Representation Of Place Research Articles

Distributed Cortical Regions for the Recall of People, Places, and Objects

The human medial parietal cortex (MPC) is recruited during multiple cognitive processes. Previously, we demonstrated regions specific to recall of people or places and proposed that the functional organization of MPC mirrors the category selectivity defining the medial–lateral axis of the ventral–temporal cortex (VTC). However, prior work considered recall of people and places only, and VTC also shows object selectivity sandwiched between face- and scene-selective regions. Here, we tested a strong prediction of our proposal: like VTC, MPC should show a region specifically recruited during object recall, and its relative cortical position should mirror the one of VTC. While responses during people and place recall showed a striking replication of prior findings, we did not observe any evidence for object-recall effects within MPC, which differentiates it from the spatial organization in VTC. Importantly, beyond MPC, robust recall effects were observed for people, places, and objects on the lateral surface of the brain. Place-recall effects were present in the angular gyrus, frontal eye fields, and peripheral portions of the early visual cortex, whereas people recall selectively drove response in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus. Object-recall effects were largely restricted to a region posterior to the left somatosensory cortex, in the vicinity of the supramarginal gyrus. Taken together, these data demonstrate that while there are distributed regions active during recall of people, places, and objects, the functional organization of MPC does not mirror the medial–lateral axis of VTC but reflects only the most salient features of that axis—namely, representations of people and places.

Projecting the world. The mediated geography of the projection lantern in Belgium c.1900-c.1920

This article studies the virtual world(s) that Belgian audiences encountered through the multimodal mass medium of the projection lantern in the early twentieth century. In contrast to previous work, we move from studying the visual representation of a single place in a small number of projection slides to examining the virtual world(s) that the lantern medium enabled. To achieve this overview, we produce and analyze a database of announcements and reviews of 5673 unique lectures lantern lectures published in Antwerp and Brussels newspapers in three sample periods (1902–1904, 1914–1918, and 1922–1924). Oscillating between distant reading the database and close reading individual announcements, we chart the virtual world(s) of this multimodal mass medium in Belgium: the parts of the globe that became visible – be it in a positive or negative projection light – and the parts that remained underexposed. We show that in this virtual world, the Belgian colony of Congo was relatively close, while it was almost impossible to visit South America. While previous research has underlined the representation of far-away and exotic places, our research demonstrates that audiences most prominently used the projection lantern to take trips in their own country. By analyzing the virtual geography on multiple scales —continents, countries, and cities— we show how Belgian audiences experienced the world through the lens of a particular medium, uncovering the complex interplay between technology, media, and geographical imagination.

Dwelling in the Urban Liminal: A Phenomenological Consideration of Saul Leiter’s Street Photography

In this essay, I present a phenomenological exploration of the “urban liminal” in the context of Saul Leiter’s street photography. In gauging the possibilities of dwelling in the urban liminal, this essay brings into dialogue Heidegger’s notion of “wohnen” (as delineated in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”) and Leiter’s re-presentation of liminal places (and liminality). As transient spatialities, liminal places are not typically considered suitable for dwelling, meaning living or settling. But as neither space nor time is immutable and is always—whether evident or not—in a constant state of flux, it is useful to re-assess and re-imagine from time to time our relationship with place (and time) and, in the process, to reappraise the questions of identity and belongingness. In its investigation of the latencies of liminal places in Leiter’s street photography, this essay poses questions such as: is it possible to dwell (or be at home) in liminalities? How might the visual representation of liminality help deepen our understanding of transitional states and of change? How does Leiter’s stylization of liminality connect with our lived experience of these places? By examining Leiter’s depiction of urban liminality from a phenomenological perspective, this essay aims to show how liminality can be a useful concept for reimagining the relationship between the self and the world.

