Cultural Studies Association’s Environment, Space & Place Working Group Co-Chair Richard Simpson discusses the local, global, and transnational impact of cruise ships and the cruise ship industry with Constance Dijkstra, International Maritime Organization (IMO) policy manager for the advocacy group T & E, Karla Hart, co-founder of the Global Cruise Activist Network, and Luc Renaud, Associate Professor at the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Francesca Savoldi.
Articles by Richard Simpson
Richard Simpson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, Presque Isle. His research examines the pedagogical qualities of urbanization and environment in contemporary American culture. His development of collaborative modes of knowledge-making through community-engaged participatory pedagogies and digital cartography has recently been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. His most recent publications include “Allegory or Algorithm: The Smart City as Monument” in Claims on the City: Situated Narratives of the Urban and “Classroom” in University Keywords, forthcoming from John Hopkins University Press.
Toward an Alaskan Critical Regionalist Pedagogy: Mapping the Cruise Ship Industry through Visual Spatial Tactics
In an era when urban space is theorized as an educative science enhancing productivity, business, and management, we witness the emergence of teaching as a dominant productive force for the first time in the history of capital. Given the decisive role of knowledge production in the development of globalized urbanization it becomes vital to identify critical pedagogies that not only engage the production of space but grasp the production of space as pedagogical. To do so, I attend to interventions into regionalist studies and the global city to argue for visual spatial tactics as a tool for a critical regionalist pedagogy capable of linking material, affective, and discursive practices with a placed-based approach to globalized urbanization. Students design a collaborative website documenting the spatial history of cruise ship tourism in Alaska as an argument over the right to the city. Identifying this living process—framing the cruise industry as a constitutive system fusing discourse, space, and identity to restructure history, nature, and region—becomes a means of questioning and revising otherwise generalized theories often brought to bear on tourist landscapes, on Alaska, and on critical pedagogy itself. This case study shows the emergence of the cruise ship city as inseparable from the onset of globalized urbanization and how it, in turn, provides edifying material to mobilize a critical regionalist pedagogy within contemporary forms of educative landscapes.