Giada Peterle | Università degli Studi di Padova (original) (raw)

Papers by Giada Peterle

Literary Second Cities, 2017

This chapter leaves the lagoon-city of Venice behind to look at the network of ‘secondary’ cities... more This chapter leaves the lagoon-city of Venice behind to look at the network of ‘secondary’ cities on its mainland. For its rapid and scattered development, Venetian ‘citta diffusa’ has already been recognized as a perfect laboratory to explore postmodern cityscapes. Particularly, the chapter will focus on the ‘landscape of movement’ as a key structuring element of diffused urbanization and of its literary narration. The journey involves movement along the arterial route of the motorway connecting Milan and Venice, and analyses different case studies, from the 1989 novel by Gianfranco Bettin Qualcosa che brucia to Giorgio Falco’s 2009 collection L’ubicazione del bene, to propose these literary works as cognitive tools that contribute to the ‘readability’ of Italy’s north-eastern urban sprawl, even from a geographical perspective.

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Comics as a Research Practice, 2021

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Una mappa può raccontare una storia? E una storia, o per meglio dire una narrazione scritta, può ... more Una mappa può raccontare una storia? E una storia, o per meglio dire una narrazione scritta, può orientare il lettore nella pagina e nel mondo come una mappa? Il rapporto fra narrativa e carte geografiche oggi è al centro di diversi dibattiti volti ad esplorare le potenzialità e le problematicità del legame fra il linguaggio apparentemente oggettivo della cartografia e il linguaggio soggettivo e pregnante del raccontare.

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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021

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Political Geography, 2022

Locating the territoriality of territory in border studies

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J-Reading - Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography, 2015

This article suggests the use of comics, particularly of graphic novels, as valuable instructiona... more This article suggests the use of comics, particularly of graphic novels, as valuable instructional tools for teaching cartography. Of particular interest is the idea that comics can be used to develop students’ geographical competencies, their ability to think actively about cartographical issues, and their capacity to interact with “maps as mappings” (Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins, 2009). The theoretical references used to conduct the deep interdisciplinary proposal and analysis include: the growing field of literary cartography, recent post-representational theories in cartography, and the emerging field of “comic book geography” (Dittmer, 2014). The article reads comics as maps and analyzes their map-like features to demonstrate that both maps and comics ask the reader-user to be actively engaged to decipher, orient, and practice them. Proposing to read “maps as comics”, “maps of comics”, “maps and mappings in comics”, and “comics as maps and mappings”, the article suggests the poss...

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Starting from the graphic novel Etenesh. L’odissea di una migrante [Etenesh. The odyssey of a mig... more Starting from the graphic novel Etenesh. L’odissea di una migrante [Etenesh. The odyssey of a migrant] by Paolo Castaldi (2011), the present contribution proposes to interpret the comic book as a ‘space of encounter’ between disparate subjectivities and as a ‘place of mediation’ between different cultural and geographical perspectives. The first part of the article aims to situate the analysis of Etenesh within the recent field of ‘comic book geographies’, paying particular attention to the encounter between comics, postcolonial, and geographical studies in the emerging debate around ‘postcolonial comics’. Furthermore, the graphic novel by Paolo Castaldi is proposed as an example of how comics could profitably enter contemporary ‘Italian postcolonial studies’. The second part will present the reasons why it is appropriate to embrace ‘interviews’ as methodological tools in postcolonial geographical research: on the one hand, I respond to the question about who is the interviewer, pre...

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Between, 2018

Starting from the recently emerged field of ‘comic book geography’ (Dittmer 2014), the article pr... more Starting from the recently emerged field of ‘comic book geography’ (Dittmer 2014), the article proposes ‘comic book cartography’ as a further research line to explore the intersections bewteen comics and cartography. The proposed transdisciplinary approach is based on the encounter between geography and geocriticism, comics studies and post-representational theories in cartography. Through a ‘carto-centred’ reading of both Italian and international case studies, the comic book is interpreted as a map inolving author and reader in an orientation practice.

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Mobilities, 2021

ABSTRACT This paper is a response to the pervasive spread of both cartographic materials related ... more ABSTRACT This paper is a response to the pervasive spread of both cartographic materials related to the COVID-19 pandemic and critical commentaries about such materials. Written by four Italian map-scholars with different theoretical backgrounds but similar socio-cultural and emotional concerns, this paper emerged spontaneously, following the impulse to grasp the rapid movement of coronavirus cartographies, particularly online. Through conversations carried out during the lockdown, the authors collaboratively observed how both scientific and governmental, as well as existential and affective features of the pandemic have been informed by cartographic imaginings. This plurality of cartographic visuals and mapping practices, which appeared soon after the coronavirus outbreak, requires exponential research angles. Approaching the pandemic through and in the proximity of maps, mapping practices, map-like objects and creative cartographies, this paper aims to foreground the speculative, empirical and fast-moving expressions of the pandemic’s cartographic imagery.

