In this article I revisit a literary-audio work I created in collaboration with a Vancouver composer for Intersections, a new music series organized by the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada. We spliced together recorded interview material with composed music to craft a site-specific acoustic landscape. This work is presented as a site in which to explore creative, experimental ways of restaging memory and of bringing experiential landscapes more fully to life, immersing public audiences in the felt histories of the city.
For many geographers, the printed page is no longer a productive tool to engage contemporary definitions of place or debates surrounding the nonrepresentational. There is a discernible shift within the discipline toward creative research methods, including using media such as film or sound, with a perception that they are less “fixed” in nature. In this article, however, I suggest that, by developing “geo/graphic” work that draws on theories and practices from both cultural geography and graphic design, the page can be recast as a liminal space, a threshold between readers and their understanding and imagination. I propose that a book has the potential to offer a multisensory, interactive space of exploration for readers and that the construction of such geo/graphic work also offers researchers an additional creative method with which to understand place.
A long-form essay, arranged in a sequence of eight segments, in which I travel the countryside in search of a missing person: the scarecrow. Different aspects of the centuries-old practice of scarecrow making and bird scaring are described. Traditionally constructed as a likeness of the human form and erected in newly sown fields as a visual method for warding off feeding birds, the existence of this striking farmland contraption is variously reported: as having all but vanished and yet of making unexpected reappearances; as materially functional and complexly meaningful; as a figure summoned up by cultural memory and personal recollection; and as a focus for mixed feelings of loss, nostalgia, estrangement, and community. A version of “geographical portraiture” accumulates, in which a single, scenic landmark stands as the essay's central fascination and simultaneously operates as a cipher for stories old and new, of agricultural society, country life, landscape politics, and rural values.
Between 1961 and 1996, more than 200,000 people in Guatemala lost their lives as a result of state-orchestrated acts of terror denied still by the national security forces who committed them. A U.N. Truth Commission was repeatedly obstructed by army and police personnel from gaining access to official records, being told that no documentation of the type sought existed. Bureaucracies do not work that way, even ones with good reason to destroy or conceal evidence of an incriminating nature. It was nonetheless of startling import when an attorney working for Guatemala's Human Rights Office stumbled upon an archive recording the deeds of the National Police. Known now to contain an estimated 80 million documents, the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional is a cabinet of atrocities that reveals conspiracy and complicity on the part of police officers engaged in a ghoulish network of surveillance, intimidation, abduction, torture, and murder.
Novel Synopsis : In the wake of an unprecedented economic collapse and nationwide systems failure, the historian and high school principal Carson Waller finds himself jobless and adrift in a large East Coast city. He spends most days contemplating the dramatic history-in-the-making from the ever-shrinking security of his apartment. On the other side of the country, Beatrix Banks, a fair-trade activist, is similarly grounded, her global cause now radically circumscribed and somewhat circumspect. Grave personal loss initially brought them together, but it is the universal loss and devastation now surrounding them that sets in motion their separate journeys toward each other.
Amid escalating violence, Carson leaves his perch to begin chronicling history as it happens, walking west along the railroad tracks, toward Beatrix. He encounters an altered America, brought to life by a variety of characters and their stories of former lives and current survival. Meanwhile, Beatrix tends to the immediate issues of shelter, water, and food, slowly building community in a neighborhood she previously barely knew. Between them lies The Center, a mysterious destination advertised in a stream of broadcasts by an evangelical Christian cult promising “ascension” to those who make pilgrimages to the country's geographical middle. As Carson continues westward, unable to shake Beatrix from his mind, Beatrix and her neighbors work to ensure their own survival and present an alternative to the Ascensionists' irresistible, unfulfillable promises.
We present five scenes from Nanay, a testimonial play that we cowrote, drawing on conventional social scientific research transcripts from interviews conducted with Filipino domestic workers, their children, nanny agents, and the Canadian employers of live-in caregivers. We developed this theater play from May 2007 through August 2008 and performed the piece in Vancouver and Berlin in 2009. A reading of the script was staged in Edinburgh in 2012, and the play will be performed in Manila in November 2013. We have turned to performance to create and extend public debate about current immigration policies, racial and ethnic stereotypes, the commodification of reproductive roles, and the transfer of care labor from the global South to the global North. We interject the scenes presented here with behind-the-scenes observations to more fully contextualize the script and to suggest ways in which this process of creative writing and performance informs conventional social science writing.