Pamela Stewart - Böcker

Contributing to a growing discourse in spatial humanities, this collection of essays provides a unique, critical insight into how place is shaped through visual and sensory practices. By looking at a range of natural, built, and digital environments, across historical and contemporary contexts, Visual Ecologies of Placemaking offers an in-depth study into place as a spatial, social and cultural construct. Essays explore public and private spaces, cities, gardens, sacred settings and domestic scenes, and particularly consider human beings’ relationships to place at times when places are undergoing radical shifts due to occurrences such as global pandemics, changing climates and widespread social unrest. This timely volume features a range of case studies that explore places from storage units to city streets, performances from sacred pilgrimages to drag shows, and identities from secessionists to imperial authorities. Essays also contribute to emerging areas of inquiry, such as queer and decolonial studies and the digital humanities. Visual Ecologies of Placemaking offers a broad examination of the performative aspects of place and identity, and yields new ways of thinking about how places are shaped and negotiated. Leslie Atzmon and Pamela Stewart's collection provides fresh and essential insights into the varied roles that place plays in our understanding and expression of the world and our place within it.

More and more, anthropologists are recruited as consultants by government departments, companies or as observers of development processes in their field areas generally. Although these roles can be very gratifying, they can create ambiguous situations for the anthropologists who find that new pressures and responsibilities are placed upon them for which their training did not prepare them. This volume explores some of the problems, opportunities, issues, debates, and dilemmas surrounding these roles. The geographic focus of the studies is Papua New Guinea, but the topic and its importance apply widely through the world, for example, Africa, South America, Australia, and the Pacific in general, as well as in relation to indigenous groups in Canada and elsewhere. All the authors have first-hand experience and they address these new pressures and responsibilities of anthropological research. The book's chapters are written in a way that combines scholarship with a style accessible to general readers.