Tag Archives: Presentation

Sonic Sunday Clips 02.09.20

Posted on by
Reply

Happy Weekend, folks. It’s certainly been an interesting week of the DNC stumbling over themselves to avoid nominating an actually sorta progressive candidate, and I wanted to make sure that a handful of items worthy of your attention didn’t slip through the cracks!

  • If you see this right after I posted it and you’re in Central Michigan, you still have time to catch the 12:30pm screening today of the Bruce Springsteen film Western Stars at the Broadway Theater. I’ll be talking for a few minutes afterwards. I’m sure tickets will still be available at the door, but here’s the link with more info.
  • Amanda Petrusich (my favorite music journalist) is at it again, this time with a great New Yorker review of Taylor Swift’s documentary. It makes for a great read about the nature of fame and class in 2020.
  • Jathan Sadowski just published a new article in Antipode about Internet Platforms and Rentier society, which sounds amazing. I may need to wait until next month to get my hands on the full thing what with EBSCO restraints.
  • Speaking of Antipode, there are several sites online where you can look up your current antipode! This is one of them.

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to see my talk at SoCA down in Windsor on Friday, and an extra special thanks to Dr. Jamey Essex for the invitation as well as being a consummate host and good friend of almost two decades now. As I said to the audience before my presentation, be nice to your TA’s, kids, and maybe one day they’ll shepherd you across the border. Also, the audience of U Windsor students and faculty may have provided the best set of post-talk questions I’ve ever received, and I wish I could have had more time to meet and chat with everybody.

0206202155a_hdr

With the Windsor music map on Dub Night at The Phog, Windsor ONT. Photo by Jamey Essex.

Mic Nite at Relix Theater this Thursday

Posted on by
Reply

5a987b7bf2b3f-image

I’m looking forward to represent UTK Geography at the UT Faculty Fall Mic Nite this Thursday! It will take place at Relix Variety Theater (1208 N. Central Street). Doors are at 5:30pm, and presentations begin at 6:30pm. It’s free to attend, but they’d like for you to RSVP here so they can stock the pizza and bar appropriately.

This will be my second time presenting in the Pecha Kucha format and my first time presenting on what I’m referring to as “symbolic gentrification,” so it should be interesting, at the very least. I feel like Mic Nite, since it’s interdisciplinary, will provide a good forum for unpacking such a broad subject. I’ll paste my abstract from the program here.

Monitor_KnoxCollege_Sonnichsen

Symbolic Gentrification and Learning from Pop Culture

Gentrification has been a concern of sociologists, geographers, and urban dwellers at large since the sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term to describe changes in 1960s London. Critical geographers have long assumed much of that mantel, particularly Neil Smith, whose “The New Urban Frontier” remains a cornerstone. However, understanding gentrification solely a process of city development leaves out much of the story.

My research argues that gentrification is not simply a process of what Smith calls “revanchist urbanism,” but is, at its core, a greater dynamic that weaves geography together with multiple other fields within the humanities. Specifically, my experience teaching American Popular Culture has inspired me to approach what I call “symbolic gentrification,” a critical understanding of the relationship between urban space, capital, and the arts.

The last time I presented in this format (20 slides, 20 seconds apiece) was for the Pecha Kucha Night Knoxville in November 2016. I presented on Ben Irving publicly for the first time; you can watch here. I’m such a fan of the timed-slides format that I’m employing it in one of my classes this semester for the first time.

Hope to see you Thursday!

Lyrics, Letters and the Forgotten Lives of Ben Irving

Posted on by
3
New Picture

Click to watch at PechaKucha.org

Pecha Kucha Knoxville recently uploaded the PowerPoint and Audio from my November presentation about my great-grandfather. This was a 6 minute, 40 second truncation of archival work I’d been doing about over a thousand postcards he sent from the road in the 1930s and 40s. It is an ongoing project that has been as rewarding as it has been educational and surprising regarding both my family history and a different era in American cultural life.

Here is my respectful sales pitch: If you enjoy what you see above, let me know. I am always happy to bring this lecture (in any reasonable length) to present at your company, school, civic organization, for any interested parties. Feel free to contact me at sonicgeography [at] gmail. I presented an hour-long version of this talk, which included a handful of his original song lyrics, more news clippings, and personal history at the Kimball Farms Lecture series in Lenox, MA in November. I have an audio recording available for anybody interested in the extended version.

Anyway, I’ve hinted at this postcard collection before, but until now I haven’t been completely comfortable with sharing. But now that the cat’s out of the bag and I did this presentation for over a thousand people in Knoxville, I’ll be a bit more forthcoming with Ben Irving’s story.

I assume you’ll watch the video-slideshow at the link above (WordPress doesn’t allow embedding of iframe codes; apologies), but the long and short of it was that my great-grandfather, who went by his stage name Ben Irving in most of his professional life, was a prolific musician on the Hartford jazz circuit of the 1920s. When the Depression hit, he moved his young family (including my grandmother, then a toddler) to Brooklyn and hit the road as a sales representative. In his time, Irving got to see so much more of America than most anybody in his position, including parts of the country that were still mired in dark history and summarily unfriendly to Jews. Assuming that his wife and daughter would probably never see any of these places, he sent home multiple postcards from almost every city he visited.

IMG_0876

A few years ago, when I inherited the postcards, I began bringing selections with me whenever I traveled to particular cities in North America. I began to re-pose and re-create the shots, better terms as ‘rephotography’ (see Kalin 2013 for a great overview of this). I cataloged these attempts in a handful of entries (including in Florida, New Orleans, Mobile, and Chattanooga) all of which are tagged with ‘Re-Photography’ and I included in my PechaKucha talk. I recently created a new tag (‘Ben Irving’) for the posts I make about my ongoing work focused on (or directly inspired by) my great-grandfather. Stay tuned for a pair of new entries that follow his postcards (including an overdue AAG 2017 retrospective), coming very soon.