2005 AAG Communication Geography Specialty Group Sponsored Sessions
GEOGRAPHIES OF MEDIA
Geographies of Media 1: Cinematic and Televisual Geographies
Geographies of Media 2: Spaces of Print and Advertising
Geographies of Media 3: Performance
Geographies of Media 4: Communicating
Geographies of Media 5: Cyberspace and the Internet
Geographies of Media 1: Cinematic and Televisual Geographies
1. Cinematic Landscapes
Chris Lukinbeal, Arizona State University, Department of Geography
In this paper I engage the relationship between cinematic geographies and landscape studies. While other geographic research on film have highlighted themes such as mobility, pedagogy, the city and the frontiers of cinematic geographies the theme of cinematic landscape remains uncharted. From sweeping panoramas in Westerns to gritty noirscapes in Los Angeles to travelogues in places both close to home and faraway, landscape is central in the formation of cinematic space. Cinema relies on a constant tension between place and space, where place is continually transformed in spaces of narrative action. Place grounds narrative events to a landscape especially through establishing shots at the beginning of movies. Landscape gives meaning to cinematic events and positions narratives within a particular scale and historical context. Where place and landscape ground action and the construction of meaning, space provides the stage for the stories to unfold. Landscape and film are both social constructions that rely primarily on vision and perception for their very definition. Vision links and distances us from cinema and landscape; it makes it easier for us to be disengaged through the act of viewing. Yet there is an intimate bond in this disengagement, where the viewer must reach out and establish some "sense" of place whether it's through a windshield, on a movie screen, or standing in the middle of a scape. Our attachment to and understanding of landscape is always mediated by the lens of culture, attitudes, experience, cinema, books and television.
2. Two For The Road: The Latin American geographies through the lenses of Walter Salles
Joseph S.E. Palis Department of Geography, University of North Carolina
The panoramic landscape of Latin America provides the cinematic canvas for famed Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles. As seen through his films, notably ìCentral Stationî and ìThe Motorcycle Diaries,î the acclaimed directorís depictions of the rural spaces become the defining and transformative agent in changing the urban-hardened attitudes of individuals. Dora found her compassionate heart and maternal instincts through her journey from Rio de Janeiro to northeastern Pernambuco in ìCentral Stationî. Pre-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevarraís sojourn across Patagonia, the Andes, the Atacama Desert, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and the Amazon awakened his nascent radical idealism and anti-authority impulses in ìThe Motorcycle Diariesî. The two films serve as a travelogue to the cinematically unmapped areas of Latin America and suggest a return to rural origins to construct an alternative ideological view of the continentís renewal. Sallesí depiction of the uniqueness and specific geographies of the rurality of Latin Americaís interior towns and open roads represent a deeper connection and solidarity between the people and the continent. While ìCentral Station fictionalizes urban and rural spaces by creating characters to represent these spaces, ìThe Motorcycle Diariesî reconstructs the hopes and confusions of an uncorrupted South America before the Cuban Revolution and military coups. Both films evoke a Latin American identity that ultimately hopes to transcend the arbitrary boundaries of nation and race.
3. Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Kevin E. McHugh, Arizona State University
Gary Davis presents an ironic and strangely dissonant interpretation of American culture in the documentary film, This is Nowhere, an expose of RV travelers who circumnavigate the country 'camping' in Wal*Mart parking lots. My interpretation of the film explodes the fiction of placelessness, as nowhere serves as a poignant foil in evoking place and landscape in America. Through ingenious editing and timely cuts to film footage, the viewer is taken on a journey of cultural contradictions, driven by the balderdash of Wal*Mart campers who speak their minds on a panoply of issues: mobility, freedom, nature, resources, consumption,government, social class, community, globalization and homogenization, suburban sprawl, urban poverty and blight. The result is a theater of the absurd acted out in surreal Wal*Mart scapes and highway strip developments, vehicles and people jiggling in fast motion staccato,going nowhere. The film encourages us to pause and reflect on paradoxes that underscore American culture.
