Andrew F Wood

“What Happens [in Vegas]”: Performing the Post-Tourist Flâneur in “New York” and “Paris”

This essay explores Las Vegas as a stage-set for tourist performance. Initially, I outline Walter Benjamins notion of the flâneur as a framework for my study before addressing two foci of this paper: (1) the site of Las Vegas as “omnitopian” enclosure and (2) the performance of Las Vegas through post-tourism. Following this analysis, I discuss consequences of inauthentic post-tourist play as imagined by critics of “mere pleasure.”

“Are We There Yet?”: Searching for Springfield and The Simpsons’ Rhetoric of Omnitopia

The Simpsons’ visual and textual depiction of Springfield as a typical American city provides an insightful critique of the modern project. We demonstrate how Americas longest running sitcom depicts urban life as a mutable environment whose disparate locales convey their inhabitants to a ubiquitous, ever-present continuum that we term “omnitopia.” In depicting Springfield as omnitopia, the show offers a cartoon version of public life marked by dislocation, conflation, fragmentation, mutability, mobility, and commodification. The study of these components provides a means to interpret and critique the increasing decline of locales in the urban environment.

Remote Control: Identity, Power, and Technology in the Communication Classroom.

Instructional communication researchers, by focusing attention on “how-to” matters and forays into conventional areas of study (i.e., immediacy, apprehension), neglect a nuanced treatment of student and teacher identity. Such a perspective is relatively disembodied and fails to engage actual classroom interactions. By engaging in autoethnographic analysis of their experiences with instructional technology, the authors reveal a more complex understanding of how instructional identities interact. In particular, the authors advocate an understanding of power that is distributed, embodied, and malleable.

Two Roads Diverge: Route 66, “Route 66,” and the Mediation of American Ruin

I explore Route 66 as both a material environment and constellation of media texts, highlighting how contemporary exigencies having inspired the creation of simulations and simulacra of the road. Simulations include reproductions of historical sites and experiences, such as refurbished gas stations and nostalgic performances; simulacra include the construction of conflated geographies that obscure the meaning of “the real” altogether, as seen in the Route 66 Casino Hotel and the movie Cars. Ultimately the question of “real” assumes a central focus in this piece, as it frequently does in research inspired by an omnitopian framework, as todays Route 66 entrepreneurs create, sell, and enact images of the “Mother Road” to tourists, travelers, and even academics who sometimes prefer inauthenticity to any number of supposedly real histories of the highway.

Managing the Lady Managers: The shaping of heterotopian spaces in the 1893 Chicago Exposition's Woman's Building

This essay argues that Worlds Fairs offer important examples of the struggle to craft “other places” for minority narratives while, simultaneously, ensuring that dominant narratives maintain their power. Employing Foucaults notion of heterotopia, the essay offers an analysis of the 1893 Columbian Expositions Womans Building as a site in which overlapping and contradictory narratives served to affirm the dominant rhetoric of “civilization” as White and male. Representations of the Womans Building provide three principles upon which this process depends: (a) co‐opting oppressed groups through “middling,” (b) enacting hierarchy through opposing narratives, and (c) marginalizing radical voices through “safe spectacle.” The essay offers a historical parallel to contemporary sites of amusement and ideology such as shopping malls and themed communities, contributing to scholarship that addresses the intersection of place, culture, and “otherness.”

The Middletons, Futurama, and Progressland: Disciplinary technology and temporal heterotopiain two New York world's fairs

An investigation into worlds fairs provides exemplar sites for the analysis of temporal heterotopias, defined as paradoxical places that employ multiple time‐narratives to affirm a dominant narrative. This essay emerges from a broader conversation begun with Michel Foucaults development of heterotopia. Drawing from his notion of places whose paradoxes reflect social order, the Westinghouse “Middletons” campaign and General Motors Futurama at the 1939‐40 New York Worlds Fair and the General Electric Carousel of Progress at the 1964‐65 New York Worlds Fair are examined. The goal is to unpack strategies of social order revealed in these temporal heterotopias. Opportunities to expand on the notion of temporal heterotopias in other research environments are discussed.

Presenting Juche: Audiencing North Korea's 2012 Arirang Mass Games

This essay describes an in-person audiencing of North Korea’s 2012 Arirang Mass Games, a massive spectacle featuring the synchronized movement of more than 80,000 performers, which celebrates the birth of the North Korean nation and its continued resistance to foreign incursion. The authors argue that audiencing across cultures must take into account not only the “meaning effects” of propaganda and other cultural productions, but also the “presence effects” through which culture is materialized. These presence effects give material specificity to otherwise abstract claims to common humanity across cultures, which is particularly important when trying to understand those who one’s own culture views as radically Other.

“The best surprise is no surprise”: Architecture, imagery, and omnitopia among American mom and pop motels

This essay explores the critical role of motels as markers of transition between idiosyncratic locales and homogenized chains. Toward that end, the essay expands on a newly proposed concept of omnitopia—an intersection of architectural design and human practice through which distinct places become nodes of a perpetual continuum—by focusing on the construction of “place” in roadside motels. From the analysis of omnitopia found in early-20th-century motels, three practices emerge: dislocation through vernacular architecture, fragmentation through iconic signage, and mutability through roadside simulacra.

Regionalization and the Construction of Ephemeral Co-Location

This essay investigates the role of ephemeral co-location within practices of regionalization as a potential response to the increasingly commodified, mediated, and militarized experience of public space. An “epilogue” to the articles gathered for this special issue, this essay outlines five characteristics of regionalization: active resistance, selective deployment, shared aesthetics, common identity, and augmented reality.

“The Only Dominator and Remaker of the World”: , , and the Rhetoric of North Korean Juche

This essay examines the constitutive rhetoric of monuments, tourist sites, and spectacles encountered while visiting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 2012. Expanding ideographic analysis, the essay adds an axis of performativity to extant axes of synchronic pairs and diachronic temporality. Key sites for analysis include the Monument to Party Foundation, the Mansudae Grand Monument, and the USS Pueblo exhibit, sites that reflect an evolution and interplay of and to provide insights on a place too often dismissed as the “Hermit Kingdom.”