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American Material Culture Commons

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Full-Text Articles in American Material Culture

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe May 2022

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …


Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell Mar 2018

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …


Communities Of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, And The Solidarity Economies Of Local Food-Related Business Networks In Knoxville, Tennessee, Tony Nathan Vanwinkle May 2014

Communities Of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, And The Solidarity Economies Of Local Food-Related Business Networks In Knoxville, Tennessee, Tony Nathan Vanwinkle

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the socio-economic and eco-political dimensions of contemporary localist food movements in Knoxville, Tennessee. More specifically, it explores the implications of the mutualistic and networked socio-economies (solidarity and/or community economies) of such movement expressions as they are experienced, embodied, and understood among the small-scale, independent food-related business owners who often serve as the interpellators of such movements. This study is likewise concerned with ways in which movement actors are actively shaping/creating place (via the processes of emplacement), and relatedly, the way place—as an entity possessive of its own accretions of environmental, historical, cultural, economic, and political identities—shapes actors, …


Tapestry Of Space: Domestic Architecture And Underground Communities In Margaret Morton’S Photography Of A Forgotten New York, Irina Nersessova Apr 2014

Tapestry Of Space: Domestic Architecture And Underground Communities In Margaret Morton’S Photography Of A Forgotten New York, Irina Nersessova

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article addresses the impact urban space has on individuals through the use of Situationist International theory and psychogeography. Representations of homelessness in New York in Margaret Morton's photography are used to demonstrate the interconnectedness among space, people, and social issues. Social issues manifest themselves in urban decay, and the inhabitants react to this phenomenon emotionally and artistically. Some inhabitants demonstrate their relationship with space by responding with material production of housing and art, which they accomplish by building without exploiting the environment the way the manufacturing of commodities often does.


Up In Smoke: The Place Of The Modern American Cigarette, Hannah B. Grose Jan 2012

Up In Smoke: The Place Of The Modern American Cigarette, Hannah B. Grose

Student Publications

Since its discovery, the use of tobacco products has acted as a form of meditation, social engagement, and reprieve. In the era following the late 1950’s, designated “smoking areas,” whether sequestered informally by social constraints or formally by the law, have led to a culture of very “implaced” cigarette smoking. These have become places of escape, places of exile, and places of compromise. This paper explores what it means to belong, and not to belong, to these places, and the role of designated smoking areas in the formation of our culture.