Innovative Approaches to Design Representation in Civil Engineering

In design and architecture, ‘reality’ exists through sign systems, the structured arrangements of signifying that which previously existed as ideas, beliefs, values, images and events. These representations conform to the philosophical and ideological dispositions that post the philosophical description of the Zeitgeist. An explicit emphasis on representations is characteristic of civil engineering design, which allows for the integration of technological, cultural, and esthetic values and information exchange across the temporal, spatial, and cultural divides. Consequently, it has been identified that, though representation is an important concept in civil engineering, there is no concrete and unambiguous definition of representation in modern civil engineering. This paper fills this gap by providing a theoretical analysis of representation and how it is used in contemporary design professions. From a theoretical viewpoint, the research defines the concept and builds a sound framework to deconstruct and implement representation to a real-life civil engineering model. Representation encompasses imitation and embodiment of prior elements through processes of abstraction or simulation, revealing two key dimensions: generative source (semiotic) and materialization (performed). Representation in civil engineering is present but in two primary dimensions. The first one, which is based on classical procedures, is semantic and realistic, and these works unambiguously express ideologies or technical concepts. The second, non-classical approach, relies on abstraction and subjectivity and here the designs look like an open question – not unique and predetermined by certain context and culture. These dualities place representation as a generative and communicative medium in civil engineering while providing conceptual solutions to structures, city planning and sustainability.

Gender in the Archive: The Dialogic Potential of Public Memory in the Outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

The original version of the film Shoah had an enormous impact on the revival of Holocaust memory. However, women appeared only a few times over the course of those nine long hours. Even though Lanzmann’s film achieved complexity in its representation of places, it failed to equally represent the experiences of both women and men, which is a disservice to all survivors. In 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) released over 220 hours of additional outtake footage from Shoah, never seen by the public. The outtakes reveal longer interviews with women, and these missing voices shed light on women’s experiences during the Holocaust in more detail. I argue that the “outtakes” of this film can be used by audiences to deconstruct gender “neutralities” around testimony to reimagine public memory narratives and spaces about the Holocaust as highly gendered. In the “rhetorical process of gendering” in public memory, so-called “neutral” public memory narratives can be challenged by newly discovered artifacts like the outtakes. Though Shoah had elements of ambiguity, there was no way to challenge its strict binary in gender representation— until now. This active audience engagement with Holocaust artifacts, what I call performative memorialization, marks a kairotic force in Holocaust memorialization; the past collapses into the present to elicit a dialogic of active audience participation.

Narrative Space and the Figure of the Refugee in the Early Life Writing of Ocean Vuong

ABSTRACT This paper will read for the representation of space in the Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong’s narrative essay “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation”. The paper places Vuong’s text into conversation with theorists of narrative and architectural spaces – Yi-Fu Tuan, Umberto Eco, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others – and draws on critical refugee studies to explore the representation of spaces and places in their relationship to Vuong’s account of refugee experience and trauma. In the essay’s manipulations of narrative space, meditations on architectural space, and engagements with theories of trauma, a spatial understanding of trauma emerges and comes to bear on first wave literary trauma theory, which the essay builds on and departs from with the suggestion that architectural space functions semiotically and is a medium of language by which topics socially and psychologically repressed can be “spoken” despite social taboos and prohibitions. Working against public discourse which reduces refugees to victims of trauma (in their country of origin) and beneficiaries of social uplift (in their resettlement country), Vuong critiques the discursive framing of the refugee as needful ward and perpetual other and works toward a means of speaking about personal experience that speaks back to dominant narratives about refugees.

