Performing Cities: Engaging the High-tech Flâneur
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v20i1.293Keywords:
City, Intersecting cultures, Student engagement, Technology, Place, Study abroad, Education abroadAbstract
The city is a place of intersecting cultures, identities and ideas that also serves as fertile ground for learning within the context of study abroad. Using the notion of the flâneur, this article problematizes students’ engagement with the spaces and places of the city with special attention to the mediating role now played by technology. We interweave a theoretical discussion with empirical examples from two urban study abroad locales and with suggestions for practice. We argue that despite the complex array of resources the student employs to take on the foreign city, it is only the savvy wanderer who picks up on the subtle differences that we elusively refer to as a city’s “character” or personality and who understands their own shifting role of spectator, wanderer, and performer—thus entering into a relationship with place.
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Baudelaire, C., and J. Mayne. (1964). The painter of modern life, and other essays. London: Phaidon.
Coverly , M. (2006). Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials.
De Certeau, M. (1974). The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. Originally published 1967. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.
Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A short introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
García Canclini, N. (1995). Mexico: Cultural Globalization in a Disintegrating City. American Ethnologist, Vol. 22 (4), 743–755.
Goh, R.B.H. and B.S.A. Yeoh. (Eds.) (2003) Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text: Urban Landscapes, Cultural Documents, and Interpretive Experiences. New Jersey, London, Singapore, Hong Kong: World Scientific.
Hall, S. (2004). I, Mercator. In You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. Katharine Harmon (Ed). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 15–19.
Holston, J. and A. Appadurai.i. (1999). Cities and citizenship. In James Holston (Ed). Cities and Citizenship. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1–18.
Jenks, C. and T. Neves. (2000). A Walk on the Wild Side: Urban ethnography meets the flâneur. Cultural Values. 4(1), 1–17.
Knopp, L.(2007). On the relationship between queer and feminist geographies. The Professional Geographer. 59(1), 47–55.
Low, S. (1996). Spatializing culture: the social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica. American Ethnologist, Vol. 23 (4), 861–879.
Mazlich, B. (1994). The Flâneur: from spectator to representation. In The Flâneur. Keith Tester (Ed.). London, New York: Routledge, 43–60.
Mbembe, A. and S. Nuttall (2004). Writing the world from an African metropolis. Public Culture. 16(3), 347–372.
Nuttall, S. (2009). Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Parsons, D. (2000). Streetwalking the metropolis: women, the city and modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perkins, C. (2007). Community mapping. The Cartographic Journal. 44(2), 127–137.
Pile, S. (2005). Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. London: Sage.
Pinder, D. (2005). Arts of urban exploration. Cultural Geographies. 12, 383–411.
Pinder, D.( 2007). Cartographies unbound. Cultural Geographies. 14(3), 453–462.
Pratt, M. L. (1999) Arts of the Contact Zone. In D. Bartholome and A. Petrosky, (eds.) Ways of Reading. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Available at: http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~stripp/2504/pratt.html>
Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
Rink, B. (2008). Village people: Quartering De Waterkant in discourse and bricks. PhD thesis. University of Cape Town.
Rodríguez, K.(2009). Dentro y fuera/Inside and Out: an erotics of public space. Morelia, Mexico: Azafrán y Cinabrio Press.
Sack, R. D. (1988). The consumer’s world: Place as context. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 78(4), 642–664.
Smith, R. G. (2003). World City Actor-Networks. Progress in Human Geography. 27(1), 25–44.
Tester, K., Ed. (1994). The Flâneur. London, New York: Routledge.
Tilly, C. (2005). Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press.
Weber, S.(2003). Streets, squares, theaters: A city on the move — Walter Benjamin’s Paris. Boundary 2. 30(1), 17–30.
Wood, D. (2004). Two maps of Boylan Heights. In You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. Katharine Harmon (Ed). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 104–107.
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Published
2011-03-15
How to Cite
Rodríguez, K., & Rink, B. (2011). Performing Cities: Engaging the High-tech Flâneur. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 20(1), 103–119. https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v20i1.293
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Research Articles
