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In the past century, more and more Americans have been migrating from rural areas and urban centers to suburban communities. As a result, the majority of American youth are educated in the suburbs, and the ways in which they learn to be citizens are shaped by their suburban surroundings. Because many of these communities are designed to support a “placeless” lifestyle of a transient yet demographically similar population, they are often disconnected from a regional history and culture. For practitioners of place-conscious education—education that seeks to ground the curriculum in local experience, both natural and cultural—this presents a challenge. In Writing Suburban Citizenship, nine college and secondary writing teachers present suburban classroom projects aimed at exploring the watershed and the commonwealth of the region. Watershed projects, those concerned with the natural environment and ecological realities, include a unit on regional water issues and a naturalist almanac for a local park system. Commonwealth projects are concerned with cultural history, including an investigation of a community’s Native American heritage and a chronicle of multigenerational work histories. With these diverse and robust projects, contributors spotlight the myriad ways suburban students can build rich, authentic connections to their surroundings and create a sense of belonging to their community.
This study is an attempt to understand community participation in an American suburb. The research topic was stimulated by a lack of consensus on the issue. Some authors see substantial civic participation in U.S. suburban areas, while others see the suburbs as civically dead. Based on over 16 months of participant observation in a suburban community outside of San Diego, California, I seek to move the analysis forward by focusing on suburban notions of citizenship. I begin the dissertation with a discussion of how a suburban form of subjectivity developed over the 19th and 20th centuries. I then turn specifically to the suburban neighborhood of Rancho Peñasquitos and investigate the ways in which the space is given meaning as an ideal suburban place. Drawing on Holston's (2001) conception of local citizenship, I argue that residents of this suburb have developed their own form of citizenship that is separate from surrounding conceptions of citizenships. I investigate what this suburban form of citizenship is based on, how it is given legitimacy, and what effect it has on suburban behavior. Finally, I attempt to contextualize the development of suburban citizenship. I argue that the emergence of suburban citizenship is in part based on neoliberal governmental policies that have led to the withdrawal of the state from numerous aspects of suburban life. This leaves suburban residents exposed and unprotected. Suburban citizenships develop to fill the gaps left by neoliberal state. Throughout the dissertation, I pay particular attention to how suburban space is created and defined. An important part of suburban citizenship is based on the exclusion of various groups. These exclusions are hidden behind a discourse that makes the suburbs seem natural. The masking of these exclusions is, however, imperfect. Despite best efforts, the people and things obscured by the suburban discourses break through from time to time. The tensions between ideologies and realities haunt life in the suburbs. I interrogate these contradictions and use them to pry open the suburban discourse, thereby illustrating the ways in which the suburban landscape is created and maintained as a cultural project.
A study of the conditions of being a citizen, belonging and democracy in suburban Britain, this book focuses on understanding how a community takes on the social responsibility and pressures of being a good citizen through what they call ‘stupid’ events, festivals and parades. Building a community is perceived to be an important and necessary act to enable resilience against the perceived threats of neoliberal socio-economic life such as isolation, selfishness and loss of community. Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain explores how authoritative knowledge is developed, maintained and deployed by this group as they encounter other ‘social projects’, such as the local council planning committee or academic projects researching participation in urban planning. The activists, who call themselves the ‘Seething Villagers’, model their community activity on the mythical ancient village of Seething where moral tales of how to work together, love others and be a community are laid out in the Seething Tales. These tales include Seething ‘facts’ such as the fact that the ancient Mountain of Seething was destroyed by a giant. The assertion of fact is central to the mechanisms of play and the refusal of expertise at the heart of the Seething community. The book also stands as a reflexive critique on anthropological practice, as the author examines their role in mobilising knowledge and speaking on behalf of others. Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain is of interest to anthropologists, urban studies scholars, geographers and those interested in the notions of democracy, inclusion, citizenship and anthropological practice.
Suburbanization is often blamed for a loss of civic engagement in contemporary America. How justified is this claim? Just what is a suburb? How do social environments shape civic life? Looking beyond popular stereotypes, Democracy in Suburbia answers these questions by examining how suburbs influence citizen participation in community and public affairs. Eric Oliver offers a rich, engaging account of what suburbia means for American democracy and, in doing so, speaks to the heart of widespread debate on the health of our civil society. Applying an innovative, unusually rigorous mode of statistical analysis to a wealth of unique survey and census data, Oliver argues that suburbs, by institutionalizing class and racial differences with municipal boundaries, transform social conflicts between citizens into ones between political institutions. In reducing the incentives for individual political participation, suburbanization has negated the benefits of ''small town'' government and deprived metropolitan areas of valuable civic capacity. This ultimately increases prospects of serious social conflict. Oliver concludes that we must reconfigure suburban governments to allow seemingly intractable issues of common metropolitan concern to surface in local politics rather than be ignored as cross-jurisdictional. And he believes this is possible without sacrifice of local government's advantages. Scholars and students of political science, sociology, and urban affairs will prize this book for its striking findings, its revealing scrutiny of the commonplace, and its insights into how the pursuit of the American dream may be imperiling American democracy.
Explores how American writers articulate the complexity of twentieth-century suburbiaExamines the ways American writers from the 1960s to the present - including John Updike, Richard Ford, Gloria Naylor, Jeffrey Eugenides, D. J. Waldie, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Daz and John Barth - have sought to articulate the complexity of the US suburbsAnalyses the relationships between literary form and the spatial and temporal dimensions of the environment Scrutinises increasingly prominent literary and cultural forms including novel sequences, memoir, drama, graphic novels and short story cyclesCombines insights drawn from recent historiography of the US suburbs and cultural geography with analyses of over twenty-five texts to provide a fresh outlook on the literary history of American suburbiaThe Literature of Suburban Change examines the diverse body of cultural material produced since 1960 responding to the defining habitat of twentieth-century USA: the suburbs. Martin Dines analyses how writers have innovated across a range of forms and genres - including novel sequences, memoirs, plays, comics and short story cycles - in order to make sense of the complexity of suburbia. Drawing on insights from recent historiography and cultural geography, Dines offers a new perspective on the literary history of the US suburbs. He argues that by giving time back to these apparently timeless places, writers help reactivate the suburbs, presenting them not as fixed, finished and familiar but rather as living, multifaceted environments that are still in production and under exploration.
Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain follows a group of community activists in suburban London, as they take on the responsibilities and pressures of being good citizens.
Originally published: New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, c1986.
For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.
In The Writing of Where, Charles Lesh examines how graffiti writers in Boston remake various spaces within and across the city. The spaces readers will encounter in this book are not just meaningful venues of writing, but also outcomes of writing itself: social spaces not just where writing happens but created because writing happens. Lesh contends that these graffiti spaces reinvent the writing landscape of the city and its public relationship with writing. Each chapter introduces readers to different writing spaces: from bold and broadly visible spots along the highway to bridge underpasses seldom seen by non-writers; from inconspicuous notebooks writers call "bibles" to freight yards and model trains; from abandoned factories to benches where writers view trains. Between each chapter, readers will find "community interludes," responses to the preceding chapters from some of the graffiti writers who worked on this project. By working closely with writers engaged in the production of these spaces, as well as drawing on work invested in questions of geography, publics, and writing, Lesh identifies new models of community engagement and articulates a framework for the spatiality of the public work of writing and writing studies.
This in-depth study of the important but neglected writer Anthony Munday fills a long-standing gap in our knowledge and understanding of London and its culture in the early modern period. It will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and cultural geographers.