Embodying Place: Charting the Badlands

I draw to recall the sensations of moving and resting within the landscape, images of place as translated through body, material and mark. In Charting the Badlands, gesture-driven mixed-media drawings fuse a lived, sensory experience of the natural geological environments of the American Southwest with the act of inventional mapping. While walking within the canyons, badlands and arroyos of the high desert, I gather clay, silt and soils to process into pigments in the studio. These pigments combine with my body’s gestured marks to map a memory of moving through place, a fragment of lived geological time. Drawing actions may echo geological processes of deposition, sedimentation and erosion. While not literal representations of place, the drawings reference geomorphological processes and evoke the surface of the earth as seen at altitude, with the viewer moving within and over the terrain. By physically walking the land, gathering soil and drawing with handcrafted pigments, I bridge the raw elements of the landscape with a gestural cartographic sense. This act of drawing is one of remembering the sensations unique to the experience of the flesh body within the lithic landscape, translating sense into a marked language of geological form. By using the soils gathered from the terrain as a self-referential drawing medium, the drawings invite a movement in both temporal and physical scale, a consideration of the history and context of the land embedded within the image, as well as the ground upon which one physically stands.

Infernal Heavens: Narratives of Africa. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise

Situated at the intersection of literary studies and cultural studies, the present article looks at how fictional representations of Africa have evolved over the past century, from Conrad’s canonical Heart of Darkness, which has unjustly become the landmark of colonial biased narratives of Africa despite the author’s declared disengagement with his protagonists’ perspectives, to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s recent reverse rewriting of Marlow’s journey, this time from the heart of darkness outward. Dwelling on the spatial metaphors of Heaven and Hell, this study argues that the two works under scrutiny put forward two essentially dichotomic representations of the same place, the African continent, which are largely dependent on the cultural environment and on cultural constraints. Whereas Conrad’s infernal depiction of Africa relies mostly on Eurocentric stereotypes and on a personal experience whose horror mostly stemmed from a cultural shock produced by experiencing difference as evil, Gurnah’s more complex and authentic depiction is a result of telling the story from within, as an insider, and reflecting on difference as productive diversity. In this respect, this study brings into discussion Ranjan Ghosh’s recent dialogue with J. Hillis Miller on Literature and Globalization (2016) to argue that a transnational, transcultural and transdisciplinary approach to the narrative text would actually result in bridging the gap of classical binary difference and would emphasize the immanence of the literary text. Thus, Gurnah’s Paradise reconstructs pre-WWI Africa from within, as a sum of lost Paradises which are by no means of Western extraction, while Conrad’s canonical Inferno echoes the fears of an empire.

Applying A/r/tography as a creative community resilience strategy in response to the climate emergency

ABSTRACT This paper connects arts education creative practice and the rise of climate emergency discourse with community resilience policymaking. We apply a creative-relational approach informed by the principles of a/r/tography to position community stories as central to place based transformation. Through our Guattari-inspired conceptual model, we apply the a/r/tographic method to critically explore its suitability for identifying and mapping hidden community stories — traces of a new ecosophy — as a local resilience response. Our research took place in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, as part of a creative programme commissioned to address inequalities through the arts. We entered into artistic dialogue with community creative practices that occurred at two ecological sites, creating reflective textual and visual artworks to produce alternative representations of place that challenge dominant narratives within local resilience policymaking. These mutual creative engagements informed our findings while remaining within their artistic context rather than reduced to categorised themes. This work offers a new local resilience strategy to strengthen community representation of their places.

Crossed by the border: children’s lived experiences with flooding in an urbanized transborder watershed

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the differential effect of the US-Mexico border on the lived experience of children exposed to flooding risk in an urbanized transborder watershed. The central argument is that this geopolitical border is an institution generative of social and spatial processes that create and thrive on differences and expose children on both sides of the border to high but unequal hazard levels. We pose that children’s bifurcated experiences with rain evince the border’s structuring power as a supra institution producing a socio-spatial regime that enables environmental inequities producing disparate representations of place. Understanding children’s lived experiences is critical to reducing their vulnerability in a highly integrated cross-border urbanization. Framed as a case study based on qualitative data obtained through narratives and visual elicitation techniques, the analysis reveals children’s experiences with flooding and associated hazards that have not been exposed in prior border research and have important implications for integrated disaster management, environmental justice, and resilience in border regions and cities.

