From journals to classrooms: theory and teaching in cultural geography

Abstract

Cultural geography has always involved multiple, sometimes conflicting, dialogues about what the subfield includes and should address, about how research within it should proceed, and about what theoretical approaches best capture the complicated relationship between something called “culture” and the production of space and place. This article examines the ways that these questions shape the work of cultural geographers in the classroom, especially the undergraduate classroom. As cultural geographers draw from an increasingly complex set of theories and frameworks, how do, or how can, these theoretical ideas inform pedagogy? What might recent debates about representational and nonrepresentational theories in cultural geography look like in the introductory classroom? Drawing on my own experience of teaching cultural geography, this article reflects on the relationship between theoretical debates over the doing of cultural geography and pedagogical practices in the undergraduate classroom. As it shows, the move from debating the doing of cultural geography in academic publications to teaching cultural geography in the undergraduate classroom requires a set of translations that, to date, are poorly developed in the subfield, as well as a potential reorientation of audience in cultural geographic writings.

Keywords:

• pedagogy
• nonrepresentational theory
• teaching
• cultural geography
• representation
• virtual geographies

Acknowledgments

I thank Nicholas Crane and Weronika Kusek for inviting me to be part of the AAG session from which these articles emerged and Mona Domosh for her feedback on an earlier version of these ideas. I also thank the anonymous reviewers whose cogent feedback substantially strengthened this paper, as well as Emily Mitchell-Eaton and Jesse Quinn, who helped immensely in bringing complicated theoretical ideas into the classroom.

Notes

1. The literature on theorizing the field is immense. For examples, see Katz (1994), Moseley (2007), Sundberg (2003), and Vanderbeck (2005). The same is true for geographic discussions of texts. See, among others, Barnes and Duncan (1992), Buttimer et al. (2000), Dittmer (2010), and Rose (2011).

2. Questions about the doing of cultural geography are predicated on the question of what cultural geography—or culture, for that matter—is. In this article, I take to heart Anderson et al.'s arguments that cultural geography is “a contested terrain of debate” motivated in different ways in different places and coalescing into “a series of intellectual—and, at core, politicized—engagements with the world” (2003, p. 2). Like the articles in this special issue, Anderson et al. (2003) focus less on what cultural geography is and more on what it does as a set of practices, discourses, and politics. See also Mitchell (2000), Castree (2004).

3. Barnett (1998) also stresses the ways that changes in the academic publishing industry moved new cultural geography toward middle-range texts oriented toward the classroom. Again, however, such midlevel teaching publications have yet to surface for nonrepresentational geographies. One of the only published discussions of nonrepresentational theories in the context of teaching (Latham and McCormack 2009) does not discuss the actual process of teaching nonrepresentational theory and focuses, instead, on using images (in their case, photographs) to allow students “to experiment inventively with techniques for participating in the generative expressiveness of the world” (p. 261).

4. This way of understanding relevance in the classroom is perhaps a step toward what Tariq Jazeel and Colin McFarlane call for in their arguments about “responsibility” as “an emotional, social and political demand” in work in and beyond the classroom (2010, p. 110).

5. An additional key theme in new cultural geography, and in my course, was a focus on power, hegemony, and resistance. What these themes look like in the context of nonrepresentational theories is the subject of much debate. See, for instance, Cresswell (2012), Rose (2010).

6. Dirty Dancing clip—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43vK0k6A2I. Accessed 2 August 2013. The Artist is Present clip—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcmcEZxdlv4. Accessed 2 August 2013.

7. In 2013, I again taught this material, with some changes. I added new exercises to lecture material on representation, asking students to analyze changes in how ideas about slavery, the antebellum American South, and race were represented in movie trailers for Gone with the Wind (1939), Django Unchained (2012), and Twelve Years a Slave (2013). This additional hands-on exercise, along with more extensive discussion of how to analyze texts through the lens of representation, somewhat strengthened students' abilities to apply a representational approach, at least in terms of connotation and denotation, in their online lives. In the lecture on nonrepresentational theory, I added a discussion of the rapper Jay-Z's performance art piece, “Picasso Baby,” which was inspired by Marina Abramovic. I moved the lecture on non-representational theory and affect to precede the exercise on virtual geographies, and students were asked to reflect in their papers on whether ideas associated with non-representational theory helped them think about how we interact with virtual spaces and practices. In their papers in 2013, students drew more on a language of emotion than affect but did hone in on the ways that web design manipulated, or tried to manipulate, their affective responses—a key theme in work on affect (Thrift 2004; Ash 2010) but not a topic that I covered. Also, some students argued that affect was not a useful lens for thinking about virtual spaces because there were no material bodies present online, understanding affect as something that worked through material bodies and struggling to see how it might work at the interface between virtual and material bodies and spaces. Even with this new arrangement, students, and I, still wrestled with how to operationalize a nonrepresentational approach in their analysis and how they might “do” nonrepresentational theory in assessing virtual geographies. Even as the ideas that we might know something without knowing it or might have encounters that operate outside our cognition of them made sense to students in theory, figuring out how to work with these ideas in practice remains an ongoing project. Affect provided a more tangible way for students to use ideas associated with nonrepresentational theory, but nonrepresentational theory itself continued to be something they could describe but were unclear about how to “do.”