The Oral History Association's 2014 annual meeting will be held in Madison, Wisconsin this week.
Students Yuko Nakamura and Hongyan Yang will present their papers, below, as part of the session, "Exploring Built Environments with Oral History." Thu, October 9, 8:30 to 10:00am, Madison Concourse Hotel, 2, Conference I
Dr. Arijit Sen will present his paper, "Vegetable, Fish and Mango Streets: Refiguring Immigrant Landscapes Through Food Imagery," as part of the session, "Exploring Cultural Narratives." Fri, October 10, 3:45 to 5:15pm, Madison Concourse Hotel, 1, Caucus Abstract Place is an intensely local concept. But when attention shifts to immigrants who inhabit multiple locations, often separated by distances and time, the territorial description of place becomes problematic. Immigrants experience place differently and often describe a local landscape using images and experiences from a different location. This paper examines how a culture of mobility influences the ways South Asian immigrants along Devon Avenue, Chicago,e speak about locality and place. Although the owners of these stores have diverse national, language, religious and regional backgrounds the street is referred to by pan-ethnic descriptive monikers such as Little India or as a South Asian marketplace. Internal differences are rendered invisible purposely since a unified front produces a coherent identity. Yet, my analysis of twenty in-depth interviews with storeowners shows how national and sub-group differences can be read in the sensory descriptions of place. Different in-group spatial imaginations are sustained by using sensory references such as visual arrangement of food objects, types of cuisines, food memories, cooking smells, and groceries. For instance, Bangladeshi storeowners differentiate themselves from Indian and Pakistani stores by advertising (and taking about) fish in ways that makes sense only to their Bangladeshi customers. The internal spatial organization of their stores are related to the variety of fish they sell and their descriptions of Devon Avenue is organized around a taxonomy of stores selling and smelling of different fish products. In addition they use piscatorial experiences from Bangladesh (how fish is caught, cut and sold) in order to describe their merchandise. These place descriptions framed by sensory references to food subtly express regional and religious affiliations. An effective jargon based on common cultural experiences and experiential order of place becomes a formulaic in-group communicative strategy. This paper’s focus on trans-national sensory experience in the interpretation of place sheds new light on our understandings of the material world of immigrants.
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Anna Andrzejewski will be speaking at the 3rd Annual David Dillon Symposium in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington on Saturday, October 11th. The Topic this year is "Building the Just City," and Anna will be speaking on the history of penal architecture as presented in her first book, Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America. For more info, see http://www.uta.edu/architecture/research/dillon/symposium.php
September 26, 2014 at 4:30 PM in AUP 170 at UW-Milwaukee
“Architectures of Information” presentation by Molly Steenson, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI In the 1960s, architecture got smart. Architects began turning to computation to make buildings and cities responsive and to model the increasing complexity of their work. In so doing, they did more than merely apply the computer to architecture: they employed the logics of cybernetics and artificial intelligence in order to alter their own design processes and their approaches to representation. At the same time, computation researchers embraced architecture as a way to describe the impact of their work on the world. In this lecture, we'll explore architectures of information: what happens when architecture and AI mesh at the scale of the human, the city, and the world. Molly Steenson is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where she focuses on digital media. Her research meshes architecture, communications and history of science. She holds a PhD in architecture (2014) from Princeton University School of Architecture. Her dissertation is titled “Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, Nicholas Negroponte & MIT’s Architecture Machine Group.” She also holds a Master’s of Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture (the history-theory degree). She was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy for two school years, from 2003–04, where she ran the Connected Communities research group. Before this return to academia, she worked with the Web and social media for 20 years in a variety of roles at a variety of companies. She continues this practice as a digital strategist and design researcher who examines how technology and interactivity fit into our contemporary cities and lives. This interest has sent her to India to study mobile phones, to China to study social networking sites, and to the 1960s to study the effect of artificial intelligence on architectural systems and interactivity.http://www.girlwonder.com Richard Guy Wilson, Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, will speak at UW-Madison on Thursday, October 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L160. His talk is entitled, "Edith Wharton and Frank Lloyd Wright: Reshaping the American Interior." We hope to see you there!
We are excited to announce four new faculty affiliates in the BLC Program at UW-Madison! Congratulations to:
Jim Leary, Folklore Mark Nelson, Design Studies Monica Penick, Design Studies Molly Steenson, School of Journalism and Mass Communication Monica Welke, a recent graduate of UW-Madison's Master's Program in Art History, had her research on the 1954 Parade of Homes in Madison's Westmorland neighborhood published in their newsletter, the Westmorland Courier. Monica completed this research in Anna Andrzejewski's "Methods in Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures" course in the spring of 2014. Class members' final projects focused on either Westmorland in Madison or the Washington Park neighborhood in Milwaukee. Congratulations, Monica! Click here to read "Constructing and Marketing the Ideal Homeowner Lifestyle: The 1954 Parade of Homes in Westmorland, Madison, Wisconsin."
BLC Field School Receives Wisconsin Humanities Council Grant
The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures program annual field school, this year called "Picturing Milwaukee: Washington Park" and being directed by UWM Associate Professor Arijit Sen, has been awarded a competitive $9978 Public Humanities Grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council. A primary component of the BLC curriculum for students from UW-Madison and UWM, this field school project seeks to employ the enduring creativity of storytelling, the power of digital humanities, and depth of local knowledge in order to galvanize Milwaukee residents to talk about their homes as repositories of community memory, spaces of caring, and markers of civic pride. With the help of the grant from the WHC, the BLC Field School will have the capability to expand the students' final presentations beyond traditional physical exhibits through the use of documentary shorts and a digitally enhanced neighborhood heritage tour. These additions will broaden the range of available methods for analyzing vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes. Field School runs June 9–July 11, with the final exhibit opening July 25 at the Washington Park Partners public hall. Contact Prof. Arijit Sen for more information: [email protected]. Interested UW–Madison students should contact Prof. Anna Andrzejewski for information on enrolling for Madison credit: [email protected]. For more info about the field school, see www.SeeSchool.weebly.com. Welcome to the Buildings-Landscapes-Culture Program's new website!
We hope this new look will help visitors, students, and participants find out more about the program, our history, and what's been going on recently. New features include: The BLC Fieldwork Archive Page Under the Resources tab, this page will have links to online and downloadable material related to field projects from past years. BLC classes always involve on-the-ground field research, which generate drawings, photographs, maps, essays, histories of buildings, neighborhoods, and communities. This is a great place to get a sense of what BLC students do. This page is still under construction but will be growing. Please check back often! BLC Students page A better student page introduces visitors to BLC students and recent graduates in Milwaukee and Madison. Resources In addition to the fieldwork archive, we have set up a space for students and faculty to share their work. This will include a syllabus exchange, bibliographies and reading lists from BLC students' PhD exams, conference papers and anything else that we want to share. This What's New? Page While BLC has been keeping a few different blogs, we plan to consolidate and make all of our news announcements here. So please click the "What's New?" button to keep up with news from BLC! We look forward to making this new website a gathering place for students, faculty, project participants, and prospective students. Welcome! — Sarah Fayen Scarlett, BLC Program PhD Candidate and project assistant Check out this article that promoted the Vernacular Architecture Forum annual conference before it came to Madison in 2012:
Wisconsin State Journal (Apr. 9, 2012) |