Composing Place

Composing Place takes an innovative approach to engaging with the compositional affordances of mobile technologies. Mobile, wearable, and spatial computing technologies are more than the latest marketing gimmick from a perpetually proximate future; they are rather an emerging composing platform through which digital writers will increasingly create and distribute place-based multimodal texts. Jacob Greene utilizes and develops a rhetorical framework through which writers can leverage the affordances of these technologies by drawing on theoretical approaches within rhetorical studies, multimodal composition, and spatial theory, as well as emerging “maker” practices within digital humanities and critical media studies, to show how emerging mobile technologies are poised to transform theories, practices, and pedagogies of digital writing. Greene identifies three emerging “modalities” through which mobile technologies are being used by digital writers. First, to counter dominant discourses in contested spaces; second, to historicize entrenched narratives in iconic spaces; and third, to amplify marginalized voices in mundane spaces. Through these modalities, Greene employs Indigenous philosophies and theories that upend the ways that the discipline has centered placed-based rhetorics, offering digital writers better strategies for using mobile media as a platform for civic deliberation, social advocacy, and political action. Composing Place offers close analyses of mobile media experiences created by various artists and digital media practitioners, as well as detailed overviews of Greene’s own projects (also accessible through the companion website: www.composingplace.com). These projects include a digital “countertour” of SeaWorld that demonstrates the ways in which the attraction is driven by capitalism; an augmented reality tour of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue; and a mobile advocacy project in Jacksonville, Florida, that demonstrates the inequitable effects of car-centric public infrastructure. Ultimately, by engaging with these theoretical frameworks, rhetorical design principles, and pedagogical practices of mobile writing, readers can utilize the unique affordances of mobile media in various teaching and research contexts.

Writing Belonging at the Millennium brings together two pressing and interrelated matters: the global environmental impacts of post-industrial economies and the politics of place in settler-colonial societies. It focuses on Australia at the millennium, when the legacies of colonization intersected with intensifying environmental challenges in a climate of anxiety surrounding settler-colonial belonging. The question of what "belonging" means is central to the discussion of the unfolding politics of place in Australia and beyond. In this book, Emily Potter negotiates the meaning of belonging in a settler-colonial field and considers the role of literary texts in feeding and contesting these legacies and anxieties. Its intention is to interrogate the assumption that non-indigenous Australians' increasingly unsustainable environmental practices represent a failure on their part to adequately belong in the country. Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.

This text presents a variety of ways for students to meet traditional instructional goals in writing while also learning how writing can help them become stewards of the natural world and advocates for their own communities. Built on a foundation of emerging research and theory and grounded in the lived reality of teachers, this book explores the material and virtual worlds as places that can be equally productive as sources for authentic writing. Readers will find place-based writing activities, lesson ideas, and samples of student work in every chapter. With practical and classroom-tested ideas, Place-Based Writing in Action is a useful text for preservice and in-service English teachers, as well as any educator who wants to move the act of writing beyond the four walls of the classroom.

A thought-provoking collection of personal essays about home What makes a home? What do equality, safety, and politics have to do with it? And why is it so important to us to feel like we belong? In this collection, 30 women writers explore the theme in personal essays about neighbors, marriage, kids, sentimental objects, homelessness, domestic violence, solitude, immigration, gentrification, geography, and more. Contributors -- including Amanda Petrusich, Naomi Jackson, Jane Wong, and Jennifer Finney Boylan -- lend a diverse range of voices to this subject that remains at the core of our national conversations. Engaging, insightful, and full of hope, This is the Place will make you laugh, cry, and think hard about home, wherever you may find it. "This collection, encompassing a spectrum of races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, political beliefs and classes, could not be timelier . . . open this book, hear its chorus of voices and remember that we are a nation of individuals, bound to each other by our humanity." -- The New York Times Book Review " . . . an honest portrait of the U.S., pieced together like an imperfect American quilt. We need more books like this." -- BUST

In Reading and Writing Place: Connecting Rural Schools and Communities Erika L. Bass and Amy Price Azano suggest there is a need to add nuance to the ways we consider and engage with place in the classroom. Using a narrative writing project completed with two rural schools in two states, the authors provide an explanation of critical placed education and how students' explorations of place through writing led the authors to develop a concept of place (Big "P" and small "p" place). Students' explorations of place highlighted the how internalizations and externalizations of place impact identity formation and sense of belonging.

This book discusses the intrusion, often inadvertent, of personal voice into the poetry of landscape in Britain, 1700– 1807. It argues that strong conventions, such as those that inhere in topographical verse of the period, invite original poets to overstep those bounds while also shielding them from the repercussions of self-expression. Working under cover of convention in this manner and because for many of these poets place is tied in significant ways to personal history, poets of place may launch unexpected explorations into memory, personhood, and the workings of consciousness. This book thus supplements past, largely political, readings of landscape poetry, turning to questions of self-articulation and self-expression in order to argue that the autobiographical impulse is a distinctive and innovative feature of much great eighteenth-century poetry of place. Among the poets under examination are Pope, Thomson, Duck, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, Smith, and Wordsworth.

Exploring a hitherto neglected field, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing is the first monograph to consider the works of George Gissing (1857-1903) in light of the ‘spatial turn’. By exploring how objectivity and subjectivity interact in his work, the book asks: what are the risks of looking for the ‘real’ in Gissing’s places? How does the inherent heterogeneity of Gissing’s observation influence the textual recapitulation of place? In addition to examining canonical texts such as The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1901), the book analyses the lesser-known novels, short stories, journalism and personal writings of Gissing, in the context of modern spatial studies. The book challenges previously biographical and London-centric accounts of Gissing’s representation of space and place by re-examining seemingly innate contemporaneous geographical demarcations such as the north and the south, the city, suburb, and country, Europe and the world, and re-reading Gissing’s places in the contexts of industrialism, ruralism, the city in literature, and travel writing. Through sustained attention to the ambiguities and contradictions rooted in the form and content of his writing, the book concludes that, ultimately, Gissing’s novels undermine spatial dichotomies by emphasising and celebrating the incongruity of seeming certainties

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different. In Maxwell Street, Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.