Garden Etiquette

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways. With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Land / Canberra, I play a role in such structural violences—something that has compelled me to try to locate myself, my upbringing and the tools I use in my photographic work. For this project I visited and made images at conservation sites on Dharawal Land / NSW and Narragansett, Nipmuc, Wampanoag and Pokanoket Lands / Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I also engaged with material related to the 1989 Royal National Park (formerly just “National Park”) proclamation on Dharawal Land held by the NSW State Archives. I am interested in how imaging these conservation sites, and looking at related archival material, might render visible or invisible colonial logics: how the social, racial, gendered, political and scientific stratifications of land—that afforded settlers a sense of romantic communion with nature and sense of belonging—were obscured. Drawing connections between analogue photographic processes, hot glass and lenses, 3D scanning, and modeling has allowed me to extend on this and helped me to discursively locate Enlightenment aesthetics and politics within traditional photographic practices and contemporary imaging technologies. Doing so has served to de-familiarise myself with traditional photographic codes. Less so to find a solution or way around certain problematics in photographic and conservation practices, but to locate my own relations to the constitutive violences that colonialism attempts to veil as “common,” “ordinary,” or “inevitable,” and asserts through ideological constructions such as “civility” and “etiquette.” This thesis posits that a critical approach to photography—in practice, theory and as metaphor—has been of help to me in this undertaking

Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies : Year 2020 : Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage

The announcement of the creation of a European Year of Cultural Heritage (year 2018) – by the Decision 2017/864 of the European Parliament – encouraged the creation, in 2017, of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage (ESACH). ESACH has become the first still-growing interdisciplinary and cross- -generational network in the field. Currently brings together young researchers and researchers at early stages of their careers, in the fields of culture and heritage, from all kinds of academic disciplines and is made up of members from various European universities and research centres (see www.esach.org). Within the network, the main questions are: How do we engage with the past elements of our culture(s)? How and why do we protect culture as a genuine element of a contemporary cultural system? What do younger generations state as heritage and what ways do they see to safeguard and experience it? ESACH stands up for a participatory way of involvement and is eager to take part in the cultural discourse at European and national levels. Since ESACHS’ foundation, the Portuguese publisher Mazu Press (www.mazupress.com) has been associated with the initiatives of the Portuguese branch of ESACH based in Lisbon (Sharing Heritage Lisbon), firstly with the promotion actions and then with the publication of the book “New Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Cultural Heritage Studies. Contributions of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage in the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018”. In this atypical Covid-19 pandemic year, Mazu Press again invited ESACH to join the renewed idea of “unifying through Cultural Heritage”, creating the opportunity for all to associate their efforts to this volume of “Advances in Cultural Heritage Studies, Year 2020”. Until now, ESACH members have been given the opportunity to contribute their ideas in several European events organized by the respective stakeholders, such as the Genoa Meeting, in October 2019, which had the cultural, logistic and financial support of the University of Genoa and foremost the PhD Course in Study and Enhancement of the Historical, Artistic-Architectural and Environmental Heritage. This book brings together twenty chapters by twenty four authors from Canada, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey. This sharing of knowledge, culture and heritage studies, through various disciplines, shows the richness – advances and new perspectives – generated by the common passion for cultural heritage.Mazutech R&D; Università di Genova / Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche / Dottorato in Studio e Valorizzazione del Patrimonio Storico, Artistico-Architettonico e Ambientaleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Making Ourselves at Home: Representation, Preservation & Interpretation at Canada\u27s House Museums

