How do we come to a know a place? How are senses of place enacted and with what consequences? This course will focus on "place-making" as a historical, emergent, and contested process. Through course texts, films, and ethnographic exercises, we will explore places as sites of individual and collective self-making, power consolidation, not-only-human-collaboration, and the provisioning of specific futures. While anthropologists will be our primary guides, we will also engage scholarship from Black studies, Indigenous studies, history, and ecology. Although we will consider examples of place-making from around the world, our primary focus will be on the U.S. with a particular focus on Middletown/Mattabesset. Taking settler colonialism and racial slavery to be foundational to local and national projects of place-making in the U.S., we will explore how memory, landscape, affect, political economy, and history interact in more-than-human social worlds. |