perry carter | Texas Tech University (original) (raw)

Papers by perry carter

Routledge eBooks, Feb 11, 2015

Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies

Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2015

ABSTRACT This study examines two southern Louisiana plantation museums: Laura and Oak Alley, usin... more ABSTRACT This study examines two southern Louisiana plantation museums: Laura and Oak Alley, using a framework that stresses the narrative power and politics of these heritage sites. Located a mile from each other along the Mississippi River, they present two similar yet different narratives of the antebellum American South. Laura places more emphasis on the enslaved who inhabited the plantation than does Oak Alley, whose narrative centers upon the opulence of the plantation home – that is, ‘the big house'. This study explores what visitors take away from their plantation tours. Specifically, it examines their thoughts about how the enslaved are represented at these two museums. The study's data come from visitors’ comments posted on the travel website TripAdvisor. The object of the study is to gain a greater understanding of what visitors learn about the history of the enslaved on these tours and how they participate, along with site managers, in the narrative construction of the plantation and negotiating the divide between tourism as amusement and tourism as memorial.

This article presents the results of a content analysis and a thematic analysis of undergraduate ... more This article presents the results of a content analysis and a thematic analysis of undergraduate students’ essays on the Middle East, specifically on the nation of Iran. The students were all members of a world regional geography class taught at a public west Texas university during the Fall of 2002. These students’ writings provide a particular regional view of the Islamic world post-September 11, 2001. The essays are responses to Christiane Bird’s travelogue Neither East nor West. Bird’s book, published before the September 11, 2001, attacks, offers a balanced if not positive view of Islam in general and Iran in particular. The written narratives produced by students afford an aperture into their imagined geographies and figured worlds of the Middle East and the Muslim world.

The Professional Geographer, 2009

This article reviews how race, quantification, and raced quantification have been used and writte... more This article reviews how race, quantification, and raced quantification have been used and written about in geography. Its two primary arguments are that race should be more central in the discipline and that a reluctance to address ontological and epistemological issues ...

Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2015

Georgia Southern University faculty member Amy E. Potter co-edited Social Memory and Heritage Tou... more Georgia Southern University faculty member Amy E. Potter co-edited Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies alongside non-faculty members Stephen P. Hanna, E. Arnold Modlin, Perry Carter, and David L. Butler. Potter also co-authored Introduction alongside non-faculty member E. Arnold Modlin and The Commons as a Tourist Commodity: Mapping Memories and Changing Sense of Place on the Island of Barbuda in Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies. Book Summary: The examination of social memory and heritage tourism has grown considerably over the past few decades as scholars have critically re-examined the relationships between past memories and present actions at international, national, and local scales. Methodological innovation and reflection have accompanied theoretical advances as researchers strive to understand representations, experiences, thoughts, emotions and identities of the various actors involved in the reproduction of social memory and heritage landscapes. Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies describes and demonstrates innovations – including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches – for analysing the process and politics of remembering and touring the past through place. An introductory chapter looks at the history of social memory and heritage tourism research and the particular challenges posed by these fields of study. In subsequent chapters, the reader is lead through the varying methodologies employed by presenting them in the context of an in-depth case study from range of geographical locations. The resulting volume showcases innovative research in social memory and heritage tourism and provides the reader with insights into how they can successfully conduct their own research while avoiding common pitfalls. This title will be useful reading for scholars, professionals and students in tourism, geography, anthropology and museum studies who are preparing to conduct research on the reproduction of social memory in particular landscapes and places or are interested in investigating heritage tourism practices and representations.https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/geo-facbookshelf/1014/thumbnail.jp

Memory Studies

While Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Highland work to recover the lives of people ensl... more While Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Highland work to recover the lives of people enslaved by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, their institutional missions emphasize the importance of these four men within American history. The resulting impediments to honoring Black lives within these spaces can be best understood using the analytical framework of reputational politics and by recognizing the roles visitors have in reproducing the reputations of the presidents and the women and men they enslaved. We base our examination of visitors’ participation in these reputational politics on a systematic documentation of tours and exhibits combined with surveys of visitors. Our results suggest that there are significant differences among the four sites in how visitors balance the reputations of enslaved communities with those of the Founding Fathers. On the whole, the emphasis on the presidents’ important positions within American social memory continues to inhibit efforts...

Each paper time slot is 20 minutes long: 15 minutes for the paper presentation followed by 5 minu... more Each paper time slot is 20 minutes long: 15 minutes for the paper presentation followed by 5 minutes of audience/presenter discussion. Please respect the chairperson's time cues.

myweb.ecu.edu

Plantation museums would appear to be natural sites in which to learn about the lives of enslaved... more Plantation museums would appear to be natural sites in which to learn about the lives of enslaved Africans and African-Americans in the United States. Yet, at the numerous restored plantations that dot the states of the former Confederacy, places with regal sounding ...

