The Places People Become: The Role of Imagination, Language, and Bodies in Constructing Difference

• In Event: Reimagining Teacher Education Through University-Community Partnerships

Abstract

This paper reflects a portion of a qualitative study of two university-community collaborations, which create “contact zones”(Pratt 1991) between undergraduates from a prestigious urban university and local high school youth from surrounding inner city environs. The research explores engagement between young people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, with an eye on how they make sense of each other, their identities, and their “places” in the world. Magnifying tensions around racial, class, ethnic, geographic, and cultural differences, university-community partnerships produce spaces in which relations of power are negotiated and contested. This paper examines how race, class, ethnicity, and geography shape participants’ processes of meaning-making about people and places in critical and contested ways. This insight is key to re-imagining approaches to teacher training, engagement across difference, and thinking about “diversity” in teacher education.
Using university-community programs as a lens, this paper asks: How do participants theorize about people and places who have been socially marked as “different” from each other? I argue that notions of the urban experience come alive in the imagination and facilitate assumptions about particular people and possibilities associated with them. These impressions play out through language and through bodily expressions. For many of the undergraduates taking part in university-community programs, urban imaginings were predicated on difference. Through discursive practices and images, commonplace constructions of the “inner city” as dangerous and chaotic shaped ideas about local regions; these place-impressions imposed ideas about the people who live there. My data show that a blurring of people and place informed undergraduates’ initial assumptions about local youth as different and, therefore, “other”. “Urban”, then, became a proxy for race, levels of privilege, and academic “difference”. In this paper, I offer ways that we see the conflation of people and place: through language and through the body. Both linguistic and embodied expressions reflect a racial logic, activated by the imagination.
I take up Massey’s (1994) conception of place in my work, seeing places as dynamic geographies, while acknowledging the ways in which imaginations and assumptions about places impose static and bounded identities on those places. The ways in which the inner city is imagined as “authentically” urban, as a site of fear, danger, and chaos reflects understandings of place as a timeless location. Secondly, I employ Leonardo and Hunter’s (2007) concept of the ‘urban imagination’, arguing that undergraduates’ imaginings about places informed their impressions of people who live there. Thus, the “inner city” and the “ghetto” are socially constructed, historically produced, and collectively imagined. This paper demonstrates how, through the lens of difference, conflations between people and places become deployed through spoken language, the written word, and the body. Fortunately, conceptions of people and places are constantly being re-imagined through an iterative process; borders can be broken down, assumptions disrupted. Using fieldwork as a lens, this paper offers insight into processes of theory-construction about urban “others”, urban places, and the university. This contribution ultimately proves critical for generating new and innovative ways to imagine teacher education and engagement around “diversity”.

Author

• Emily Gleason, University of California - Berkeley