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Striscia/ illustrazioni di @ Elena Mistrello, Giada Peterle, Mattia Moro, Alekos Reize, Giuseppe ... more Striscia/ illustrazioni di @ Elena Mistrello, Giada Peterle, Mattia Moro, Alekos Reize, Giuseppe Lo Bocchiaro

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This piece briefly summarizes the contents of part of a University course in cultural geography h... more This piece briefly summarizes the contents of part of a University course in cultural geography held at the University of Padua in the 2015/16 academic year, with the aim of suggesting a possible didactical contextualization for two recent creative works devoted to very different examples of “cultural quarters” in Italy (the Venetian Jewish quarter and so-called “Milan’s Chinatown”). The very first notion of comparing the docufilm Il Ghetto di Venezia. 500 anni di vita [The Venice Ghetto. 500 Years of Life] (2015) and the graphic novel Primavere e Autunni [Springs and Autumns] (2015) originated from a purely formal appreciation of them. The works, in fact, both present pieces of creative cartography of the cultural quarter, which have particularly stimulated our imaginations as cultural geographers (Figs 1 and 2). Subsequently, a deeper analysis of the complex implications of these informed and carefully arranged creative works led us to consider them precious resources for the teaching of cultural geography. Creative works became crucial given that we built upon them educational projects that refer to complex, transcalar, and multidimensional relations between cultural processes and spaces. In the initial part of this article, therefore, we draw on recent international and Italian literature on ethnic spatial concentration to contextualize the two works presented here.

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Literary Second Cities, 2017

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Comics as a Research Practice, 2021

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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021

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Political Geography, 2022

Locating the territoriality of territory in border studies

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J-Reading - Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography, 2015

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Between, 2018

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Mobilities, 2021

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Spazi chiusi. Prigioni, manicomi, confinamenti, eremitaggi, stanze| Università di Cagliari - Università Roma | 5 June 2020, 2020

La mia riflessione parte da un cronotopo che sta al confine tra spazi chiusi e aperti, tra l’inte... more La mia riflessione parte da un cronotopo che sta al confine tra spazi chiusi e aperti, tra l’interno e l’esterno, un limite che separa l’io dall’altro.
È il cronotopo della soglia, quello che Bachtin in Estetica e romanzo definisce come lo spazio della crisi, ma anche della svolta. Da qui nasce l’idea di parlare di sconfinamenti urbani, intesi come possibilità di un’articolazione dialettica, come costruzione di una relazione dinamica che consente il superamento delle dicotomie. Nasce così una nuova configurazione relazionale tra interno e esterno, soggetto e oggetto, corpo e ambiente, mobilità e immobilità. Il mio racconto è strutturato attorno a tre spazi liminari a cui corrispondono altrettanti capitoli: la finestra, la mappa, la vetrina. Sono a mio avviso soglie che invitano ad andare oltre, ma anche punti di partenza, da cui iniziare a tracciare una mappa incompleta delle nostre città durante la pandemia.

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Locative media, climate change and (im)mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic: exploring collaborative spatial narratives in the arts and education Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London | 29 May 2020, 2020

To me, maps are narrative triggers. We can tell stories of maps, of their lives and afterlives. A... more To me, maps are narrative triggers. We can tell stories of maps, of their lives and afterlives. At the same time, we can use carto-fiction to let our autoethnographic reflections and affective bonds with maps emerge. This time for the first time I worked with urban walking and photography as interrelated aesthetic practices (Bissett 2004). As Arnold notices, these intuitive, immersive, sensory practices allow us exploring and capturing spatial and temporal variations and materialities in the city (Arnold 2019, 3). In my photo-essay, I connected image-making with urban walking (Hunt 2014) to register the alternations of mobilities and immobilities, the variations of my rhythms and gaze during the lockdown. The carto-centred story I'm telling, is a story from a specific spatio-temporal context. Is an autoethnographic account of an urban exploration in Italy's red zone during the April 2020 lockdown.

