identities in different localities (Blackwell, 179). The ability of indigenous women to recreate indigenous spaces and reclaim traditions. Their ability to reconstruct their communities on a different land to rebuild and reclaim their rights gave me a new perception of the different powers of place. I came to similar conclusions after reading the article, “Between Landscape and the Screen: Locomotive Media, Transitive Reading, and Environmental Storytelling.” Changing what materials you interact with changes the concept of the spaces you usually interact with. When you “find” new spaces it creates a new type of “knowing” about your community and surroundings. How we move through spaces shapes the way we perceive and know them (Didur, 102, 103).
I felt that these topics we covered in class are very prevalent in my other classes and global current events. Alán Peláez López expressed their feelings in their poetry book about the recent uptick in xenophobia and xenophobic policies from the Trump administration. In my other classes, I found that these ideas were not exclusive to the U.S. (López). In Elizabeth Krause’s book “Tight Knit” she recounts how the fast fashion industry in Italy not only changed the demographics in Italy but the way Italians interacted with their home cities. The fast fashion industry brought Chinese migrants to Italy where they work and own small-scale firms. The connection to globalization and a new mixture of people through the fast fashion industry prompted Italians to have a crisis of place. They no longer connected to the same areas and sentiments they once did and this created an explosion of xenophobic scapegoating. This book also shaped my concepts of place, since Krause outlined in her book that many times the perceptions we have of certain places are based on false perceptions rather than reality. When demographic shifts occur at the same time as the revival of harsh realities it results in a crisis of place. This is a more present example of how globalization has changed people's perception of space, which is closely related to my final digital story.
All of these papers and concepts, including a paper that I have not outlined yet called “The role of nature-based solutions and senses of place in enabling just city transitions,” helped me conceptualize my final project. My conclusion was influenced by class discussions just as much as the papers, and perhaps the largest thing that stuck with me is the transformative nature of almost everything. This caused me to reflect on my reality and experiences. As I explained in my digital story, my family, friends, and I have always expressed our inherent dislike for our hometown and our need to move away. Mostly because it was small, boring, and conservative. But the number of ways it has changed just in the past ten years is astonishing. After reading and discussing these topics in class I realized that places are never static and always have transformative aspects. Developers and residents are always a part of experiments to produce structures that promote new relationships between people and places (Raymond, 12). This is why a lot of spaces are temporary, as some of them did not reflect the goals of residents.
My digital story gave me my first chance at reflection. As I have found that my connections and perceptions of my hometown have completely changed as it has developed and shifted. As I get older and make different personal connections the places I go have also shifted my personal experiences.
I was initially worried about the conclusion of my digital story since it did not touch upon any of the deeper themes I was drawing on such as globalization and trans-local communities. Even now I am not sure this conclusion is very cohesive. But as one of my first times speaking autobiographically, I enjoyed interacting with our class topics in a way that allowed for self-reflection. I have rarely had a class that has caused me to reconsider things in my personal life, but I have found that it is one of the benefits of digital storytelling. Anna Polletti notes in her paper “Coaxing an intimate public: Life Narrative in digital storytelling,” that “..every occasion of speaking autobiographically presents an opportunity for the realignment and re-creation of meanings attached to life (Poletti, 75).” Though my personal experience with concepts of place are very different from what I outlined above, it displays my first step in interacting personally with these concepts and emerged from “honest self-reflection” (Lambert, 54).
Credits:
Music & Audio:
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Muisc: White Rabbit
Musician: Silicon Estate
Rest of the audio is recorded by me
Most photos are mine:
With exception to
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Tweet: [Utah State University] (@USUAggies). 2020 "NOTICE: Utah State University will move academic courses online on Wednesday, March 18. Classes on Friday, March 14 through Tuesday, March 17 will be cancelled to allow faculty members time to move their classes into the online learning environment." Twitter, March 12, 2020, 2:04 pm. https://twitter.com/usuaggies/status/1238163863280816129?s=46&t=_b6L3b_SaHDQkMQ34mkDCw
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Photo of Denny's Fire
Screen grab from WJZ news
WJZ CBS News Baltimore, 'Carless Smoking ' To Blame For Denny's Fire In Eldersburg," Nov 29, 2019, 0:03, https://youtu.be/32ljSkcDKJ0.
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Photo of Farmers Market
Lanny, "Maryland Buy Local Week," Plug-In Sites, July 18, 2021. https://pluginsites.org/maryland-buy-local-week-sykesville-ev-charging/
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World Map with Networks
Images used under license of ShutterStock.com
Image title: Vector. Map of the planet. World map. Global social network. Future. Blue futuristic background with planet Earth. Internet and technology. Floating blue plexus geometric background. https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/vector-map-planet-world-global-social-1771088840
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Images on Downtown Sykesville Main Street
Kimberly Uslin, "Daytrippin': Downtown Syesville," Sykesville, February 27, 2018. https://www.baltimorestyle.com/daytrippin-downtown-sykesville/
Writing Citations:
Blackwell, Maylei. "Geographies of Indigeneity: Indigenous Migrant Women’s Organizing and Translocal Politics of Place." Latino Studies 15, no. 2 (2017): 156-181. Accessed May 20, 2023. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=edsbl&AN=vdc.100138443385.0x000001&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Huggins, Chris, Doris Buss, and Blair Rutherford. 2017. “A ‘Cartography of Concern’: Place-Making Practices and Gender in the Artisanal Mining Sector in Africa.” Geoforum 83 (July): 142–52. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.09.009.
Krause, Elizabeth L. Tight Knit: Global Families and the Social Life of Fast Fashion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Accessed May 20, 2023. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=nlebk&AN=1647504&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Kiminami, Cristina A. G., and Mike Duggan. 2022. “Locative Media Communities, Social Media and Cultures of Enthusiasm.” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 18 (3): 357–73. doi:10.1080/14794713.2022.2031799.
Lambert, Joe, and H. Brooke Hessler. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. 5th edition. Routledge, 2018.
Peláez Lopez, Alán. Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien. The Operating System, 2020. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=cat01476a&AN=umdbc.006258426&site=eds-live&scope=site.EBSCOhost, accessed April 17, 2023.
Poletti, Anna. "Coaxing an Intimate Public: Life Narrative in Digital Storytelling." Continuum 25, no. 1 (2011): 73-83. Accessed May 20, 2023. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=edsbl&AN=ETOCvdc.100027289464.0x000001&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Raymond, Christopher M., Richard Stedman, Niki Frantzeskaki. "The role of nature-based solutions and senses of place in enabling just city transitions." Environmental Science & Policy 144 (2023): 10-19. ISSN 1462-9011. Accessed May 20, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.02.021.
Rodríguez, Ana. 2017. “Toward a Transisthmian Central American Studies.” Latino Studies 15 (1): 104–8. doi:10.1057/s41276-017-0051-5.
Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. United States: Northwestern University Press, 2019.