| 1. |
- Nadegger, Monica, et al.
(author)
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Flooding lagoons, melting mountains: Diffractive vignettes as a communicative engagement with extra-linguistic and response-able materializations
- 2024
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Purpose: This article aims to illustrate diffractive vignettes as a methodology to extend current communicative and performative approaches. We engage with the critical ethical- onto-epistemological underpinnings of diffraction and explore how it can sensitize communicative research (in particular within the Montréal School (TMS) of CCO scholarship) to processes of materialization - what comes to matter - differently in our research in the context of the climate crisis.Design/methodology/approach: Reading our ethnographic fieldwork concerning the climate crisis in the Venetian Lagoon and the Austrian Alps, diffractive vignettes are introduced as a way through which we ‘thickly perform’ the climate crisis and become response-able for our agential cuts. In crafting these diffractive vignettes, we discuss what experiences and affects materialized and how the climate crisis can emerge differently through the performances in our research.Findings: Our empirical contribution is twofold. First, diffraction helps us attend to how performativity works through extra-linguistic sensibilities and how it moves through affective transmission in the constitution of organizational realities. Second, it allows us to account for the ethical consequence of these materializations by developing response-ability for the materialization and the matterings we produce in our research.Originality: Through a diffractive methodology, we extend a fastly developing body of work on materialization within communicative organizational research with what seems still to be missing from it: an attunement to affective more-than-human Earthly relations and developing response-ability for the particular materialization.
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| 2. |
- Cassinger, Cecilia, et al.
(author)
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Critical interventions into sustainable tourism promotion and consumption
- 2023
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This thematic session addresses the theme of the conference on “Rethinking tourism for a sustainable future” by examining the paradoxes, challenges, and possibilities of sustainable tourism as modes promotion and consumption. The session invites conceptual and empirical research papers that critically intervene in ongoing discussions on tourism as a cultural and spatial phenomenon in the intersection of consumption, promotion, and sustainability.
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| 3. |
- Cassinger, Cecilia, et al.
(author)
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Outlining a feminist ethics of sustainable place branding
- 2022
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- AimsIt is increasingly argued that place branding is an important element in sustainable urban development (e.g. Therkelsen et al., 2021; Taecharungroj et al., 2019). However, there are still unresolved ethical difficulties connected to the relation between sustainable development goals and place branding strategy. For example, a typical ethical dilemma arising at the nexus of sustainable development and place branding concerns the reconciliation of the promotion and commodification of places and making them into ecological and social just habitats. In order to approach such dilemmas, this paper proposes a feminist ethics to sustainable place branding that go beyond the idea of autonomy of place brands, and towards the recognition of inherent interdependency between places, people, and brands.Theoretical frameworkThis research builds on previous critical interventions in the field that has demonstrated that place branding is not an ethically neutral practice, but has political and normative consequences in its application (e.g. Sevin, 2011; Kavaratzis et al., 2017). The theoretical argument is informed by Butler’s (2020) recent work on feminist ethics of non-violence in order to shift focus from sustainable place branding as an autonomous practice to the complex relational constitution of place branding, sustainability, and society.Main research approachThe study advances a conceptual argument with empirical illustrations of sustainable place branding in cities.Key arguments/findingsIn the analysis, typical views on ethics and ethical dilemmas identified in place branding research are discussed in relation to three key premises underpinning the feminist ethics approach: relationality, embodiment, and vulnerability. Taken together we argue that these premises help us to formulate an ethics for sustainable place branding that celebrate unavoidable interdependency and moral equality.ConclusionsThe paper concludes that a robust ethical notion of sustainable place branding passesthrough the acknowledgment of the unavoidable geographical, political, social, andecological bonds between place brands, and an honorability of the moral obligations that such interdependency entails.Practical implicationsThe ethics approach outlined in this paper is able to inform policy and practice of achieving ecological and social justice in places as part of their commitment to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.ReferencesButler, J. (2020). The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind. New York: Verso.Kavaratzis, M., Giovanardi, M., & Lichrou, M. (Eds.). (2017). Inclusive place branding:Critical perspectives on theory and practice. London: Routledge.Sevin, E. (2011). Thinking about place branding: Ethics of concept. Place Branding andPublic Diplomacy, 7(3), 155-164.Taecharungroj, V., Muthuta, M., and Boonchaiyapruek, P. (2019). Sustainability as a place brand position: a resident-centric analysis of the ten towns in the vicinity ofBangkok. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 15(4), 210-228.Therkelsen, A., James, L., and Halkier, H. (2021). Sustainable Development Goals in Place Branding: Developing a Research Agenda. In D. Medway, G. Warnaby, & J. Byrom(Eds.), A Research Agenda for Place Branding, 319-337, Cheltenham: Edward ElgarPublishing.
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| 4. |
- Cassinger, Cecilia, et al.
(author)
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Rethinking ethics in city branding: from competition to vulnerability
- 2024
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In: City Branding.
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this chapter we propose a novel ethical approach to city branding based on a relational understanding of vulnerability. We rethink the prevailing ethics of competition and competitiveness in the field by demonstrating its limitations for contributing positively to urban sustainable development. An ethics of vulnerability approach is outlined based on principles of performativity, interdependence, and relationality, and an obligation to care for the vulnerable.
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| 5. |
- Porzionato, Monica
(author)
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Affect and climate change in the communicative making of vulnerable urban futures. The case of Venice, Italy.