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Royal Geographical Society - IBG Annual International Conference, 2019

The encounter between the interdisciplinary field of comic book geographies (Dittmer, 2010; 2014)... more The encounter between the interdisciplinary field of comic book geographies (Dittmer, 2010; 2014) and the recent ‘creative turn’ (Madge, 2014) suggests that we think about comics not only as finished stories, that enable geographers to encounter migrants’ narratives in an apparently more accessible form, but also as storytelling practices with which to engage as creative methods of research, that can help us let migrants’ stories emerge.
In this paper I will focus on a creative practice in which I am involved in as both a cultural geographer and a comics author myself: with an urban sociologist, Adriano Cancellieri, I am currently curating the anthology Quartieri. Un viaggio al centro delle periferie italiane [Neighborhoods. A travel through Italian peripheries] (Cancellieri and Peterle, 2019) and composing one of the 5 short comics stories collected in it. These short stories will be set in 5 peripheral neighborhoods of 5 Italian cities (Padua, Bologna, Milan, Palermo and Rome), each of which faces issues concerning integration/migration; spatial/social marginality; the perception/narration of identity and of a sense of community. In particular, our short story on the ‘multi-ethnic neighborhood’ of Arcella, in the city of Padua, is a result of ethnographic accounts we collected during fieldwork, interviewing recent migrants and long-term residents, shopkeepers and private citizens, representatives of associations and resident committees. Through its creative composition practice, the comic book emerged as a ‘place of mediation’ between different cultural and geographical perspectives (Hawkins, 2015). Constantly unfolding in the confrontation between authors, stories, and the protagonists of the stories collected during fieldwork, comics build potential ‘spaces of encounter’ for disparate subjectivities and voices to emerge, meet and dialogue.

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My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power ... more My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power of non-human narrators and aims to reflect on the contrasting encounter between the apparent immobility of buildings, as non-human inert bodies, and the peculiar mobility of the flâneur. I said apparent immobility because my provocation starts precisely from the idea that buildings, despite their inertia, have an intrinsic power to mobilize our gaze and move our feet: my proposal is to imagine them as non-human narrators that invite the flâneur to move in the city both vertically, discovering changes in time, and horizontally, exploring connections in space. Furthermore, as (im)mobile concrete archives, buildings invite us to reflect once again on the peculiarity of the flâneur’s mobility, which is made of a constant alternation between walking and resting, listening and writing practices. Even if always on the move, the flâneur constantly takes time for slow practices like resting, reflect and writing, thus resisting through his own body to the rapid flows of contemporary cities and neoliberal rhythms.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”

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Il presente contributo si strutturerà in due parti: la prima sarà dedicata ad introdurre un appro... more Il presente contributo si strutturerà in due parti: la prima sarà dedicata ad introdurre un approccio interdisciplinare al linguaggio del fumetto a partire dalle 'comic book geographies', un recente campo di studi emerso a livello internazionale come punto d'incontro tra comics studies e geografa (politica, dei media, culturale, di genere, postcoloniale); la seconda parte sarà invece incentrata sulla proposta di un nuovo campo di ricerca, la 'comic book cartography' (Peterle 2017), a partire dall'analisi della stretta relazione tra linguaggio del fumetto e linguaggio cartografco.

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Esplorazioni geografiche attraversando il graphic novel. Le relazioni tra il fumetto e la geograf... more Esplorazioni geografiche attraversando il graphic novel. Le relazioni tra il fumetto e la geografia, dalla geopolitica alla geocritica attraverso una focalizzazione della rappresentazione dello spazio urbano in una prospettiva diacronica, dalla metropoli di Will Eisner alle de-costruzioni urbane di Chris Ware.

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Almost 30 years after the publication of Gianni Celati's Verso la foce the aim of our presentatio... more Almost 30 years after the publication of Gianni Celati's Verso la foce the aim of our presentation is to
develop the concept of the river Po as a “liquid chronotope” (Conte 2008, Bauman 2000, Bakhtin
1975) that works both on the metaphorical-narrative and the physical-geographical level. On the one
hand the river Po works as a narrative line and guides Celati's narration replacing the structuring
function of the plot; on the other hand it represents a geographical element that orients both the
narrator's and our perfomative tour through the “new Italian landscape”.

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Tis contribution aims to explore the relationship between creativity and geography (Marston and D... more Tis contribution aims to explore the relationship between creativity and geography (Marston and De
Leeuw 2013) by suggesting that we consider graphic creative writing as a way to redraw research in
cultural geography, just as “graphic ethnography” was proposed for the feld of anthropology (Dennison
2015; Ingold 2011). In addiction, through the enacting of “carto-centred” narratives (Rossetto 2014),
this contribution endeavours to involve the audience in a creative writing and post-representational
mapping experience (fctionally) based in Berlin.