4. Sikhing Identity in "Bend it Like Beckham": Sikhs Speak
Katie Algeo, WesternKentucky University
The British film "Bend it Like Beckham" heightened popular interest in that country's Sikh minority, a group too often missing from film and television portrayals. While much of a Western audience would consider this upbeat film a positive portrayal of the Sikh community, Sikh opinion is divided. This paper analyzes alternative constructions of Sikh identity made by members of the international Sikh community that participate in the on-line forum Sikh.net. It positions these multiple readings of the film in the context of Sikhism's rich culture and history, which have engendered distinctive sub-cultures, and within the textual bounds of film media, where a necessarily partial portrayal of Sikhism ironically both objectifies and serves as a medium of reflexivity.
5. Virtual Signification: Los Angeles, The Shield, and theshieldfans.com
James Craine Department of Geography, San DiegoState University
I explore how signifying elements work between actual places, television, and the Internet by referencing the real landscapes of Los Angeles, the visualized landscapes of the Fox Network television show The Shield, and the virtual landscapes of www.theShieldfans.com. Current theories of visualization surmise that the mental maps that compose the themes located within geographic space are mediated internally by the systems of signs, symbols and signals people have previously internalized through the experiential negotiation of constructed landscapes. In the hyperreality of our postmodern visualized culture and experience, these maps extend through real space into virtual space. However, what we internalize is not arbitrary, but like all symbols it bears a motivated connection to real-world phenomena. I argue that by consuming these representations of Los Angeles, the consumer remakes space and time by specifying spatial locations and temporal identities from the perspective of one of the participants in an act of communication. Today’s electronic media allows the consumer to become independent from older notions of the body and its need for material locations in space and time. The consumer is thus displaced into a parallel universe without any physical effort thus allowing one to counteract the deterritorializing forces of mobilized culture. In this manner, we find human agency and freedom within the spaces created by the virtual signification of actual place and time.
Geographies of Media 2: Spaces of Print and Advertising
1. The Last, Best Space?: American Print Media’s Recasting of the Plains
Christina Dando University of Nebraska, Omaha
Recent articles, such as National Geographic’s “Change of Heartland” (May 2004) or The New York Times series “Vanishing Point: The Empty Heartland” (Dec. 2003), are recasting or reframing the Plains as again an open space, a “re-wild” core of bison and Indians, a re-established frontier. This paper will examine the national print media’s portrayal of the Plains over the last 10 years, using content analysis to analyze the language and rhetorical devises utilized in presenting the Plains to their American audiences. By the resemanticisation of terms such as “frontier” and of the agricultural landscape, the place identity of the Plains is recast as space, rather than place. By framing Plains settlement and development as a failure or disaster, and emphasizing the depopulation of western Plains states, the media is assailing the remaining family farms of the Plains – creative destruction, if you will – removing them in order to bring in new industries – agribusiness, bison ranching and tourism. But while creative destruction is usually viewed as occurring within the region being reconfigured, for the Plains, it is coming from the East, highlighting its relationship as a “colony” to Eastern business, government and media.
2. “What’s healthy is what’s beautiful”: Representations of ‘nature’ in health and beauty advertisements
Jane Moeckli, Department of Geography, University of Iowa
Popular media is flooded with images and texts shaping the parameters of contemporary American beauty culture. Most notable is the current trend toward extreme makeovers – including extensive plastic surgery redefining a person’s bodily shape and function – which has taken center stage in America’s fascination with and/or disdain for beautified bodies. Within academic circles, explorations in and critiques of plastic surgery are only the most recent round of debates about beauty ideals, self-image, technology, and the body. Garnering less public and academic attention is the comparably understated notion of natural beauty. The objective of this paper is to critically examine ‘natural beauty’ as a discursive construction. I specifically attend to the ways in which ‘nature’ is defined with and/or against ‘health’ and ‘beauty,’ using textual analyses of beauty advertisements featured in over 50 years of a prominent U.S. women’s magazine. Nature takes many forms in these advertisements, from the ever-deteriorating shell women need to control, to the key ingredient designed to deliver (corporeal, mental, spiritual, planetary) transformation. I argue that current articulations of a natural beauty ideal are intricately linked to an emerging notion of wellness permeating American culture.
