Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

This course provides an opportunity for students to study one or more urban studies topics that lie beyond the scope of the other courses. This course will normally provide a more research-intensive experience than other graduate urban studies courses.

COURSE DETAILS:

TOURISM, PUBLIC HISTORY, AND POPULAR MEMORY

Decisions about what history, whose culture, and which representations are incorporated into public sites of memory are always in process and invariably contested. The power relations that undergird these decisions are etched in the physical and ideological landscape of a place. This course engages with these struggles over place identity and constructions of the past through an examination of heritage tourism, public history, and memorial practices in their multiple forms, including monuments, museum exhibits, public art, cultural productions, community projects, tours, and visitor promotional materials.  

The course employs an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates analyses of a range of primary and secondary sources (e.g. academic scholarship, literature, film, performance, material culture), field trips, and presentations. Readings and assignments are particularly attuned to the ways that tourism, heritage, and memorial practices have been shaped by racism, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and neoliberalism, as well as the ways that marginalized communities have resisted, disrupted, and expanded dominant tourist and heritage narratives. The ethnography and proposal assignments give students the opportunity to apply definitions, concepts, and theories from the course to the local context.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: