With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non- heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather, socialize, protest, mourn, and celebrate. The focus is deeper look at how sexually variant and gender non-conforming Americans constructed identity, created communities, and fought to have rights recognized by the government. Each chapter is accompanied by prompts and activities that invite readers to think critically and immerse themselves in the subject matter while working collaboratively with others.
This book explores the changing meanings of place for our identities and life stories in the 21st century, using an empirical approach developed in narrative and discursive psychology.
In this volume, Marichela Sepe explores the preservation, reconstruction and enhancement of cultural heritage and place identity. She outlines the history of the concept of placemaking, and sets out the range of different methods of analysis and assessment that are used to help pin down the nature of place identity.
Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of “place” and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life. Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can’t be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn’t a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support? Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists—and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme—we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society. The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.
The UK is experiencing a housing crisis unlike any other. Homelessness is on the increase and more people are at the mercy of landlords due to unaffordable housing. Place and Identity: Home as Performance highlights that the meaning of home is not just found within the bricks and mortar; it is constructed from the network of place, space and identity and the negotiation of conflict between those – it is not a fixed space but a link with land, ancestry and culture. This book fuses philosophy and the study of home based on many years of extensive research. Richardson looks at how the notion of home, or perhaps the lack of it, can affect identity and in turn the British housing market. This book argues that the concept of ‘home’ and physical housing are intrinsically linked and that until government and wider society understand the importance of home in relation to housing, the crisis is only likely to get worse. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate students whose interest is in housing and social policy, as well as appealing to those working in the areas of implementing and changing policy within government and professional spaces.
Feminist approaches within the social sciences have expanded enormously since the 1960s. In addition, in recent years, geographic perspectives have become increasingly significant as feminist recognition of the differences between women, their diverse experiences in different parts of the world and the importance of location in the social construction of knowledge has placed varied geographies at the centre of contemporary feminist and postmodern debates. Gender, Identity and Place is an accessible and clearly written introduction to the wide field of issues that have been addressed by geographers and feminist scholars. It combines the careful definition and discussion of key concepts and theoretical approaches with a wealth of empirical detail from a wide-ranging selection of case studies and other empirical research. It is organized on the basis of spatial scale, examining the relationships between gender and place from the body to the nation, although the links between different spatial scales are also emphasized. The conceptual division and spatial separation between the public and private spheres and their association with men and women respectively has been a crucial part of the social construction of gendered differences and its establishment, maintenance and reshaping from industrial urbanization to the end of the millennium is a central linking theme in the eight substantive chapters. The book concludes with an assessment of the possibilities of doing feminist research. It will be essential reading for students in geography, feminist theory, women's studies, anthropology and sociology.
Reflecting the ideas and issues which have found themselves at the forefront of cultural theory and studies, this text addresses itself to the dilemmas and predicaments of the often bewildering experience of modern life, covering such diverse topics as ethnicity, architecture and urban spaces.
Maybe we've had enough of studies of gay men and urban centers, tracing out the similarities from one place to the next. Japonica Brown-Saracino bucks the trend, giving us the first in-depth study of lesbians (and bisexual/queer women more generally), showing how four contrasting communal cultures have shaped their identity. Individual lesbian residents shape the culture of sexual identity they embrace, based at the same time on the prevailing culture in the city they inhabit. And the consequence is that the same woman will develop a different version of lesbian identity depending on which of the four cities she moves into. Those cities are: Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine. She identifies them in the book (a rare move for ethnographers), thus insuring a coast-to-coast readership, with lots of debate. This book advances, in almost equal measure, sexuality and gender studies, theories of identity, theories of place, and urban sociology. Each city has its own loose bundles or connections between residents, whether it's the taste-based ties in Ithaca, or the ties in San Luis Obispo that cut across demographics, or the conversations about identity that prevail in Portland, or the emphasis Greenfield on other dimensions of the self (e.g., profession, politics, or life stage, such as motherhood). Along the way, Brown-Saracino poses a set of questions from urban sociology about migration, residential choice, and community change processes that students of cities rarely apply to sexual minority populations.
Dark Tourism, including visitation to places such as murder sites, battlefields and cemeteries is a growing phenomenon, as well as an emergent area of scholarly interest. Despite this interest, the intersecting domains of dark tourism and place identity have been largely overlooked in the academic literature and this book aims to fill this void. The three main themes of Visitor Motivation, Destination Management and Place Interpretation are addressed in this book from both a demand and supply perspective by examining a variety of case studies from around the world. This edited volume takes the dark tourism discussion to another level by reinforcing the critical intersecting domains of dark tourism and place identity and, in particular, highlighting the importance of understanding this connection for visitors and destination managers. Written by leading academics in the area, this stimulating volume of 19 chapters will be valuable reading for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in a range of discipline areas; researchers and academics interested in dark tourism; and, other interested stakeholders including those in the tourism industry, government bodies and community groups.