Historic house museums are a common, if often overlooked, feature of the Canadian heritage landscape. As national historic sites, and community museums, they address cultural, social, historical and political facets of the past. Pursuing the idea of the house/museum hybrid, this study examines the house museum as a distinct museological type. Chapter One defines house museums both in relation and opposition to encyclopedic, folk, decorative and collection museums, period rooms, model and heritage homes and other sites of living history. It reviews architectural, commemorative and preservation histories to outline the conditions that encouraged their development from the West coast (British Columbia) to the East (Nova Scotia). Chapter Two argues that house museums are part of a broader network of home representations. It demonstrates that they are representations of the domestic environments of the past, which are also responsible for generating and preserving photographs, models, floor plans, blueprints, paintings, prints and drawings of private interiors, imagined dwellings and residential architectures. Case studies are used to show that house museums are constructed, saved, explained, validated, funded and marketed through a range of home representations. Chapter Three looks at multisensory exhibits, interactive displays and participative programs at house museums across Canada to highlight the tensions between conservation concerns and the quality of visitor experiences at these sites. It investigates how house museums have reacted to the tenets of a new museology and an Experience Economy, which emphasize participative involvement, active learning and immersive experience, often at the expense of conservation. Chapter Four acknowledges that many historic homes have been refashioned as birthplace museums and shrines for individual legacies. It interrogates the relationship between house museums and their key interpretive figures by examining discourses and histories that position individuals and their iii homes as integrated subjects. Moreover, it contends that house museums structured around a single historical figure tend to be exclusionary, and reductive of complex narratives. As a whole, the thesis considers the topics of representation, preservation and interpretation to remark upon the function and future of house museums in Canada

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

The Visual Culture of Niagara Falls: From Kitsch to Keepsake

This dissertation uses the visual history of Niagara Falls to argue that iconic touristic landscapes promising Sublime moments can benefit from embracing their often-eclectic mixture of images, experiences, artefacts, and small-scaled private collectors and collections. This study takes up two distinct areas of Niagara’s visual history; how the site is depicted and copied, and how the site is collected and memorialized. The natural site, charted through attractions, themed environments, souvenirs and amateur home collections, is an apparatus that generates everlasting spectacle. Niagara’s current attractions connect the earliest physical encounters of the site with contemporary experiences along tourist corridors, bridging the void between eighteenth-century European landscape aesthetics and contemporary discourses of eco-criticism and sustainability. Wax museums draw on the desire to copy, commemorate, and recreate iconic places and settings, embracing the inherent spectacle of sites like Niagara Falls and redirecting it towards commercial and entrepreneurial gain. Souvenirs, mementoes, postcards, and other ephemera help memorialize visits to places like Niagara Falls, demonstrating that personalized experiences can occur at iconic tourist destinations. Amateur collectors, and their smaller-scaled private collections, illustrate that the eclectic visual histories of sites are preserved in the homes of its visitors, rather than larger-scaled accessioned collections of public institutions. This project concludes with an echo of the introduction, which attempts to establish an updated understanding of the Sublime that embraces eclectic and sometimes disparate visual examples

Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities

Place-­attachment in heritage theory and practice: a personal and ethnographic study

The thesis is a critical study of the concept of place-attachment in Australian heritage practice and its application in this field. Place-attachment is typically characterised as a form of intangible heritage arising from interactions between people and place. I trace how this meaning borrows from concepts in psychology and geography and argue that the idea of place-attachment is often applied uncritically in heritage conservation because the field lacks a body of discipline-specific theory. It is my thesis that place-attachment can be conceptualised in a way that is more amenable to effective heritage management practice than is currently the case. I construct a concept of place-attachment that draws on a notion of intra-action and theories of attachment, agency and affect. I define place-attachment as a distributed phenomenon that emerges through the entanglements of individuals or groups, places and things. This meaning is interrogated via four case studies – each centred on a home and garden (including my own) and Anglo-Australians – by applying a methodology that is primarily self-referential and auto-ethnographic. Topics that emerge from the field data, including life stages (i.e., childhood-adulthood attachment), generational transfer, and experiential understanding or empathy, are examined and shown to offer support for a concept of place-attachment as entanglement. The thesis findings have implications for heritage practice. A framework of entanglement over interaction calls for recognition of intra-active assemblages in preference to intangible meanings; dynamism and multi-temporality over stasis and a distant past; the power of personal heritage alongside authorised, collective forms; and situated, relational ethics together with place-centred values