Week 12 24 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 GEOG...

Week 1224 November 2011

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

1

GEOG 3300Space, Place & Scale

Week 12Possible Worlds: Imaginary Places and Digital Geographies

Department of GeographyFaculty of Liberal Arts & Professional

StudiesYork University

Fall Term 2011-2012



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Research Essay

• Critical essay official due date: Tuesday 6 December 2011. Late essays will not be read or graded without formal documentation.

• Please submit your graded outline along with your final paper.

• Make sure your paper is analytical rather than descriptive, and that it engages critically with the meanings of space and place.



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GEOG 3300 Term Paper:Suggestions for Organization

Section Content Pages

1

Introduction: thesis statement (explain what you are writing about, how you will do so, and why it is important or meaningful), summary of arguments you will use

1 or 2

2

Context / background: brief explanation of theoretical perspective(s) that inform your paper. Where does this perspective ‘fit’ in the literature/debates on SPS?

2 to 3

3Analysis: A thoughtful, complete exploration of your

subject (using evidence and examples) that justifies / fulfills your thesis statement.

5 to 7

4 Conclusion. 1 at most

Don’t forget to choose an interesting title and provide full references and notes as necessary. Yes, you can use “I”.



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Is Facebook a Place?

• A space and a place?• Can you have a sense of ownership, connection,

privacy, belonging, dwelling, embodiment?• Going back to Cresswell – John Agnew’s three

aspects of place: (1) location (coordinates); (2) locale (setting; perhaps landscape); (3) sense of place (spatial meaning; significance)

• (How) can we use spatial concepts to understand Facebook, cyberspace, and online ‘communities’ in general?



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If Facebook is a place, what kind of place is it?

• From a descriptive perspective … • From a phenomenological perspective …

– Is dwelling (Stefanovic, Heidegger) possible on Facebook?

– What kind of performance or movement does Facebook enable?

– Is there an authentic experience of place on Facebook?• From a Social constructionist perspective …

– What would Lefebvre say about it ?– How would Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle

describe Facebook ?– How would you analyse Facebook from a postcolonial

perspective ?– From a feminist perspective ?– Through the lens of someone with a disability ?



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Metaphors of Place

• How far can we stretch metaphors of place?• Metaphors of place (Adams) can connect the familiar

with the unfamiliar; can also destabilize taken-for-granted meanings; can change how we think about things; can even efface reality (Baudrillard’s simulacrum; Borges’ map)

• Metaphors themselves have spatial aspects: metaphor as a threshold, a journey, a migration between ideas. We can use metaphors to journey from one place (or one idea of place) to another.

• Three kinds of metaphor (after Deetz, Lakoff, Johnson): (1) positional metaphors (translating nonspatial conditions into spatial ones; on, over, under) (2) ontological metaphors (where some tangible connection between phenomena is presupposed); and (3) structural metaphors (relations between familiar experiences).



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Virtual Places

• Are they fundamentally different from other kinds of places and spaces?

• What are the limits of spatial metaphors? At what point do the concepts themselves rupture?

• Adams (after Tuan) suggests that metaphors have particular uses when we consider technology, largely because technology is innovative in much the same way language (or ideas) are.



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Three Cyberspatial Metaphors

1. Virtual Architecture2. The Electronic Frontier3. Cyberspace

How do we see these metaphors unfold and rupture and rebuild themselves … in ‘social networking’ sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter? In films like The Matrix?

Do these kinds of spaces change how we think about geography?



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Brave New World?

• Utopia: ou/topos --? “no place”. Imaginary worlds; “the ficticity of nowhere” (Hutchinson); metaphors of charting and discovery (metaphors themsleves extended by “subtexts” to become “semiotic rectangle[s]” (Hutchinson, 173); “invented” places: worlds; ideologies.– Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels– Your online identities

• Two meanings of ‘no-place:’ either it is impossible to achieve, or it has no material form or existence.

• Is social networking the ultimate utopia? In one or both senses of the word?

• Utopia / dystopia / eutopia

• Utopias as “out there;’ a “hitherto unexplored region of the world. … Utopias may be set on some distant island, valley or mountaintop, in the Amazon basin, the Far East, Ethiopia, or the other side of the world, on the moon or other celestial bodies, inside the earth or a sea monster, or in the remote past or future.” (Hutchinson, 172)

• Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as utopian societies? But how are they regulated?

Week 1220 March 2008

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris, 2008

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Week 12 24 November 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 GEOG...

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