Alcantara, Christophe, Paquette, Jonathan and Lacassagne, Aurélie (2021) Cultural roads and Itineraries : Concepts and cases. Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 978-9-811-63532-8

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Abstract

Like many academic projects, this book results from a series of reflections
that converged over the years. At the time of this book’s conception,
Aurélie Lacassagne and Jonathan Paquette had been working together
for years on a number of collaborative projects—the most important of
which related to “terroir” and cultural industries in Canada. As such, this
project evolved from a variety of fieldwork that took place throughout
the provinces of Ontario and Québec, wherein the place of roads became
salient. Roads were a way of narrating regions, of narrating identity; roads
enabled the stories of Canadian terroir that had only very recently been
crafted. Roads, in a sense, provided spatial support for the implantation
of terroir’s imaginary. Outside of this collaboration, roads have been an
important part of Aurélie’s theoretical approach to French-Canadian and
French-American literature. The importance of roads has also emerged
in Jonathan’s fieldwork in Asia. In Hong Kong, heritage and nature trails
are an important component of the local cultural scene. While Jonathan’s
work focuses on museums and heritage policies, roads revealed another
dimension of heritage in Hong Kong. Similarly, Christophe Alcantara’s
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vi Preface
work in communications and on the use of social media reached an interesting
turning point when he took an interest in the representations of
roads and selves on Instagram. Studying the social media practices of
hundreds of Instagram users, Christophe’s work found patterns in the
picture-taking practices of users’ that suggested their selfies were not as
shallow as one might think; the roads portrayed in these images often
revealed a new sense of spirituality and depth to those who took the
pictures.
These different ideas and perspectives on roads converged in 2018,
when we all met in Montréal for the Société Québécoise de science politique’s
annual meeting. This was the occasion where many of the ideas
that are discussed in the pages of this book first took form.
It is with all of this in mind that this book aims to achieve two
objectives. First, the book aims to discuss roads from an interdisciplinary
perspective; it unites ideas, concepts, and notions from a number
of different disciplines: history, geography, economics, political science,
literature, philosophy, and many others. As such, the book engages with
the works of many important philosophers and social scientists—notably
Deleuze, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Simmel, Castells, among many others.
Second, this book focuses on cultural roads, bringing us closer to disciplines
that have already engaged with the cultural dimensions of roads,
itineraries, paths, or routes. Notably, tourism studies, heritage studies,
leisure studies, and regional development have all contributed to frameworks
and concepts that further the understanding of the cultural aspect
of roads. Thus, this book engages with the rich work that has emerged
in these disciplines since the early 2000s and with greater force since the
2010s. The cases discussed in this book further the ongoing discussions
and debates around the cultural aspect of roads; the cases we have selected
and the approach we have privileged explore new concepts and test the
boundaries of this object of study.

Item Type: Book
Language: English
Date: 12 November 2021
Subjects: E- SCIENCES DE L’INFORMATION ET DE LA COMMUNICATION > E3- Culture et Media
Divisions: Institut du Droit de l'Espace, des Territoires, de la Culture et de la Communication (Toulouse)
Site: UT1
Date Deposited: 08 Mar 2022 10:48
Last Modified: 08 Mar 2022 10:48
URI: https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/44713
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