On The City
edited by Daniel Makagon

Editor's Introduction
I Love Livin' in the City
by Daniel Makagon     » read | pdf


Essays & Projects

Places and Stages:
Narrating and Performing the City in Milan, Italy
by Cristina Moretti     » read | pdf

"Finders Keepers":
Performing the Street, the Gallery and the Spaces In-between
by Luke Dickens     » read/watch | pdf

Making Sense of the City:
Place, Space, and Rhetoric in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square
by erin daina mcclellan     » read | pdf

Unsafe Houses:
The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film
by Joan Faber McAlister     » read | pdf

Space Wars
&
Walking through a Liquid Forest of Symbols

by Anders Lund Hansen     » read/watch | pdf

Staging and Enforcing Consumerism in the City:
The Performance of Othering on the 16th Street Mall
by Richard G. Jones, Jr. & Christina R. Foust     » read | pdf

“Full of Proud Memories of the Past, on which Irishmen Love to Dwell”:
Irish Nationalist Performance and the Orange Riots of 1871
by Stephen Rohs     » read | pdf

A Taste of Buffalo:
Staging the Lives of U.S. Cities
by David J. Eshelman     » read | pdf

Flowing Through the City:
An Urban Ethnography
by Renee Human     » view site



<notes on contributors>

» Luke Dickens is a doctoral student in cultural geography at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His developing research interests attend to the geographies of urban inscription, intervention and exploration; the theoretical intersections of culture and the city; and experimental qualitative methodologies. Working with case studies in London and New York City, his thesis investigates the contested terrain between art and economy, creativity and crime, as negotiated by those involved in the production, circulation and consumption of an emergent ‘post-graffiti’ aesthetic.

» David J. Eshelman is Assistant Professor of Speech at Arkansas Tech University, where he is founder and artistic director of the Arkansas Radio Theatre. His performance writings—which include plays, musicals, solo performances, and translations from French—have been performed around the US. His academic writings have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, glbtq.com, Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance, and Translation Review (forthcoming).

» Christina R. Foust is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver. Her teaching and research engage rhetoric, power, and social change in a variety of contexts.

» Anders Lund Hansen is a researcher and teacher at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Lund University, Sweden. He loves strolling through big cities and he has a longstanding interest in documenting these experiences through photography and filmmaking. He was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from Wallanderstipendium, on the basis of his dissertation, Space Wars and the New Urban Imperialism (2006). His work focusses on investment flows in the commercial property market, changes in urban governance and changes in social geography, and how these three aspects are related. Drawing on cross border investment data, archive studies, interviews with key actors and street walking experiences in Copenhagen, Lisbon and New York, his work offers insight into the "glocal" logic of urban imperialism and its tendency towards uneven development - fundamental forces that shape our cities in the 21st century.

» Renee Human is a doctoral student in the College of Communication and Information Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research in computer-mediated communication blurs the lines between mass media and interpersonal and cuts across several diverse areas of interest including urban systems and social networking. She recently published an interactive DVD textbook on web design and teaches courses in commercial media design at UK.

» Richard G. Jones, Jr. is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver. His research examines performance of marginalized identities using reflexive, qualitative methods.

» Daniel Makagon is an associate professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University. He specializes in urban communication, intercultural communication, ethnography, and the study of community. His first book, Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2004. He is also co-author of Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience (Sage, forthcoming August 2008). Makagon's published articles on guerrilla art, cultural disruption, democracy, and urban life have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Southern Communication Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Journal of Communication Inquiry. His audio documentaries have been broadcast on public radio and DocumentaryWorks.org.

» Joan Faber McAlister is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society at Drake University. Her research interests include suburban culture, domestic space, visual rhetorics, aesthetics, Critical Theory, and the performance of class, race, gender and sexuality in daily life.

» erin daina mcclellan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University. This essay, although novel in its current form and argument, was inspired by her larger dissertation project on rhetorics of place and space and their connection to sense-making processes in and about public squares — particularly Portland, Oregon's Pioneer Courthouse Square and Prescott, Arizona's Courthouse Plaza.

» Cristina Moretti is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada. Her dissertation examines how different people and social groups participate in public space in Milan, Italy. Her current research interests also include the visual lives of urban places, performative anthropology, and the politics of fashion, class, and gender in the context of Italian multiculturalism.

» Stephen Rohs is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University’s James Madison College. He teaches courses on cultural nationalism, politics and post-colonialism, and the performance of national identities in a comparative context. His book, Eccentric Nation: Irish Performance in Nineteenth Century New York City, is forthcoming with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

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