Place-Making as Meshworking: Developing a Framework for Creative Place-Making

• In Event: Eisner in Focus: "Seeing What We Have Said" Through Music, Meshworking, and Artistry

Abstract

This empirical study builds theory around the poststructural concept of meshworking. Meshworking as a theoretical frame causes us to reconsider constructionist notions of activity and meaning-making with place and materials in learning. The study follows a place-based theater community and its creative relationship with a university arboretum. Using an emplaced ethnographic approach that attends to artistic creations, performances, trails, and movement, the study explores how the community inscribed and aligned practices with the Arboretum. The findings contribute to a novel placemaking framework that elucidates how people move, create, and learn in concert with place. The framework provides a flexible analytical lens for understanding placemaking and extends the creative process to different kinds and scales of creativity.

Author

• Jaclyn Lauren Dudek, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author