A ventromedial visual cortical ‘Where’ stream to the human hippocampus for spatial scenes revealed with magnetoencephalography

The primate including the human hippocampus implicated in episodic memory and navigation represents a spatial view, very different from the place representations in rodents. To understand this system in humans, and the computations performed, the pathway for this spatial view information to reach the hippocampus was analysed in humans. Whole-brain effective connectivity was measured with magnetoencephalography between 30 visual cortical regions and 150 other cortical regions using the HCP-MMP1 atlas in 21 participants while performing a 0-back scene memory task. In a ventromedial visual stream, V1–V4 connect to the ProStriate region where the retrosplenial scene area is located. The ProStriate region has connectivity to ventromedial visual regions VMV1–3 and VVC. These ventromedial regions connect to the medial parahippocampal region PHA1–3, which, with the VMV regions, include the parahippocampal scene area. The medial parahippocampal regions have effective connectivity to the entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex, and hippocampus. In contrast, when viewing faces, the effective connectivity was more through a ventrolateral visual cortical stream via the fusiform face cortex to the inferior temporal visual cortex regions TE2p and TE2a. A ventromedial visual cortical ‘Where’ stream to the hippocampus for spatial scenes was supported by diffusion topography in 171 HCP participants at 7 T.

The International Zone of Tangier in the Eyes of the Self and the Other

During colonial occupation in Morocco, Tangier, unlike other Moroccan cities, was governed by an international administration of eight European countries. The International Zone was a melting pot that brought together native Moroccans and European residents who traveled to the city post-World War II. This unique social context gave rise to two distinct literary voices: one represented by the American novelist Paul Bowles and the other by the Moroccan oral storytellers of Tangier. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of these two literary representations of the same place and era, juxtaposing American and Moroccan fiction. The central argument is that these writings present contrasting yet interdependent portrayals, reflecting the dual realities that coexisted in the international zone: the native experience and the foreign tourist’s perspective. By examining these parallel narratives, this study reveals the complex, multifaceted nature of life in Tangier during this period.

How Does Contemporary YA Literature Represent Rural People and Places?

This article presents a critical content analysis of representations of rural people and places in contemporary, middle grades and young adult novels. Interrogating representations is vital for implementing critical rural place pedagogies. Findings indicate this award-winning text set included diverse representations of racial, religious, and sexual identities. Characters often felt a sense of place-based belonging and identity but also experienced tensions of feeling stuck. Rural places were frequently depicted as places of despair and pervasive poverty, with a lack of middle or upper-middle income representations. Implications for teacher education are presented with suggestions for critical place pedagogies and developing counternarratives that convey the diversity of rural people and places.

Analysis of LGBTQ+ Representation in Indian Graphic Novels: A Case Study of Kari by Amruta Patil

The past decade has seen the Indian graphic novel undergo a transformation, turning from a niche market into a vibrant and diverse form of storytelling. The study aims to analyze LGBTQ+ representation in Kari and place it in the overall phenomenon of Indian graphic novels. The methodology included the major theoretical concepts used to analyze the graphic novel and a blend of them: queer theory – “which involves views on this construction by examining the normalization of sexuality”; thematic analysis – a “means of conceptually organizing and structuring the narrative data obtained through interviews. It involves stripping away the details and unique aspects of the text of its read-down meaning”; and analysis of author’s interviews and reviews. The study attempts to summarize findings into gender, sexuality, and sexuality in the Indian context. The paper is an understanding of Indian culture and the changing discourse around LGBTQ+ rights and representation. The novel gives a voice to a narrative that has long been silent – the life of a lesbian woman in a conservative society – by ending the invisibility that surrounds their lives through in a traditional poetic narrative.

