Working Port or Lifestyle Port? A Preliminary Analysis of the Port Adelaide Waterfront Redevelopment

This paper presents preliminary analysis of a larger study examining the re‐making of the Port Adelaide waterfront. It offers insights into the way the processes of urban entrepreneurialism endeavour to appropriate and transform landscapes by building on a particular heritage of place while simultaneously dismantling this image to recreate an alternative form. The proposal to refashion the Port's waterfront into a lifestyle and tourist destination will dramatically transform the current socio‐spatial organisation of working and community life as perceived and valued by those local communities currently living in and around the Port area. The removal of a small group of boatyard operators from the inner‐harbour, as part of the redevelopment, is symbolic of local concern of the potential loss of a particular way of working and community life that is steeped in history, heritage and class and is particular and peculiar to the Port Adelaide waterfront. The findings support the view that the process of urban entrepreneurialism in the re‐imaging of place is transformative, selective and exclusive.     

Images of homelessness in Ottawa: implications for local politics

The empirical foci of this paper are a content and discourse analysis of four years (1994 to 1997) of media reporting on ‘homelessness’ in The Ottawa Citizen, the premier, English language daily newspaper in the region. Examining these reports in juxtaposition with governmental and community‐based reports from the same period has provided useful insights into how public opinion might be influenced to regard antihomeless laws as more or less legitimate. This paper's approach was influenced by certain regulation theorists who argue that an examination of key discourses has the potential to enhance understanding about how economic, political and social restructuring is taking place, as well to shed light on how to intervene effectively at a variety of geographic scales in shaping its key elements. The results of the media analysis suggest that very particular messages are emphasized vis‐à‐vis “the homeless”: the ‘stubborn’ unchanging nature of the problem, and the difficulties that housed citizens have in helping these passive, isolated, overwhelmingly white, male, substance abusers and contained (in the downtown) ‘others’. They generally neglect or dismiss stories that might expose the demographic and geographic diversity of those who currently are homeless, and their complex and difficult past histories. When hints of such complexities are mentioned, they come with subtle messages about the deserving individuals who might be redeemed, in contrast to the hapless majority. Cette recherche présente une analyse du contenu des articles sur les personnes sans‐abri, publiés entre 1994 et 1997 dans le quotidien anglais le plus important dans la région d'Ottawa le “Ottawa Citizen”. L‘étude de ces articles ainsi que les rapports gouvernementaux et communautaires durant la même période soulèvent des idées intéressantes autour de l'impact que le discours public peut avoir sur l'acceptation de lois discriminatoires contre les personnes qui sont sans‐abri. Le présent travail est influencé par certains théoriciens de la régulation qui proclament que l'analyse des discours clés dans la société peut potentiellement améliorer notre compréhension de la restructuration économique, politique et sociale et clarifier la manière d'intervenir efficacement pour l'influencer. Les résultats de l'analyse des articles médiatiques suggèrent que des messages particuliers sont communiqués au sujet des personnes qui sont sansabri: c.‐à‐d. la nature invariable du problème et les difficultés vécues par les citoyens logés, à savoir comment aider cette population qui est présentée comme passive, isolée, à prédominance blanche, qui souffre de toxicomanie et qui réside dans le centre‐ville. Généralement, les médias négligent l'information qui expose la grande diversité démographique et géographique des gens qui sont sans‐abri ainsi que leurs histoires de vie personnelles difficiles et complexes. Quand ils mentionnent ces complexités, elles sont accompagnées de messages subtiles suggérant que seulement une minorité de l'ensemble des personnes sans abri méritent notre aide.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

Anthropology and the New Museology

Efforts are expanding to make museums responsive to broader audiences, and to incorporate a more multi-voiced approach to representation. Anthropologists and museum professionals point to initiatives in museums to broaden their research and outreach, but there is work still to be done. Whether we focus on theory or methodology, the new museology represents a particularly anthropological approach to museum work, emphasizing collaboration between museums and communities, and the recognition of the rights of peoples to be included in and consulted about the presentation and preservation of their heritage.     

Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.