Place and the Sociology of Art

This session invites papers from scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of place studies and the sociology of art or allied fields such as cultural geography, cultural policy, arts management, cultural/creative tourism, and heritage studies. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan famously suggested place is a complex word and 'exists at different scales. At one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth’. In cultural analysis, place has been invoked to account for how ‘regionality’ and ‘regionalism’ express themselves through ‘cultural objects – arts, crafts, ways of speaking, cooking styles, modes of dress, architecture – that bear a socially recognized relationship to place’ (Griswold). Place also features in accounts which emphasize that ‘artfulness... has a geographically local quality, generating styles of activity particular to a place’ (Molotch). Then there are the urbanistic and creative industries agendas highlighting the roles art might play in phenomena such as place-making, precinct revitalization, grassroots activism and local economic development. Yet the mobilization of place for economic and political purposes raises questions such as: how do we avoid defensive or even reactionary approaches to place (Massey)? Or a situation where place becomes entirely subservient to neoliberal urban and regional economic agendas (Harvey)? This session is seeking theoretical, empirical and especially case study-focused papers that grapple with the complexities of place and cultural production, and that speak to the types of political, organizational, affective, material, and participatory, implications of linking place to topics in the sociology of art.