How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of The Cultural Work, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname and French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Focusing on three collectives known locally as "cultural groups," which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons, it marks a vital contribution to knowledge about the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia closed ten percent of its traditional public schools. Citing poor academic performance, declining enrollments, and fiscal constraints, the District deployed school closure as an education reform strategy. Other districts mirror Philadelphia's efforts, closing from five to fifty percent of their public schools. This dissertation examines how public school closures, sales, and reuse can be seen not only as education reform policy, but also as urban policy, transforming the physical, social, and political fabric of a city. This dissertation thus extends the work on the education-related impacts of school closures, and demonstrates the salience of school closures from an urban policy and planning perspective. Using Philadelphia as a case study, I draw on theories of frame analysis and use ethnographic methods to explore the discourses of closure that circulate among policy makers, residents, and the broader public. I conducted seven months of fieldwork in Philadelphia, including 118 interviews with City and School District staff, residents, and non-profit leaders, and participated in City, School District, and neighborhood association meetings. I look not only at the closure decision-making process, but also follow the trajectory of school buildings from vacancy to the transformation of schools into capital assets to the reimagining of school reuse. Examining the discursive frames of school closures, sales, and reuse is a first step at grappling with the racialized tensions and material consequences of this policy intervention. Chapters 1 and 2 provide an introduction to the issue of and current empirical research on public school closures, and background on the City and School District of Philadelphia. Chapter 3 situates the Philadelphia case in a larger national context by examining newspaper media coverage in 13 cities across the country. Coverage fosters a conflictual and dichotomous framing of closures, reducing plural meanings of schools to two competing and singular arguments: arguments for closure, based in rationality and technical expertise and arguments opposing closure, based in emotionally laden messaging. Media are predominantly sympathetic to the problem definition and causal interpretations of school closure proponents. Newspaper media do not maximize their role as a democratic institution, and neglect the disproportionate and racialized impact of closures. In Chapter 4, I move to the Philadelphia case. I use Philadelphia's school closures as a revelatory case to shed light on the multifaceted values that schools have to neighborhoods, planning, and urban governance. Schools are valued economically, socio-spatially, and symbolically, and this extreme case expands the scope of these values currently found in the literature. Economically, schools are an employment center, often for neighborhood residents; assets or liabilities that contribute to school district fiscal solvency; and redevelopment sites and vehicles for private profit making. Socio-spatially, closures reveal how school buildings have potentially negative value, as attractive nuisances in the absence of stewardship. Schools are key physical landmarks in the urban fabric, serving as nodes on pathways throughout the neighborhood, shaped by individual perceptions of safety and community. Symbolically, closures stand in for larger processes of neighborhood change, triggering or exacerbating fears about gentrification or continued disinvestment. Decisions about schools represent a larger and historically racialized relationship between particular communities and the public sector, one that is defined by systemic respect or disrespect. In Chapter 5, I build on the values identified in Chapter 4 and describe the three discursive frames of school closures that emerged from my research: closure as crisis management, closure as loss, and closure as oppression. Each one places schools in a different spatial context - from the a-spatial market (crisis management) to the school site and/or neighborhood (loss) to broader citywide patterns of re/development (oppression). This variation is tied to different notions of time, which foreground the past, present, and future in divergent ways. Chapter 6 concludes with reflections on the racialized nature of school closures, sales, and reuse, and on directions for practice and research. My findings demonstrate that to understand the consequences of school closures, research needs to examine not only the moment of closure, but also the subsequent sales and reuse of school buildings. "Placing" schools in this way situates this education reform policy in its spatial context, and reveals how school infrastructure is urban infrastructure, playing a central role in urban change. This study also illustrates the importance historicizing school closures, and considering links to past and present place-based policies that have sought to improve poor neighborhoods, yet have had racist impacts. This study documents how the administrative boundaries of the school district and school attendance catchment areas define people's mental maps of their neighborhoods, and challenges planners to consider school district or school attendance boundaries as a spatial unit of analysis. The tensions over perceived lines of accountability, political action, and resistance around school closures, sales, and reuse also suggest more reflection and attention by practitioners to bridge cross-sector silos and reconsider silo-ed public engagement processes. This research reveals the ways that schools are sites of contestation in the politics of place. It helps further understanding of the geographic and geopolitical boundaries that are tied to school sites and school districts. It enhances planners' conceptualization of and work at the nexus of place and schools. From an urban policy or planning perspective public school closures, sales, and reuse call for a recalibration or assessment of interventions in neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

Tina Thurston’s Landscapes of Power; Landscapes of Conflict is a thi- generation processual analysis of sociopolitical evolution during the Iron Age in southern Scandinavia. Several red flags seem to be raised at once. Are not archaeologists now postprocessual, using new interpretive approaches to - derstand human history? Is not evolution a discredited concept in which - cieties are arbitrarily arranged along a unilinear scheme? Should not modern approaches be profoundly historical and agent-centered? In any event, were not Scandinavians the ultimate barbarian Vikings parasitizing the complex civilized world of southern and central Europe? Tina Thurston’s book focuses our attention on the significant innovations of anthropological archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. A brief overview of processual archaeology can set the context for - preciating Landscapes ofPower; Landscapes of Conflict. During the 1960s the emergent processual archaeology (a. k. a. the New Archaeology) cryst- lized an evolutionary paradigm that framed research with the comparative ethnography of Service and Fried. It was thought that human societies p- gressed through stages of social development and that the goal was to d- cover the evolutionary prime movers (such as irrigation, warfare, trade, and population) that drove social and cultural change. By the 1970s prime movers had fallen from favor and social evolution was conceived as complicated flows of causation involving many variables.

This book is an anthology of the varied strategies of spatial transgressions and how they have been implemented through the arts as a means to resist, rejuvenate, reclaim, critique or cohabitate. The book is divided into two sections – Displacements and Disruptions. The first section discusses the ramifications of the spatial displacements of bodies, organizations, groups of people and ethnicities, and explores how artists, theorists and arts organizations have an attentive history of revealing and reacting to the displacement of peoples and how their presence or absence radically reconfigures the value, identity, and uses of place. In the second section, each author considers how aesthetic strategies have been utilized to disrupt expected spatial experiences and logic. Many of these strategies form radical alternative methodologies that include transgressions, geographies of resistance, and psychogeographies. These spatial performances of disruption set into motion a critical exchange between the subject, space and materiality, in which ideology and experience are both produced/spatialized and deconstructed/destabilized.

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers—and settlers—into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick’s tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson’s videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman’s dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists’ engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.

This book examines the power definiteness of landscape from a social constructivist perspective with a particular focus on the importance of aesthetic concepts of landscape in development. It seeks to answer the question of how societal notions of landscape emerge, how they are individually updated and how these ideas affect the use and design of physical space. It also analyzes how physical manifestations of societal activity impact on understandings of individual and societal landscapes and addresses the essential aspect of the social construction of landscape, cultural specificity, which in turn is discussed in the context of the expansion of a western landscape concept. The book offers an unprecedented, comprehensive and detailed examination of societal power relations in the context of landscape development. The numerous case studies from the physical manifestation of modern spatial planning in the United States, the power discourses concerning the design of model railway landscapes, and the medial production of stereotypical landscape notions shed light on the complex and multilayered interactions of collective and individual landscape references. It is a valuable resource for geographers, sociologists, landscape architects, landscape planners and philosophers.