CALL for PAPERS - Media and the Production of Place

University of Southern California, School of Cinema Television

The media plays an increasingly important role in our understanding of the spaces around us; it can give meaning to an otherwise blank landscape or supply narrative to a busy urban intersection. In some cases, the landscape itself becomes media – producing spaces as reproducible images for consumption. It is within this mediation of the landscape, this conjoining of the ideal and the material, that personal meaning and identification takes place. In other words, it is within this mediation that places are produced.

This issue of Spectator will explore the ways in which media images produce landscape and create a sense of place. It will address how representations of space effect lived experience, not solely from the perspective of a change of perception, but from the standpoint of personal meaning and community identification. It will begin from the idea that there is a fundamental difference between space and place. Space is the topography of the world; whereas place is the result of the interaction between topography, its mediations and the individual.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Television and urban experience

Myth and the landscape

Urban form / cinematic form

TV news and the spaces of fear

Global media spaces

Philosophy of place

Planning and Media

Gendered places – interior / exterior

Policing the production of place

Alternative media / alternative places

Black places in white spaces

Media tourism and spatial experience

Places of national identity

Media monuments

Urban Design and Visual Images