Space and Culture

It seems that local author Rob McLennan found some of my students’ work online, and realised we had shared interests. Indeed, Rob has just published a new book, Ottawa: The Unknown City, as part of Arsenal Pulp Press’ “alternative city guides for both locals and tourists.” You can take a look at this excerpt (pdf), and the official launch is this Saturday, March 15th, 2pm, at Nicholas Hoare Books in Ottawa. I’ll definitely be there, and please do come out if you can!

In 2005 and 2006, I taught a course on urban cultures. Inspired by the work of our friends Wrights & Sites, as well as Situationist practices of derive and détournement, students in the first class were required to create a “misguide” to Ottawa. In response, for example, James Hayes created this playful Guide to Ottawa’s laundromats, and Megan Jardin & Vanessa Preston published “Thirsty: A Guide to Ottawa’s Drinking Fountains from the Perspective of a Dog (And by Drinking Fountains We Mean Toilets)”

In Thirsty, twelve public washrooms in downtown Ottawa were photographed and evaluated according to cleanliness and sanitary conditions, general smell, soap smell, quality of toilet paper, and whether or not they were accessible to the disabled, babies and dogs. In addition to a tear-out map locating all the washrooms, a toy dog ‘tour guide’ was provided with the guide book.

The following year, students were required to “find” one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in Ottawa. Using Leonia’s theme of waste and excess, for example, Shannon Gamble wrote Welcome to the Turning Point, a descriptive narrative about a local used record store, and Wendy Van Oostveen wrote a piece called Prepackaged Happiness.

Both assignments were designed to get students thinking on their feet, to experience the city in situated and embodied ways, to find ways of creatively representing those experiences, and to inspire new ones as well. While such exercises are common in art and design classes, such activities are still highly unusual in sociology. Students rose to the challenges admirably–and these are just a few of the many excellent outcomes–but no one did so without a struggle.

Moving students from a theoretical understanding of space and culture to a situated, embodied, on-the-ground kind of understanding was difficult. Although I haven’t taught that course since, I did learn to make these kinds of creative ethnographies one of the first assignments rather than the last. By doing so in other classes, I’ve seen that students are better able to critically engage theoretical work once their bodies have memories and dreams of particular places. This seems to be particularly true if you want them to really understand the complexities of everyday life, and how different interests frame space and culture differently.

- Anne