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Landscape, Mobilities, And Performance: An Autoethnographic And Visual Engagement With Public Protests In Washington, Dc, Paul Ronald Watts

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how geography’s traditional approach to studying cultural landscapes, which has been largely reliant upon vision, should also include the embodied practices: the customary and habitual actions that inform human engagement. Using public protests in Washington, DC as an extended case study, I reveal an underlying tension between protest participants’ embodied practices and material objects in the built environment. I accomplish this by drawing from over one year’s fieldwork in Washington, where I used qualitative approaches, including—but not limited to—participant observation and autoethnography, to engage in public protests as an embodied participant. To support my empirical data, I …