By Nicole Findlay
Armed with cameras and a critical eye, students enrolled in Derek Smith’s cultural geography class, set out to examine Canadian cityscapes.
Combining the resulting photos with quotes from assigned academic texts, each student produced a photo essay that critically examines the spaces through which we navigate every day.
Cultural and geographic issues examined through the course emerge as a thematic link in the resulting collection of 15 photo essays. Through their camera lenses, the students have explored Canada’s multicultural communities and dissected local symbols for what they tell us about how race, gender, ethnicity and economic status are perceived by the country’s power elite.
Throughout the year, Smith introduced eight themes that included the effects of culture, identity, power, knowledge, place and globalization on the environment.
“I proposed the photographic essay because we continue to be exposed to more and more visual information, and students need to be able to analyze and critique different ways that ideas and discourses are communicated,” said Smith. “Cultural geographers are accustomed to working with visual material through their use of maps and interpreting cultural landscapes, and cybercartography offers new ways of integrating images, video and audio into new digital formats.”
As she worked through the assigned academic readings, Nikki Farquhar, a fourth-year geography major, envisioned the scenes within Ottawa she felt best exemplified the social and physical environmental themes.
“With a great interest in changing cultures especially those of the First Nations people of Canada due to a globalizing world, I knew that I wanted to incorporate Victoria Island and the efforts put forth to maintain cultural traditions and beliefs,” said Farquhar. “The irony of it and the reason I thought the pictures would work is because of the location and the surroundings of the area, being stuck between factories and the downtown core of Ottawa.”
Like Farquhar, many students set out with specific themes and locations they wanted to explore. Others took the opposite approach. The assignment caused Sarah Schachhuber, a fourth-year geography major, to re-evaluate the city she had always taken for granted.
“I have lived in Ottawa my entire life, but doing this assignment forced me to look at it in an entirely different way,” said Schachhuber. “Things such as monuments, gates and murals, which before were simply markers typical of any city, became complex cultural landmarks.”
Other essays addressed the student’s perceptions of gender and race inequality indicated by the public representations of historic figures, concepts of “othering” exemplified by ethnic and economic disparity.
Although the photo essay was assigned as an experiment and an alternative to a term paper, it taught students to connect the theory presented in class to their own environment.