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Place as Curriculum 614a Course Description

Place as Curriculum 614a Defintions

Place as Curriculum 614a Biliography

Papers and other Resources

Key Or Defining Concepts In This Course:

The phase (“sense of place”) is an intricate?though very serious?pun. It is intricate because the word “sense” and the word “place “ have two meanings each: “sense” referring to both perception and logic; “place” meaning both social position and physical location. (Meyrowitz, 1985, 308).

A. Humans are situated in the world

1. Place as body?

My understanding of place starts with the body as it is our first experience of place or of "where". Our feet are useful in that they truly do ground us--if we are aware of them. (De Certeau's idea of body as location and practice (Mauk, Johnathon, 2003, 375).

William Gass' definition of reflection, which is based in perception and a kind of permission, is clear and useful here (1999, 142). It is written in the context of his study of the poet Rilke.

To breathe, to see, feel, touch, taste, hear, smell, realize the world, widely, without judgment or repudiation: this (is) the first task—to allow the world in. To inhale all, swallow all, to become the place observed. For no more reason than its recognition. Such openness permits the initial transformation…for when we see, feel, touch, taste, and hear the world, we alter its materiality profoundly. What was simply an emitted signal, the outcry of the thing to let us know it was there, becomes a quality in consciousness.

In an essay titled, Readers of the lost art: Visuality and particularity in art criticism, Nigel Whitely (1999, 117-118) discusses the term critical looking by saying:

the ‘looking’ aspect requires experience and nurturing before truly critical looking—with both words fully served—comes into being where ‘critical’ and ‘looking’ are fused together and continually interrelate and inform.

2. Body in Social, Cultural, and Physical Place
Place has at least two meanings, i.e. physical place and social place, therefore our concept of place needs to be grounded in both the aesthetics of experiencing places with all five senses and the politics of experiencing places as contested areas.

And the second concept:

B. Language’s relationship to human situatedness in the world
The role of language in conveying and creating a sense of place, i.e. our moral obligation to be “placed” within the form of discourse that we use. Also to be aware of the both the integrating and distancing effects of certain language forms. (i.e. metaphoric vs. philosophic or scientific language. See Abram, Krall, Kamler, and Hoogland.)

But even personal language needs to exist within a critical framework. To address the need for distancing measures to be built into the work, Barbara Kamler (2001, 171) has developed what she calls a “politics of space” that
foregrounds the location and the locatedness of the writer, as well as the need to create distance between the writer and the experience written about, so that experience itself is relocated in other spaces—political, social, cultural—rather than understood simply as the province of the private and individual.

Place as Curriculum 614a Defintions

Place as Curriculum 614a Biliography