3. Competitive Commercials: A Geographical Analysis of the Advertising Industry in Los Angeles
Naomi Pope, University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles is known as being a hearth for creative industries specializing in media based production activities. In the cultural economy, advertising provides a case where the business services and creative services interact to provide cost-effective and creatively competitive products, ideas and project plans which meet intense consumer demand, stayed turned to global cultural trends, and tap into the specifies of place at the local level. Specific competitive advantages emerge in the advertising industry in Los Angeles: an expertise in car commercials which is driven by client and content specialization well situated in a landscape conducive to this type of advertising production.This investigation presents a research design to analyze the advertising industry in Los Angeles, yet due to temporal constraints, the methodology is enacted through a pilot study of advertising agencies in Los Angeles. This research is the product of a 48 hour field exam administered by the UCLA Department of Geography. The results from the pilot study reveal three key changes in the advertising industry in Los Angeles: (1) a shifting geography from the mid-Wilshire area to the Westside, and (2) the tenuous role of freelance work in the industry and its effect on the functional structure of the industry and (3) the competitive advantages and disadvantages of the advertising industry in Los Angeles.
4. Mediating cities as political objects/projects: journalism, practice and association
Scott Rodgers King’s College, LondonChicago School sociologist Robert Park – a journalist in his early career – notably argued that the work of urban newspapers made the city knowable, and thus governable as a political space. Today, urban spaces are made knowable and governable through a plethora of media, which document, imagine and denote cities. In this context, newspapers cannot be acclaimed as the singular or underlying site where political knowledges of the city are articulated. Where then, does this leave contemporary urban print media? It remains important, I suggest, to conceptualize and study the particular connections of print media, however circumscribed, in relation to political narratives on cities. I consider three areas of Anglo-American literature that have contemplated these connections, with differing emphases upon: (1) the urban representations embedded in media texts; (2) the political-economic linkages of local media with ‘governing coalitions’; and (3) the orientations and practices of journalists alongside the organization of media. I argue that the limitations of these approaches in terms of their respective over-focuses on representation, functional dependence and media autonomy can be sidestepped by focusing on the practical and associational aspects of news work. That is, the routine practices and social/material networks through which print news is made on cities, and through which the media can perform certain political and ‘institutional’ capacities. These networked practices help to circulate symbolic conceptualizations of cities as ‘policy objects’, especially amongst narrow fields of actors. I illustrate this by discussing some initial observations from ongoing research on Toronto’s print media.
Geographies of Media 3: Performance
1. Birth of the Cool: Modern Rock, Local Music Scenes, and the Ephemeral Nature of Global Popular Culture
Ola Johansson, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Thomas L Bell, University of Tennessee
Even if popular culture in general, and music in particular, is thoroughly globalized, the creative activity of cutting-edge, innovative rock music is an uneven spatial process. Around the United States (and elsewhere in the world) local music scenes emerge that produce music reflective of their time and place. But this creative process is also formed by “glocalization” where fragments of musical subcultures of past and present, regardless of geographical origin, find local resonance and meld into something new. If successful, that music is subsequently discovered by broader national and global audiences, creating new impulses ready to be absorbed and reworked somewhere else. Nominally, such diffusion is non-hierarchical.But, only certain places give birth to musical innovation, either fleetingly or by sustaining creative activities for longer periods of time. Such places exhibit greater capacity to synthesize cultural flows; they become “cool places” that continuously attract and nurture talent. It is important for such music centers to have a local music industry infrastructure, a more or less clear artistic focus (i.e., a “scene”), and the synergy of a network of creative artists and their audiences. In this paper, we synthesize ideas on the relationship between place-based creativity in rock music, cultural capital, and global flows, as well as suggest new avenues of research.
