Building participatory counternarratives: Pedagogical interventions through digital placemaking

Abstract

Places are filled with stories, with histories that shape how people understand the nature of a place. Places are unique sets of trajectories – each with a story – coming into contact. However, just as much as places are defined by their histories, they are also shaped by the histories that are forgotten, or far too often, actively suppressed through dominant narratives. After all, dominant media of spatial, public memory – for example, plaques and public monuments – often reproduce dominant narratives of a place, narratives created by the powerful. This project examines how digital placemaking can be deployed through locative technologies to push back on dominant spatial narratives and make places more polyvocal in consequential ways. In particular, through a project at Clemson University, we examine how locative storytelling applications can help students intervene in traditional narratives of place to engage with social justice and alternative histories.

Digital placemaking, health & wellbeing and nature-based solutions: A systematic review and practice model

“…Location-based technology is found as an essential element of hybrid realities, which is also understood as a key characteristic of digital placemaking (Clarke, 2021;Keegan, 2021;MacIntyre et al 2019;Witteborn, 2021). Results of the review showed that hybrid realities include location-based technology and games (Bilandzic and Johnson, 2013;Frith and Richter, 2021;Gobbo and Benedetti, 2021;Harner et al, 2017;Hjorth and Richardson, 2017;Pavlovskaya, 2016;Qabshoqa, 2018), augmented realities (Abdel-Aziz et al, 2016;Boffi, 2021;Clowater, 2021;Her, 2021;Hjorth and Richardson, 2017;Hunter et al, 2022;, immersive digital experiences (Globa et al, 2019), virtual reality (Kuchelmeister et al, 2020;Rzeszewski and Naji, 2022;van Houwelingen-Snippe et al, 2021), and digital pop-up artefacts (Fredericks et al, 2018). All of them help create realities that combine the physical and digital world with different intensitiesvirtual reality refers to a fully immersive experience in the digital environment, in contrast to digital pop-up artefacts that combine analogue and digital media for community engagement.…”

“…I have illustrated the smart approach to placemaking, and the new DIV@TER multimedia platform currently being developed. de Souza E Silva, 2006 on hybrid spaces was frequently cited to describe the digital overlay across the actual environment (Frith and Richter, 2021;Hjorth and Richardson, 2017;Wang, 2019Wang, , 2022. Qabshoqa (2018) and Kostopoulou and Fatah gen Schieck (2021) applied the idea of overlaying realities through urban gamification and local augmentation of memories respectively, with the potential to positively redefine public spaces (Abdel-Aziz et al, 2016).…”

“…These technologies do not aim to replace reality (Her, 2021), but to enhance its experiences and renew the excitement for physical space engagement and connections (Clowater, 2021;Kostopoulou and Fatah gen Schieck, 2021;Wang, 2019). The proliferation of technology in our daily life has shaped how we come to know the physical world (Clowater, 2021;Frith and Richter, 2021). Potential risks and negative effects of hybrid realities are the possible cause of displacement (Kostopoulou and Fatah gen Schieck, 2021), private data collection (Hjorth and Richardson, 2017), or increasing disparities within communities (Birnbaum et al, 2021).…”

Physical and Digital Placemaking in a Public Art Initiative in Camden, NJ

“…Social media engagements with A New View reflected people's experiences and meanings tied to those experiences as users were exposed to A New View online events, contests, and posts. These meanings, in turn, remain as reflections upon the specific places and spaces where those experiences occurred (Frith & Richter 2021).…”

The Decision-Making Process and the Construction of Online Sociality through the Digital Storytelling Methodology

“…III. The Test team [43] is a questionnaire consisting of 42 items and validated on a group of students trained in managerial action. The questionnaire can be divided into two parts, the first (the one used in this study) of 22 items referring to the level of work structuring (items 1-12), and from 13 and 22, it analyses the strictly relational plan.…”