MA Week 47 - Place seminar, more psychogeographical thoughts…and more dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 15^th November 2016

 

 

 

An interesting seminar on Tuesday lunchtime to start with. I’ve put a copy of my notes here. It was given by Dr Helen Graham and entitled “Restaging the Political Dynamics of Commons and Publics”. Some of it was a little bit beyond my sphere of knowledge but there were some very relevant and interesting points, summarised below.

Helen’s research area is heritage and she pointed out that it is concerned with the past and the future as well as the present. Looking back, we can see what pasts have contributed to our current present. Extrapolating forwards, we can try to predict what sort of future our current present might make. She considers heritage as a social process and as a means of generating ideas. This takes the ideas I’ve been working with, of heritage as having a cultural basis, and takes it further. It definitely moves it on considerably from the days of object-based concepts.

 Helen also alluded to histories pluralised beyond the “best rehearsed”, i.e. the official, which again ties in very closely with what I’ve been working on in my dissertation – the need to disrupt the “official”, over-arching narrative by telling your own version of events.  Different “pasts” can also give rise to different “futures”. She is currently involved in a project to use this technique to try to envisage the city in 2026. The intention is that the city will become more dynamic.

An interesting ethical point arose regarding the group she is working with. The group has a pre-existing Facebook group where photos and memories are shared. Full ethical clearance has been obtained for the project. However, there are probably people in the “yesteryear” photos who haven’t given their permission for the images to be used as they are passing by in the background or otherwise unaware that pictures are being taken. It did raise the disconnect between the “official” (institution-level) and “unofficial” (Facebook) archives. There is no control over social media and there is not yet enough history to judge its use. It made me slightly wary of what I’m blogging, and to be more mindful of exactly what photos are showing.

Anyway, I was heartened to see that my reading on heritage had yielded some fruit as the ideas I’d gleaned were reflected back to me via Helen’s talk. It was interesting too that the idea of “official” and “unofficial” came up again. The talk provided confirmation that my thinking about heritage is along the right lines.

 

 

Millennium Square 1

 

I had a day of dissertation on Thursday then an excellent weekend away, but it was back to it with a vengeance on Monday preparing for the upcoming Being Human event on Saturday 19^th. I went out at lunchtime to take some photos of the area we’ll be investigating, around Millennium Square, and promised myself it would just be a quick rush round the buildings, no more. Of course that soon failed and I moved on to taking photos of all the text and signage. There is so much text, telling you what you can and can’t do, how much stuff costs, trying to entice you in for a drink… it put me in mind of a future project that abstracts text as well as shapes. I also did a couple of line sketches for use in the planned cityscape and which kids can use to colour in if needed. Those and the images have gone off to the event organiser, Dr Henry Irving at Leeds Beckett.

 

Millennium Square 2

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting up with Dr Zoë Tew-Thompson again. I had managed to squeeze in reading one of the chapters of her book, “Urban Constellations : Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain” and there was much to discuss. The chapter is a psychogeographical reflection on the Sage building on Gateshead’s riverside. Old areas of the city have been destroyed to allow it to be built, thereby erasing the past. But the past is never fully erased. Oral histories, life stories, emerge to disrupt the shiny new present. The stories may not be officially, factually correct – a street name may be wrongly remembered, for example – but this does not serve to lessen their worth. It simply reflects the everydayness of life, of remembering and re-remembering.

 

The new Sage building also provided something that wasn’t previously there; a view over Gateshead’s riverside. So elements are revealed in the same way that elements are hidden. By walking we can become aware of these different viewpoints and vantage points, and this can tell us something about our attitudes and identity.

One striking thing about the chapter was the way it is written. Zoë had effectively used her theoretical underpinning as just that – a layer onto which she placed her own experience and her own argument, pulling up her theorists into her own explanations and conceptualisations as needed.  This was informative to me regarding my dissertation as I’d been trying to get lots of different theorists for fear of relying too heavily on one. This helped me see a different viewpoint – rather, that the main theorists can be called upon throughout the essay and this can help the continuity.

 

Under (re)-construction, much like my dissertation

My dissertation is starting to make more use of sense of place, much like Zoë’s book chapter, and I have compared two articles about this here. The more I read, the more I realise so many of these theories are intertwined and they become more (rather than less) difficult to separate. In a way I consider this to be inevitable as everyday life doesn’t break down into silos, does it?