2. From Around the Way to the Global-I: Developing Perspectives on Geography in Youth Media
Tamar Y. Rothenberg, Editor, New Youth Connections
Young Americans’ poor geographical knowledge is a perennial story. For two decades, surveys have shown that many young Americans can’t locate specific countries or even oceans on a map, a finding that generally points to the continuing lack of geographical education in American schools. As important as this information is, though, academic geographers know that geography is more than memorizing the names and locations of places. Geography is also about (among other things) understanding relationships between people and the places they inhabit, connections between places, struggles over space, and questions of scale. This paper details the efforts of youth media organizations in the United States to encourage such geographical awareness among its teen writers and readers. (By youth media, I refer specifically to nonprofit organizations run by older adults who work with young people to develop their voices and skills as they produce media for their peers.) These efforts include young peopleís personal and reported stories about their communities, their experiences as immigrants or the children of immigrants, and their environmental concerns. Recently, too, through a grant obtained by the Pacific News Service, youth media outlets in California, New York and Atlanta have formed a consortium to build global awareness among American teens by focusing on stories, written by young people, that elaborate on the connections between the United States and the rest of the world. This paper will discuss the challenges of developing geographical awareness in urban high school students and analyze the efficacy of youth media in expanding young Americans’ geographical awareness.
3. Dancing on the web: a sense of place/ a place for politics
Katrinka Somdahl-Sands University of Texas at Austin
Outdoor dance performances produce spaces that highlight the difficulties in defining the role of the 'public' in public art and public space. In particular, can political performances create a public sphere when the public in question is fleeting and temporary? Each work is intended to make the performers and spectators think more deeply about their relationship to not only the performance site but also how that site fits into wider social networks. I argue that these dances are micro-instances of citizenship through community building and the creation of a sense of place. Yet what if the 'space' of the performance was presented on the internet? Would this change the role of the public or the creation of a political community? How can place specific art be conveyed in a global and 'placeless' media? This paper will document how two dance companies, Bird Brain Dance and The BodyCartography Project, create political communities during their performances in outdoor urban settings and then maintain and expand those communities through their innovative use of web technology.
4. Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and the Politicization of Public Space
Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, Whitman College
Landscape is a showground for social relations and power dynamics, and much of our landscape is inscribed with language. From stop signs to campaign signs, marquees to billboards, informational placards to lost-pet announcements, much of our public space is inscribed according to convention and legislation. Using a series of case studies, this paper investigates how contemporary poets in the United States and Mexico have deliberately politicized public space by strategically inserting politically charged signs and poetry broadsides into public space, thus challenging convention and legislation. These poets are dissident citizens who publicly, if surreptitiously, contest prevailing arrangements of power through oppositional poetic practices and disruptive political tactics that vault counter-narratives into public discourse. While neoliberal-driven privatization/commercialization pull more and more public space into its vortex, these poets inject their guerrilla art as a counter-weight in an effort to re-appropriate, reclaim, and resist, often strategically using similar forms with innovative twists. These poets have avant-garde tendencies and populist aims. While audiences choose to read books and attend poetry readings, passersby do not seek out public poetry. At the same time, these passersby—an inadvertent audience—sometimes become collaborative authors, as they deface or destroy the poetry, thereby entering into a kind of public conversation where competing claims are recorded. These collaborative, micro-political, tactical transgressions challenge values that trend toward commercialism and legibility, instead moving toward charged language that attempts to resist commodification.
5. The Real World, Chicago: Or, Crossing Between the Virtual and Local: Alternative Country Music and Community in Chicago
Robert A. Russell, University of Iowa
During the 1990s, a musical movement known as alternative country music coalesced outside of the mainstream music industry by bringing together various elements of country music and rock music. Fueled in part by Bloodshot Records as well as artists such as Robbie Fulks and Jon Langford, Chicago became a central site in this musical movement. As is the case with other local music scenes, a significant musical infrastructure was created in Chicago around networks of clubs, record stores, and radio shows that catered to this growing community of musicians and fans. But, unlike many previous music scenes, the concurrent growth of a virtual infrastructure focused on alternative country music was also emerging. Led by fans, numerous virtual spaces were created for the discussion and promotion of alternative country music. Consequently, a vocal and active community of fans of alternative country music emerged separate from the nfrastructure of the local scene, with significant consequences on alternative country music in Chicago. This paper explores the interplay between virtual and local spaces in the Chicago alt.country scene as fans, musicians, and other participants cross between these spaces to create musical communities in Chicago.