Geographical Review, 2021

The Los Angeles River provides residents with much-needed access to nature and recreation opportu... more The Los Angeles River provides residents with much-needed access to nature and recreation opportunities in a city plagued by a lack of parks. Park access and use in Los Angeles varies greatly along...

Current Research Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2018

Environmental inequality assumes a near proximity of environmental health hazards, hazardous wast... more Environmental inequality assumes a near proximity of environmental health hazards, hazardous waste processing and releasing facilities to minority and low-income communities. Research in environmental inequality and environment justice over the past twenty years suggests that hazardous waste facilities are often located near minority and low-income neighborhoods. We conducted a study evaluating and quantifying environmental inequality in Lubbock County, Texas. Our study analyzed both spatial and statistical relationships between population demographics and spatial proximity to hazardous waste releasing facilities. Hazardous waste facility data used in the study were collected from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Population statistics from the U.S. Census comprise the demographic data for this analysis. Spatial regression models were estimated to evaluate the relationship between distance from TRI sites and neighborhood / census block group demogr...

This paper is a response to Bonnett' s call to examine Whiteness in its spatial diversity. Re... more This paper is a response to Bonnett' s call to examine Whiteness in its spatial diversity. Representations of women' s bodies in advertisements and the underlying White nationalist discourse they reflect is this study' s point of entry. Ostensibly, this is an examination of billboards in Central America, but it is also an exegesis of Whiteness and the nation conducted through a visual analysis of women' s bodies. The principal data are commercial representations of women and images of actual women in Costa Rica and Guatemala. The two questions being considered here are: 1) how does Whiteness operate as a visual discourse, and 2) what forms does Whiteness take in non-Anglo, non-European sites. This paper investigates the imbrications of race, gender, the body, and the nation. It would seem a simple enough assumption that the end of colonialism ushers in the end of whiteness, or at least of its unrivaled ascendancy. Yet the cultural residues of whiteness linger in the ...

AAG Newsletter

Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, lies the remnants of antebellum sugar plantations along Loui... more Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, lies the remnants of antebellum sugar plantations along Louisiana’s famed River Road, named for the Mississippi River that snakes its way through southern Louisiana before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Many of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century plantation homes that still exist along this road have been preserved, and some have been transformed into museums dedicated to retelling Louisiana’s antebellum period. A few of these museums attract as many as 200,000 visitors a year (Oak Alley and Laura, A Creole Plantation, for example). Most of these plantation house museums, however, have traditionally focused their narrative presentations on the planter and his family, which necessitates that tours be spatially arranged in and around the planter’s home (The Big House)

Sociological Spectrum, 2018

Tourists come to museums with varied expectations and leave appreciating different aspects of the... more Tourists come to museums with varied expectations and leave appreciating different aspects of their presentations. Thus, tourists/audiences are primed to see, hear, and experience certain representations and narratives when they enter museums. This is particularly so with plantation museums. Most Americans possess at the very least a vague sense of the antebellum South. They have a vague sense of a time and of a place populated by wealthy and esteemed plantation owners and their Black enslaved labor. We use, as our raw material, visitors' responses to the question: "What is your level of interest in ...," ten topics related to plantations' presentations. This question was asked of visitors returning from tours at three plantation museums. Specifically, all three differ in their presentation of enslavement and as so, have been selected to represent the spectrum of plantation museums in regards to presentation of slavery and enslaved labor. It is expected that the differences in presentations at the three sites reflect differences in plantation audiences. To this effect, plantation audiences are mapped and viewed through the framework of social representation theory in an attempt to discern social representation communities using visitors' levels of interest in topics/items presented on plantation tours at sites. Disregarding incidental cultural tourists, we found there to be basically two social representations that visitors to these three plantation museums hold: a nostalgic social representation and a Janus social representation.

Geographical Review, 2019

To what extent does local variation exist in the expressed interests of plantation museum tourist... more To what extent does local variation exist in the expressed interests of plantation museum tourists? While the study of plantation museums is of growing importance in the tourism literature, these existing studies have tended to focus on a single site or a single region. This study examines data collected at several southern plantations across multiple smaller areas in the U.S. Southeast. Specifically, we are curious about tourists' interests in select topics, such as slavery and the role of women on the plantation, among others in three regions: River Road, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and James River, Virginia. We hypothesize that each region has absorbed different local identities and histories that constitute multiple Souths. Employing conditional inference trees on plantation museum tourist interest ratings and rankings, we find varying social representations by in these local communities, with interest in Enslaved playing an important role in the variation of these imaginings.