Does a city have its own song? A hum and beat that makes it unique? Join us on this short expedition to record the soundscape produced by the everyday interactions of people and place in Old Town Salzburg. With microphone in hand we drift through the narrow streets and lanes capturing a different kind of music and consider a different way of thinking about our sensory experience of place.
In EPISODE TWENTY ONE, Seeing Heimat Through a Lens, we discuss the power of photography to shape and frame sentiments and ideas about place-based national and regional identities in 1930s Austria. Art historian Dr. Elizabeth Cronin of the New York Public Library guides us back to this key moment in the construction of a contemporary Austrianness rooted in tradition and the rural on the one hand, yet striving to be modern and urban on the other.
In EPISODE TWENTY, Sitting Near Borges, we look at the geographical imagination of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. We visit a park bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts in order to conjure up the spirit of his writings and discuss Borgesian “thought experiments” with literature scholar Bill Richardson of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Photo taken along the Rhône River in Geneva, Switzerland.
In the show’s 19th episode we test locals on their knowledge of the country of Paraguay while locating their own geographical imaginations along the way. We also invite two of the three Paraguayans living in Salzburg, the musicians Francisco González and Raúl Rolón, to share traditional Paraguayan music and discuss–in English, Spanish and Jopará–cultural geographical mixing between Paraguay and Austria.
In Pedagogy of the Compressed we venture through different spaces of teaching and learning with Dr. Rich Heyman of the University of Texas and ride upcycled bicycles through northern California with Seth Dow, Andy Knox, Hannah Halvorsen and Brandon Herhusky of Sugar Bowl Academy. In this time-space compressed world what does it mean to be “doing” geography and how can our methodology, or the how, be more important than the what?
