A colleague and I have had a paper accepted for the ‘Global Events Congress IV: Events and Festivals Research: The State of the Art’ event, to be held in Leeds from 14-16 July 2010.
Our paper looks at how the application of methods from ethnography can contribute to events management research. Bekah carried out participant observation, photographic and auto-photographic research during the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee in the US. You can read our abstract here
Wesley has posted up the latest contribution to our ‘Reading the Arcades, reading the Promenades’ blog, where we are attempting to bring together our readings of Walter Benjamins’ ‘Arcades Project‘ and apply these to the British seaside promenade.
The Arcades Project
A taster of Wesley’s piece:
“Benjamin is, very, clear and, far too, concise in his summation of the method of The Arcades Project. Convolute N, which deals with his historical method and his analysis of that method (moving into the philosophy of method and history), contains a very great deal of material but the following are his key methodological statements on the Project itself.
This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.
[N1,10]Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
[N1a,8] “
I’ve just posted about ‘the fantasy of cultural history’ and cultural materialism on the arcades/promenades blog. Wesley has also posted a photo-essay that takes its cue from Brighton’s promenade.
“…fashion…this semblance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the ever recurrent. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of “cultural history” in which the bourgeoisie enjoys its false consciousness to the full.” (Benjamin 2002: 11)
The arcades/promenades blog is a representation of our attempt to grapple with the meanings and practices of the seaside promenade through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’
Along with Wesley Rykalski, I have just embarked on an online project that seeks to examine the role of the seaside promenade in the imagination and practices of late modernity, through a critical encounter with Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’. In his final project, Benjamin was attempting to critique the ‘bourgeois experience of nineteenth century history’, partly through exploring the covered arcades of Paris, which he saw as emblematic of the attractions and contradictions of capitalist modernity. By bringing together the arcades and the promenades we hope to enrich our understanding of both of these spatial responses to the coming together of capital, leisure and public space.
We will be collaboratively reading and responding to Benjamin’s text on the arcades / promenades blog and have posted up some reading for March to get things started. As time goes on, we will develop a strategy of interspersing reflections on these readings with reflections and documentation on the seaside promenade. More collaborators are welcome, please get in touch via the blog.
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UPDATE: Work has been slower on this than I imagined, but I see this post is still getting a high number of hits. I recommend placing it in your favourites or bookmarks and checking back in a month or so! 22/01/09
As part of my research into the regeneration of seaside towns, I’ve begun to use dipity to produce a timeline of their evolution. It is at a very early stage and I’ll be working on it over the next few months. Eventually it could become quite a useful resource. As a web 2.0 platform, dipity is set up for collaboration and cross-platform links which means you can easily bring in images and video clips, as well provide hyperlinks to other resources. To see the timeline, click on the image below which will take you to the dipity site. If you would like to collabaorate by adding things to the timeline or changing anything, just sign up to dipity and let me know – I’ll then be able to add you as an editor.
My delicious Currently on my bookshelf
