Good, by God, we\u27re going to Bodie! Landscape and social memory in a California ghost town

The ghost town of Bodie, high in the desert of Eastern California, was once a thriving gold-mining town. Today, its ramshackle buildings, preserved in a state of arrested decay, make it a popular tourist destination. In Bodie\u27s powerfully suggestive landscape, visitors and staff alike experience the mythic West. This ethnographic study looks at how Bodie\u27s landscape communicates narratives of progress from a primitive past, and how these narratives are a lived part of American social memory in this ghost town. Specifically the work examines how the concept of authenticity is communicated Bodie\u27s landscape: both through presence and powerfully also through absence, and how the concept of authenticity enables Bodie\u27s master narratives. The work also examines the methodological problems that when the researcher studies a community of which she is part

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography

Exploring the dynamic growth, change, and complexity of qualitative research in human geography, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography brings together leading scholars in the field to examine its history, assess the current state of the art, and project future directions. Moving beyond textbook rehearsals of standard issues, the Handbook shows how empirical details of qualitative research can be linked to the broader social, theoretical, political, and policy concerns of qualitative geographers and the communities within which they work. The book is organized into three sections:Part I: Openings engages the history of qualitative geography, and details the ways that research, and the researcher\u27s place within it, are conceptualized within broader academic, political, and social currents. Part II: Encounters and Collaborations describes the different strategies of inquiry that qualitative geographers use, and the tools and techniques that address the challenges and queries that arise in the research process. Part III: Making Sense explores the issues and processes of interpretation, and the ways researchers communicate their results. Retrospective as well as prospective in its approach, this is geography\u27s first peer-to-peer engagement with qualitative research detailing how to conceive, carry out and communicate qualitative research in the twenty-first century. Suitable for postgraduate students, academics, and practitioners alike, this is the methods resource for researchers in human geography.https://repository.lsu.edu/facultybooks/1367/thumbnail.jp

“A Tale of Mice and Men”: The WPA, the LSU Indian Room Museum, and the Emergence of Professional Archaeology in the U.S. South

Federal relief funds distributed during the Great Depression provided unprecedented support for archaeology in the United States, resulting in a new understanding of Native American lifeways in the Southeast. Ultimately, these funds led to robust archaeological studies in the state of Louisiana and the establishment of an interdisciplinary Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University (LSU). The knowledge gained from excavations was shared with the public via the creation of a museum, affectionately known as the Indian Room, housed in the Department of Geography and Anthropology. In this article, we relate the story of the development of the museum, answering a growing call in the discipline to pay more attention to museum geographies. Utilizing the disorderly archive approach of Hayden Lorimer and Chris Philo, we also discuss how the depression-relief projects led to the emergence of professional archaeology, the resultant formation of a department at Louisiana State University, and the ongoing transformation of the museum