On Location: Exploring America
an in-depth experience by American Culture Studies
May 16 - June 4, 2023
On Location 2023
This past summer Geoff Ward, Professor of African and African-American Studies and Paige McGinley, Director of AMCS, led a group of graduate and undergraduate students in an On Location course we entitled "Performing the Past: Black History and Collective Memory in Charleston and the Sea Islands. This region is extraordinarily historically and culturally vibrant. Every aspect of Charleston and South Carolina's past and present--as well as its contemporary tourist economies--is informed by racial violence and resistance.
Click here to view the On Location 2023 digital scrapbook.
Past Locations
On Location 2023: Charleston and the Sea Islands
On Location 2023: Performing the Past: Black History and Collective Memory in Charleston and the Sea Islands
May 16 - June 4, 2023
This region is extraordinarily historically and culturally vibrant. Every aspect of Charleston and South Carolina's past and present--as well as its contemporary tourist economies--is informed by racial violence and resistance. How can such traumas be represented? What is at stake in making these pasts visible, and what how do different modes of commemorating the past--museum exhibition, performances, cooking, crafting, and more--invite witnesses and observers to reckon with the past while prompting the reparative work necessary for a more equitable and racially just future?
On Location 2019: Manhattan
On Location 2019: The Broadway Musical: Performing and Mapping Race and Gender on the New York Stage and Street
MAY 20 - JUNE 5, 2019
This course offers a unique and immersive form of location-based cultural study that draws upon multiple disciplinary models and methods, and includes many sites in New York City. We will go on guided group and solo walking tours, visit theaters and archives, pursue independent research, meet local experts and theatre professionals, and go to at least four Broadway musicals. Coursework will combine digital research and research tools with group and independent archival research in New York City libraries.
On Location 2018: Portland
On Location: Portland beyond Portlandia: Creative Cities and the New Economy
May 21 - June 5, 2018
Portland, Oregon is a city that is at the forefront of a national trend affecting many urban centers -- from Brooklyn to Detroit, Nashville to Austin. In Portland, as in other cities, the emergence of a class of artisan entrepreneur -- people who produce local organic food, sustainable fashion, hand-crafted beer, third-wave coffee, artisanal furniture, and so forth -- is driving population growth and dynamics of demographic recomposition and gentrification. Housing and rental prices are soaring. Neighborhoods are changing. Working-class and immigrant groups and people of color are being displaced from central neighborhoods, which are being redefined by the establishment of high-end grocery stores, maker spaces, boutique shops, coffee shops, and a generalized aesthetic of hipster enterprise and consumerism.
This on-location course investigates the creative culture and new forms of work, enterprise, do-it-yourself-ism, and consumption that are associated with urban change and economic development in American cities today. Over the span of two weeks spent in Portland, the course will cover topics including the history of gentrification and displacement in the United States, urban planning and the racial politics of space, Portland's lengthy history of do-it-yourself art and creation (e.g., punk, grunge, indie), the emerging "maker movement," relationships between localized consumerism (e.g., craft beer, farmers markets) and identity, critical perspectives on ethics and entrepreneurship, including claims about sustainability in enterprises ranging from farming to fashion, an analysis of hipster aesthetics and whiteness, and intersections between gender and the changing meanings of work and labor in America.
On location 2016: Manhattan
On Location 2016: "We'll Have Manhattan": New York City and the Geographies of Popular Culture
May 23 - June 7, 2016
Manhattan has been at the center of American popular culture for more than a century. At the center of Manhattan sits Times Square, an entertainment district located at the primary intersection of New York City's subway system and centered on a cluster of theatres, virtually all built before the stock market crash of 1929. This group of buildings - known together as Broadway theatres - make up a singularly enduring element of the architectural fabric of American popular culture. This course delves into the history of Times Square and the Broadway theatres, considering the changing nature of both street and stage across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Creative interchange with other Manhattan neighborhoods proves essential to the story, and so the course embraces neighborhoods such as Harlem, the African American district uptown, and downtown areas, such as Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, which fostered upstart and ethnic music and theatre. We'll also consider how adjacent performance spaces connected to elite performing arts and the movies, such as Lincoln Center and Radio City Music Hall, play into the larger midtown scene. The larger issues at the center of the course include considering how the national popular culture of the United States has been shaped by the specifics of its enduring physical location in midtown Manhattan.
Questions about On Location, contact us!
If you have questions about On Location, please contact Alison Eigel Zade, ealison@wustl.edu
Beyond providing inspiration for my thesis, On Location strengthened my passion for American Culture Studies. The class also encouraged me to explore my interests in creative, analytical formats that adhere to my personal values and desire to be an inquisitive, engaged citizen and student.
―Paige Steinberg2018 participant, Portland, Oregon