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The ongoing reconfiguration of Italian cities calls for an interdisciplinary approach that can of... more The ongoing reconfiguration of Italian cities calls for an interdisciplinary approach that can offer a more complex, ‘mobile’ rather than ‘static’ understanding of the city (Ash and Thrift, 2002).
Starting from a cross-border geoliterary perspective, my analysis refers both to the concept of the ‘novel-geographer’ by geographer Marc Brosseau (1995), and to Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical approach (2009) to interpret the ‘territorial prose’ by many Italian writers as a way to understand and (re)inhabit contemporary (peri)urban spaces...

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Nella postmodernità la “metafora multipolare e non lineare della mappa” (Westphal) è divenuta il ... more Nella postmodernità la “metafora multipolare e non
lineare della mappa” (Westphal) è divenuta il
paradigma dominante, mentre lo statuto ontologico
stesso della carta si è fatto oggetto di riflessione
transdisciplinare. Spostando l'attenzione dalla sua
natura statica, ci si è infatti concentrati sugli
elementi mobili, narrativi ed esperienziali della
carta, che torna ad essere racconto di mondi
possibili, anziché ‘rappresentazione’ della realtà. Se
la città contemporanea è insieme rizomatico di
frammenti in costante movimento, spazio
dell'attraversamento la cui geografia mobile è in
perpetua trasformazione, anche la mappa urbana si
è fatta “nomade” (Careri), costantemente
ridisegnata lungo e durante il percorso...

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GIADA PETERLE Beyond Venice. Italy's northeastern " diffused urbanisation " as a network of liter... more GIADA PETERLE Beyond Venice. Italy's northeastern " diffused urbanisation " as a network of literary second cities.

Although many spatial science scholars have investigated at length the Italian ʻdiffused cityʼ (Cosgrove 2007), literary critics have failed to concentrate on the textual representation of this primarily Venetian spatial phenomenon. Geographers, sociologists, architects and urban planners have variously analysed the urbanisation of Northern Italy from different perspectives as a paradigmatic example for analyzing also other urban formations around the world. However, the ʻdiffused urbanisationʼ of Italian northeast has never been interpreted as something that could also provide new and unforeseen literary insights. It is still almost unexplored from the perspective of literary theory and criticism, having been constantly put on the back burner and overshadowed by the historically authoritative, culturally dominant and literarily prevailing, worldwide known key case study of literary Venice. Taking this 'secondariness' into account and starting from these multifocal geographical and urban analyses, the aim of this paper is to embrace a new literary perspective that goes beyond Venice's dominant ʻliterary archetypeʼ, focusing on the large-mesh, polycentric, or even ʻnon-centric networkʼ (Cosgrove 2007) of the second cities that make up the Venetian ʻcittà diffusaʼ.

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Traverser Mobilité spatiale, espace, déplacements, 2019

Dove il confine è netto, il margine è frastagliato. Dove il confine è chiuso, il margine è aperto... more Dove il confine è netto, il margine è frastagliato. Dove il confine è chiuso, il margine è aperto. Dove il confine è invalicabile e segna un interno e un esterno, il margine è attraversabile ed è insieme dentro e fuori. Dove il confine è disegnato, riconoscibile e, spesso, rappresentato da un manufatto o da un elemento naturale, il margine è casuale, non distinguibile e privo di elementi che fisicamente lo sostanzino. (Danilo Palazzo, 2006)

Où sont les frontières de la ville? Il s’agit d’une question trop complexe, qui exigerait que nous soyons capables de définir avec certitude, sans ambiguïté, ce qu’on entend par ville et, par là, ce qu’est la ville et où se trouve ce qui n’est pas ville. Il est sans doute plus facile de se poser la question suivante: quelles sont les marges, dentelées, mobiles, poreuses de la ville contemporaine? Et à partir de quel point de vue est-il possible d’en embrasser, d’un seul regard, la fragmentation complexe, l’expansion incontrôlable, l’identité vivante et multiple?

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Corpi, strumenti, narrazioni. Officine didattiche per una geografia inclusiva, 2018

Una mappa può raccontare una storia? E una storia, o per meglio dire una narrazione scritta, può ... more Una mappa può raccontare una storia? E una storia, o per meglio dire
una narrazione scritta, può orientare il lettore nella pagina e nel mondo come una mappa? Il rapporto fra narrativa e carte geografiche oggi è al centro di diversi dibattiti volti ad esplorare le potenzialità e le problematicità del legame fra il linguaggio apparentemente oggettivo della cartografia e il linguaggio soggettivo e pregnante del raccontare.

