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.
Keyword: Alaska
Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Alaska Native Heritage Center
The Alaska Native Heritage Center (ANHC) is a living heritage center located in Anchorage, Alaska. Although there are many tourist destinations in Alaska, Denali National Park for example, Anchorage should be thought of as the cosmopolitan center of Alaska, its largest and most populous city. The Alaska Native Heritage Center is an expansive site with indoor and outdoor components focusing on history and contemporary culture. The Heritage Center was initiated and curated by Alaska Natives as opposed to anthropologists or historians. The site as a whole can thus be understood as authored by Alaska Natives. The visitor experience, story of the center, and location provide many ways to bridge the site with the concept of cosmopolitanism. As I have experienced the site as a visitor, I will consider the center in relation to the notion of cosmopolitan curiosity, particularly in conjunction with scholar Natasha Eaton’s concept of cosmopolitan nostalgia. The ANHC serves as symbol of contemporary self-definition of Indigenous peoples. By placing the center in Anchorage, the Heritage Center founders were making a conscious choice to share their history and culture with non-natives. This enacts their sense of belonging in the world relating to cultural theorist Anthony Kwame Appiah’s central thesis of cosmopolitanism in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). Although not everyone has the opportunity to visit Alaska, those who do are likely to travel to Anchorage and once there to visit the ANHC. Due to colonization, indigenous peoples of the United States make up an extremely small percentage of the population, yet by no means are they—as outmoded anthropological monographs attest—‘disappearing’. By highlighting a contemporary example of indigenous living culture, I would like to consider how cosmopolitanism as a concept can incorporate this Indigenous mode of being into its larger global story.