Not Tourism Worldmaking: A Critical Dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah on Post-Covid-19 Sensible Entanglements

Hollinshead proclaimed tourism worldmaking as the creative/imaginative and often false/faux processes that management agencies and mediating bodies use to favor particular representations of places and people. While this remains valid at an organizational level, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically (and maybe also hopefully) changed the very regimes of sensory apprehension on which tourism is based, thus also suggesting that we rethink the worldmaking aspects of its postindustrial creation (rather than production and consumption chains). Considering some recent discussions on what may happen to tourism after the end of the pandemic I claim that: 1) we should begin by reassessing the realm of the sensible, 2) talk more about “travel worldmaking”, and 3) reconsider the centrality of the traveler’s emotional work during world travels. The thesis develops at the intersection of the “must” (urgency to sustain), the “ought” (call to respect), and the “desire” (drive to enjoy). It calls for a reassessment of worldmaking agency as a structured form of action, which gestures towards a durable change in sensible entanglements between humans and the world. I engage in a critical collegial dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah’s thesis that tourism as a postcolonial or postindustrial moment per se contributes to postidentity. Instead, I argue that after the COVID-19 event (among other viral worldmaking events threatening to eliminate humanity), world travelers resort to what is deemed accessible through their sensory capabilities within structured conditions. Tourism is thus also reimagined at a sensible level separately from the organizational/institutional processes that Hollinshead and Vellah placed center stage in their thesis.

Representing Rural: A Critical Content Analysis of Contemporary Middle Grade Novels Set in Rural Places

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

From hearing to seeing: Linking auditory and visual place perceptions with soundscape-to-image generative artificial intelligence

People experience the world through multiple senses simultaneously, contributing to our sense of place. Prior quantitative geography studies have mostly emphasized human visual perceptions, neglecting human auditory perceptions at place due to the challenges in characterizing the acoustic environment vividly. Also, few studies have synthesized the two-dimensional (auditory and visual) perceptions in understanding human sense of place. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Soundscape-to-Image Diffusion model, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) model supported by Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to visualize soundscapes through the generation of street view images. By creating audio-image pairs, acoustic environments are first represented as high-dimensional semantic audio vectors. Our proposed Soundscape-to-Image Diffusion model, which contains a Low-Resolution Diffusion Model and a Super-Resolution Diffusion Model, can then translate those semantic audio vectors into visual representations of place effectively. We evaluated our proposed model by using both machine-based and human-centered approaches. We proved that the generated street view images align with our common perceptions, and accurately create several key street elements of the original soundscapes. It also demonstrates that soundscapes provide sufficient visual information places. This study stands at the forefront of the intersection between generative AI and human geography, demonstrating how human multi-sensory experiences can be linked. We aim to enrich geospatial data science and AI studies with human experiences. It has the potential to inform multiple domains such as human geography, environmental psychology, and urban design and planning, as well as advancing our knowledge of human-environment relationships.

Michael O. Johnston, Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River

Michael O. Johnston, <i>Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River</i>

Italian places in Japanese manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives

Abstract The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis on how Italian places act as key narrative units in Japanese manga. Building on a quantitative and qualitative corpus study, the paper investigates how culturally salient locations are embedded in these narratives. It is first shown that authors develop salient locations (“places”) as distinct entities playing key roles within narrative structures. It is then shown that these representations of places follow principles of cultural relevance, popularity, historical and geographical faithfulness. This is the case because authors creating manga set in Italy share knowledge and appreciation of Italian places and their cultural import with readers. These results are framed in a theory of geo-criticism and in a possible worlds analysis of places in fiction, hereby extended to graphic narratives.

From the margins of Geographical Information Systems: Limitations, challenges, and proposals

Some of the most exciting progress to address central limitations in GIS is currently originating from the margins of cartographic traditions. This article explores the potential of a proactive engagement with mapping technologies from peripheral positions, such as humanist, feminist, decolonial, queer, and black perspectives, to overcome what we identify as five intrinsic challenges of GIS: the representation of place; emotions; scales; time and change; and relational approaches. The proposals deal with specific concerns that do not fit in existing GISystems and suggest how a creative engagement with mapping technologies further expands our understanding of what GIS could be.