Placemaking as Praxis: Connectivity and a South Lebanese Village

• In Event: Discourse, Disasters, and Place

Abstract

This study reflects a recent interdisciplinary concern with social production(s) of spatiality, including within communication and media studies (Gieryn 2000; Warf and Arias, 2008; Falkheimer and Jansson 2006; Jansson 2009). It situates place-making as communicative praxis, a thought-action nexus focused on communicating for social and/or political change. Drawing upon historical and ethnographic research of a village in south Lebanon, I trace goals of place-making-as-communicative-praxis that I encountered within face-to-face and mediated discourses among translocal Lebanese about the means and ends of communication. Delineating an emergent mode of communicative praxis oriented toward “being connected,” or associating via a technological device, I note changes over time in translocally shared goals of communicative/connective praxis, as well as changes in the broader communicative values these goals reflect (for instance, communicative values of visibility, representation, or participation). I describe relationships between these shifts in goals and values of praxis and observed processes of place-framing, identity, and memory practices related to the village.

Author

• Kristin Shamas, Oklahoma City University