Geographies of Media 4: Communicating
1. WAIF-FM: A case study in community radio's place in a globalizing mediascape
BillyTerry University of South Carolina
The concentration of radio station ownership and the priority that stations place on content at national and global scales has led to deterritorialization and a sense of place-lessness at the local scale. As an alternative to these homogenizing forces, community radio has proven itself to be an alternative medium that allows citizens to construct their own local media space on terms determined by themselves. This paper is an attempt to understand how WAIF 88.3 FM, an all-volunteer community radio station in Cincinnati, Ohio is meeting the needs of the local community. The study was conducted mostly through semi-structured interviews and observation of station activities as well as through content analysis. Interviews with station volunteers documented the motivation for participation in community radio and the networks of communication and support that are linked to the station. Analysis of programming revealed that WAIF maintains a multi-scalar product with emphasis on representing groups that have traditionally been denied access to mainstream media outlets. The paper concludes by noting the relevance of the WAIF case study for broader issues of media control, content, and scale.
2. Media Agenda Setting: Perceptions of Rural Vulnerability to Terrorist Attack
Karen D. Johnson-Webb, Bowling GreenState University
Brett A. Barnett, Bowling Green State University
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government established the Department of Homeland Security, which has as its mandate: "to make America more secure." One way in which the Department of Homeland Security has attempted to make America more secure has been through the use of its "Homeland Security Advisory System", a rainbow-color-coded system created to continually notify public safety officials and the general public about the current perceived risk of terrorist attack. Although media coverage has helped to make it the most ubiquitous defense mechanism employed by government to protect Americans from the threat of terrorism, the advisory system hasgenerally not been studied by geographers. This study seeks to fill this void in the literature. Operating from the agenda-setting theoretical perspective of media effects, this study examines how press coverage of the advisory system may have affected the level of public concern about terrorism in rural America. In particular, this study seeks to determine if there is a relationship between how local newspapers serving Northwest Ohio have emphasized the Homeland Security Advisory System, through total coverage and story positioning, and the level of importance that persons living in this geographic region assign to the issue of terrorism. Results suggest that newspaper coverage of the advisory system has contributed to a general perception of immunity from terrorism in this region of rural America.
3. The Emergency Alert System: Its Viability in the New Localism of Commercial Radio
Marian Mustoe, Eastern Oregon University
EAS, EBS, CONELRAD, Localism, Federal Communications Commission, Voice Tracking, ENDEC, PEP Stations, Local Primary Stations, Emergency Messaging, Local Radio, Emergency Management Agencies, Daisy Chains, NOAA Weather Radio, Train Derailment, Hazardous Cargo, Homeland Security, Commercial Radio Broadcasting. Changes in broadcasting regulation and newly emerging technologies have contributed to a shift in the way commercial AM and FM radio stations can be operated and managed. Once the backbone of a cold war emergency alert network and strategic deterrent system, commercial radio stations still act as a part of a public emergency messaging system; now known as the Emergency Alert System. But given the present new era of de-regulatory broadcasting, some suggest that commercial radio has lost its edge as a part of a viable public emergency alert network. This research attempts to identify issues surrounding the break down of the EAS system during a train derailment of hazardous materials near Minot, North Dakota, in January 2003. Using the Minot event as a model, this derailment is compared to a derailment and hazardous spill that occurred in Macdona, Texas June 2004. Through interviews with representatives of the EPA, NOAA, state and local emergency managers as well as with radio station engineers, an analysis is constructed around the use of the EAS during these emergencies. This study also includes a series of empirical inquiries that include: the monitoring of specific stations for air quality, tracing the filing of a formal FCC complaint, and a survey of a sample of EAS local primary AM and FM stations nationwide. Finally, recommendations are provided that consider the role of commercial radio as a viable emergency messaging system in the context of homeland security and the ideals of localism.