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Literary Second Cities | Palgrave Macmillan | Eds. Jason Finch, Lieven Ameel, Markku Salmela, 2017

This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the b... more This book brings together geographers and literary scholars in a series of engagements near the boundaries of their disciplines. In urban studies, disproportionate attention has been given to a small set of privileged ‘first’ cities. This volume problematizes the dominance of such alpha cities, offering a wide perspective on ‘second cities’ and their literature. The volume is divided into three themed sections. ‘In the Shadow of the Alpha City’ problematizes the image of cities defined by their function and size, bringing out the contradictions and contestations inherent in cultural productions of second cities, including Birmingham and Bristol in the UK, Las Vegas in the USA, and Tartu in Estonia. ‘Frontier Second Cities’ pays attention to the multiple and trans-national pasts of second cities which occupy border zones, with a focus on Narva, in Estonia, and Turkish/Kurdish Diyarbakir. The final section, ‘The Diffuse Second City’, examines networks the diffuse secondary city made up of interlinked small cities, suburban sprawl and urban overspill, with literary case studies from Italy, Sweden, and Finland.

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Waterways and the Cultural Landscape, Routledge, 2017

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The purpose of this colloquium is to think about the ongoing reciprocal exchange between the ‘new... more The purpose of this colloquium is to think about the ongoing reciprocal exchange between the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and literary geographies. In particular, the event aims at interrogating the diverse ways in which the theories and methodologies triggered by the ‘mobility paradigm’ interact with literary geographies, including both texts and narrative practices. In our perspective, the focus on ‘mobilities’ suggests a move beyond the mere analysis of literary texts as representations, to read narratives as practices that encourage an unceasing critical movement; an open-ended engagement with the human and non-human worlds; an ongoing exploration of new mobile methodologies and forms of narrations (fictional/non-fictional, verbo-visual, cartographic). We foresee this as an opportunity to establish a network of scholars working across the disciplines, in the fields of literary geography and mobility.
With ‘narrative forms and practices’ as a shared starting point, contributions will be related (but not limited) to:
• State of the art of literary mobilities
• Narrative creative methods (writing, storytelling etc.)
• Narration of non-human mobilities
• Fictional and non-fictional mobilities
• Mobile maps and mappings
• Mobile practices as generative of motion, routes, encounters and place
• Im-mobilities/blockages, failures and disruptions
• Collective and individual mobilities
• Embodied mobility, privileged and excluded bodies
• Virtual mobilities
• The temporalities and rhythms of mobility
• Mobilization of affect and atmospheres
• Infrastructures, systems, assemblages
• Unsettling concepts of migration, diaspora, postcolonialism, non-Western experiences of mobility
• Interrogating distance and scale (global, planetary, home, bodies)
• Moving through elements (water, air, earth, etc.)
• Circuits of authorship and readership
• Mobilities in comics and verbo-visual modes of expression

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CeMoRe (Lancaster University) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (Unive... more CeMoRe (Lancaster University) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (University of Padua) are pleased to invite academics and art practitioners for this one-and-half-day colloquium on ‘Unruly Landscapes: Mobility, Transcience and Transformation'.
June 18-19 2020 @ Lancaster House Hotel, Lancaster University, UK

Guest speaker: Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK

In order to participate, please email your paper proposal (300 words max) and a short biography (including details of up to 4 relevant publications) to unrulylandscapes@gmail.com by 3 March 2020.

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Co-hosted by CeMoRe (Lancaster University) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Huma... more Co-hosted by CeMoRe (Lancaster University) and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility & Humanities (University of Padua), this two-day virtual colloquium brings researchers from across the humanities and social sciences together to share their recent work on ‘mobilised landscapes’ of different kinds.
Panels are open to the public. To attend, follow the zoom links provided in the programme.
More info at: https://www.mobilityandhumanities.it/unruly-landscapes/

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TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS, 2021, 46(3): 642-658

This paper intervenes in the current debate on architectural geography and the lives of buildings... more This paper intervenes in the current debate on architectural geography and the lives of buildings, aiming to provide some suggestions in light of the recent development of post‐phenomenological and object‐oriented geographical theorisation. Despite the fact that new non‐representational approaches in architectural geography do pay attention to the materialities and agencies of non‐human actors, we argue that such readings often tend to remain phenomenological and human-centred and fail to experiment more radically with a post‐phenomenological, object‐centred stance. Analysing an example of filmic it‐narration by a fictional speaking building, namely Wim Wenders’ The Berlin Philharmonic (2014), we situate the device of non‐human narration as an experimental field for advancing a critical reflection on geographic epistemologies. Critically analysed in its paradoxes and oscillations, with its double dialectic of both empathy and defamiliarisation, it‐narration provides new insights into architectural geographies by enacting a post‐phenomenology that is consciously and aesthetically object-oriented. We take both architectural geography and narratology as a testing ground to show the possibilities of expanding such conceptualisation within a broader range of geographical subfields.

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