- 2023
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper explores the relation between strategic climate communication and the organization of common affects in the constitution of the affective atmospheres of vulnerable urban places. As such, it investigates how political and industrial actors’ strategic framings of the climate crisis imply not merely a preferential understanding of such crisis, but also its preferential affective experience. Through semiotic and ethnographic analysis in the fragile setting of Venice amid exponential sea level rise, the paper thus explores how strategic efforts of portraying sea level rise as momentary and harmless tangibly serve the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere of Venice as a safe and alluring touristic destination. In order to claim so, the paper proposes an understanding of strategic climate communication as comprised of three intertwined attributes: performativity, materiality and affectivity. As a performative, materialist and affective practice, in fact, strategic climate communication is here understood less as the intentional message of actors for specific purposes, and more as the continuous orchestration of communicative practices in the constitution of politically charged affective relatings to urban space.
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| 6. |
- Porzionato, Monica
(author)
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Assemblages in the Venetian Lagoon : Humans, Water and Multiple Historical Flows
- 2021
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In: Shima. - : Shima Publishing. - 1834-6057. ; 15:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Since the dawn of its existence, and at times thanks to ambitious interventions, Venice and its lagoon have needed to be constantly protected from the various ways in which water has reclaimed its existence. This article asserts that the ways in which Venice approached the watery world imply a tendency to relate to the natural environment as if it was something humans ought to separate themselves from, rather than something towards which they could harmoniously relate. As a result of this mindset, the natural changes which made humans interventions necessary are most often phrased as events abruptly sprouted into being, and less as obvious consequences of pre-existing ecological alterations of the islands’ ecosystem throughout the centuries. In order to read these events differently, this article adopts assemblage theory as delineated in the work of Manuel DeLanda (2019 [2006], 2016), according to which history comprises a multiplicity of flows, each belonging to a specific social reality. As such, this article auspicates a way to read ecological alterations of the Venetian lagoon beyond the mere actions of humans and to see, instead, socio-natural changes as the result of intricate relations between heterogenous agents and forces.
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| 7. |
- Porzionato, Monica
(author)
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Spacing Communication: Affect and the Senses in Urban Tourism Development
- 2022
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This research aims at assessing the role of the affective and sensory dimension of space in the communicative constitution of a touristic strategy. Lately scholarly attention has been drawn to the constitutive relation between strategic communication and space (Cassinger & Thelander 2022). Following especially the work of Lefebvre on the production of space (1991), these studies investigate how space and meaning are said to have an effect on each other's existence, to constitute each other in their relationality. Expanding this scope, the present work looks at how the daily experience of space encompasses also elements like feelings, rhythms, affects and moods which cannot be said to fully pertain to the realm of representation (Lefebvre 2004; Thrift 2009; Stewart 2011). Working spatial thinking through communication theory, then, this study proposes an exploration onto the ways in which meaning can be shown to emerge also at the level of the everyday bodily experiences of space through communication as a constitutive transmission of affect (Ashcraft 2020). In particular, it shows how to strategically "touristify" a city does not merely mean to impact its architectural space, its carrying capacity, or to intervene on its representation, but also on its felt and pre-cognitive experience. In other words, a strategy also always implies a disciplinatization of the daily mode of experiencing, feeling and sensing a space achieved through communication as affective transmission. Preliminary results from an ethnographic study carried out in Venice, Italy, are presented. Venice is nowadays facing a major threat in the form of exponential sea level rise, which results in a more frequent flooding of the public spaces and touristic premises. In response to the national and international discourse over climate change advanced by the media, which often depicts Venice as underwater and in danger of disappearing, the city’s management launched a communication initiative to stress the city’s ability to deal with this natural phenomenon and, especially, discourage unnecessary concerns around it. In its media channels the municipality depicts water in Venice as static, mainly absent, successfully and purposefully kept at bay. An analysis of the relation between media messages and spatial affects can help showing that such communicative depiction of water does not merely work at the level of representation, but also implies a disciplining of the sensorium, wherein people’s daily bodily encounter with misplaced water gets regulated and normalized accordingly.
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| 8. |
- Porzionato, Monica
(author)
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Strategic climate communication and the crafting of affective atmospheres in vulnerable touristic places
- 2022
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- • AimsThis research investigates how different ways of referring to anthropogenic climate change produce different sensory and affective perceptions of nature in an urban destination, and how such perceptions sustain or resist the branding strategy of such place. In doing so, it aims at showing that strategic climate communication works not only rhetorically at the level of representation, but also bodily and materially, implying a disciplining of the sensorium wherein people’s daily encounter with nature gets regulated and normalized accordingly. • Theoretical frameworkThe theoretical framework adopts the non-representational notion of affective atmosphere (Anderson 2009, 2014) as well an understanding of communication as constitutive transmission of affect (Ashcraft 2021) in order to explore both how affective experience of a destination is spatially and aesthetically staged through strategic climate communication, as well as which human/non-human agents contribute to its sustainment and resistance. • Main research approachIn order to research this, the project takes as a case study the touristic destination of Venice, Italy. Through sensory ethnographic observations (Pink 2009) and walking interviews (Degen & Rose 2012) it looks at how the conceptualization of sea-level rise infiltrates the everyday bodily experience of touristic premises and relates to the strategic making and experiencing of Venice.• Key arguments/findingsThe project finds that the concept of Acqua alta – a mundane, well-known and predictable Venetian phenomenon – used to describe exponential sea level rise in the area contributes to the strategic crafting of an affective atmosphere wherein encounters with water ought to be experienced as with a familiar, safe and tamed natural element. Consequently, unruly affective responses (i.e., fear, panic, displacement) at the encounter with water in public spaces are communicatively marginalized and negotiated
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| 9. |
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