4. Dispatches from an overheating world: Literary writing and geographical imaginations of global warming
Kendra Strauss School of Geography & the Environment, University of Oxford,
The first aim of this paper is to consider the responses of human geographers to the construction of global warming as the pre-eminent environmental ‘matter of concern’, and to the challenges inherent in theorising the physical, spatial, social and cultural assemblages that constitute it. A review of the literature suggests a number of gaps, which can be seen as the product of missed opportunities to link up fruitful theoretical approaches – transplanted from fields such as science studies and political ecology – with the trajectories of research in physical geography (which dominates in terms of volume of published output). The second aim is to suggest an approach that grows out of an active engagement with the non-academic/pedagogical arenas in which the construction of different knowledges takes place. Discourse analysis techniques are used to analyse Bill McKibben’s essay in the literary magazine Granta’s issue on global warming, “This Overheating World”. Finally, recent literary fiction is surveyed to ascertain the existence of a literature/literature(s) of climate change which, it is argued, are emergent, and which resist the narrow exclusion of the social, cultural and political from the enviro-scientific definition of global warming. These literatures open up an alternative space for imagining and articulating the very concrete spatial, temporal and cultural transformations heralded by the ‘thing’ called global warming.
Geographies of Media 5: Cyberspace and the Internet
1. Representation of Cities and Fantasy Landscapes in Video Games
Leigh Schwartz, San Diego State University
Geographers have begun to take interest in the imaginative geographies portrayed in media images, but have so far somewhat neglected the representation of space within video games. Virtual landscapes ranging from modern cities to swords-and-sorcery fantasy, unlike real-life landscapes, are completely designed and serve as metaphors for functions, themes, and mythologies. This paper investigates the interactive spaces of several popular video games, focusing on the methods of representation as well as ideological messages portrayed through these virtual landscapes.
2. Xenophobia in Normative Cyber-space: Mainstreaming the 'Extreme-Right' on the Internet
Robert M. Kerr University of Wisconsin-Platteville
Darren Purcell Florida Department of Education
Xenophobia's definitions in the scholarly literature have focused on its pathological aspects, yet there is a clear spatial component to the phenomenon that is often overlooked. Spatial expression of xenophobia is most likely to happen when there is a perceived threat from exogenous cultural influences that challenge dominant views of the ordinary landscape. Xenophobic discourse can be found in a variety of media -- one medium deserving of greater attention as a site of contestation is cyberspace. We connect this research to a growing literature on the use of cyberspace for political aims. In this paper, we will treat cyberspace as another form of landscape, open to colonization via competing discourse on how real spaces are defined in a xenophobic form of normative space. Xenophobic social movements appropriate Internet technology to foster a "terrain of resistance" that challenges mutli-cutlural visions of territory. While the phenomenon outlined here is observable in a variety of geographical contexts, the presented case study focuses on the Vlaams Blok, an 'Extreme-Right' political party that makes heavy use of the Internet and has gained substantial popular support in the northern Belgian region of Flanders over the past decade.
3. Regional Identity in Cyberspace - Competing visions of Sandzak and Raska
Darren Purcell Florida Department of Education
Amaël Cattaruzza Paris IV-Sorbonne
Competing visions of space have been articulated in a variety of media as the potential to use them as tools of soft power and strategic discourse have increased. The advent of the Internet and cyberspaces requires geographers to treat this medium as not only a new source of text for analysis, but as a form of territory open to political contestation. This paper examines the websites of opposing political movements with a stake in defining the spaces known alternatively as Sandzak and Raska (Former Yugoslavia), to explore the tropes and discursive strategies deployed to garner legitimacy for competing territorial claims. This paper links media richness theory and a reconstituted for of medium theory of Deibert (1997) to understand the importance of the creating a website, and how this contributes to a pedagogy of space.
4. The devil finds work for virtual hands to do: Telegeographies and media markets
Ann Z. Li Rutgers University
The discourse of space, place and media was originally configured in the historical context of apparatus sites like colonial urban movie theaters. In a post-colonial context, a reconsidered virtual and geographic metropole and its simulation in multiplayer on-line virtual combat games or subaltern cinema markets readdresses and reconfigures the textual reproduction of violence and gender. This paper contributes to measuring virtual capital in the context of trans-border temporal and spatial geographies seen as a function of the academic discourse for economic geography's disciplinary discourse on cinematic and mass media industries. Are spatial models that range from neoricardian land rent to internet spectral pricing for cultural, social, human, and financial capital sufficiently operationalized for critical theoretical research programs? How convergent are the methodologies that attempt to measure, interpret and explain the use and exchange of virtual capital and do network analysis technologies ranging from social network analysis to GIS meet the challenge?