Miriam in the Midwest: What’s next?

In case any readers are wondering, no I’m not in the Midwest at the moment (though, I will be back in a few weeks for a quick visit) but I am still doing things.

Also, my focus has shifted to investigating how the social structures of transformational festivals may be applied to post-industrial city recovery/resilience efforts to maximize their success. Yep, I'm saying how do we make Black Rock City Everywhere, USA.

I’m networking.

I've attended and interviewed organizers and enthusiasts of transformational festivals here in Australia. Check out Rainbow Serpent, Maitreya and ConFest.

I’ve recently joined up with the Culture and Community Research Network, a “partnership between the Centre for  Cultural Partnerships (CCP) at the University of Melbourne and the Cultural  Development Network (CDN), that  brings together researchers who are interested in cultural development, social change, creative methodologies, artistic intervention, practice based research and/ or community research themes to create a friendly and collegial interdisciplinary environment to present new research, share ideas and build networks.” YAY!

Check out the next few months’ schedule of speakers on topics such as participatory and creative research,  sustainable urban citizenship, interactive technologies for commemorating tragedy and sensory production of urban space...

I’m going to conferences.

Unfortunately I’m going to miss March and April’s CDN presentations. As previously mentioned, I’ll be back in the US Mar 22 – April 17 for some visiting and to attend the PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston. This event, jointly hosted by the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association, is 4 days with hundreds of presentations with strong subject areas of visual culture, public spaces, vampires, dance, fat studies and a ton more. I’m going to meet with other academics and researchers who are looking at currently evolving American culture and the emerging and growing subculture that is related to Burning Man and other transformational festivals

I’ve also submitted abstracts to meetings on Healthy Cities and Public Participation here in Australia and in Canada.

I’m reading.

In preparation for these discussions I’ve been reading some great books on Burning Man culture.

This is Burning Man by Brian Doherty was the first and is widely referred to as the best introduction to the event/phenomenon/community. I read it in preparation for my playa-bound bus trip and honestly, it kinda scared me.

Next, Katherine Chen’s Enabling Creative Chaos: the organization behind the Burning Man event is a great academic discussion of the perils and harbingers of under- and over-organizing and how the Borg has harnessed the positive attributes of both to manage a monstrously growing self-defining organism into the lottery-ticketed madness it is today. Chen’s site has links to more talks and media discussing burner culture that she has produced.

I’m now reading The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert Is Shaping the New American Counterculture by Stephen T. Jones (playa name: Scribe). This book is the closest to what I want to do with my project; it introduces and discussed Burner culture and then compares it to a breadth of subculture groups that would not necessarily share a label with Burning Man event-goers but may still be called ‘us’.

Chicken John’s The Book of the IS is next on the pile…

 

And of course I have to address the other side of my research: the Midwest. Thankfully, the Chicago Council has collated a great list for me.

Find ever more academic discussion and info on Burning Man via the Burning Nerds discussion group, the Academics at Burning Man site and the newly launched Burning Man Academics WIKI.

And check out Jeet Kei Leung's TEDxVancouver presentation on transformational festivals.  

So I’m networking, reading books, downloading articles and videos and looking for a couch-surf host in Boston for this conference.

Oh, this is all while dressing up as Carmen Miranda for a huge multicultural festival and discussing researcsupport opportunities with my local Mayor.

Basically I'm trying to get support (financial, organisational, mentoring, etc) to continue and refine this project to really make a difference to the lives of Midwestern and post-industrial cities. Please get in touch if you have any suggestions for networks, individuals, programs, etc that may be useful.

P.S. Here’s the abstract I’ve been working with. Thoughts?

American cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh were built on the economic strength of industrial manufacturing and petro-chemical processing and have been in steep decline since the 1980s. Arguably, Geelong and Newcastle may be Australia's imminent 'rusty' cities.

While post-industrial urban centres are in decline, transformational festivals, their populations and their temporary residents' fervor are rising sharply. Temporary 'cities' such as Burning Man (Black Rock City, Nevada, USA), Parallelo Universo (Brazil), Shambala (Canada), BOOM!(Portugal), Rainbow Serpent and ConFest (Aus) are all based on unique social and governance structures that include high levels of self-expression, participation or civic responsibility, immediacy and personal responsibility and people are flocking to be a part of these societies. Though these are temporary annual gatherings, the culture and participants’ sense of belonging to these cultures is sustained year-round, enacting subtle social changes to the pilgrims’ year-round homes. It is common for participants to invest large amounts of money and time towards their contributions to these cities and proudly hold their involvement as part of their identity (ie. ‘burners’).

How can we embed the evidently increasingly attractive social principles of the temporary places of transformational festivals in the recovery and resiliency efforts of more permanent societies post-industrial cities? How can various levels of government not just retain and attract populations to seemingly declining urban cores, but mine the talents, creativity and enthusiasm of citizens to evolve these cities into highly-participatory and thriving places? Australia has a unique opportunity to learn from the American cities that are unwittingly doing just this according to my experiential and academic research.

Miriam Fathalla is an American and Canadian citizen and permanent resident of Australia who quit her job as an environmental planner in April 2011 to pursue her curiosity for the people and places of the American Midwest in the wake of the global financial crisis for 6 months. Miriam spent that Northern summer based in Chicago, travelling to Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Burning Man, researching and writing about emerging social and economic structures at MiriamintheMidwest.com. This led to a keynote presentation at the “Urbanized” Summit in Indianapolis her current pursuit of applying the social structures of transformational festivals to post-industrial city recovery efforts. Miriam has an academic background in urban planning, community development, sociology and environmental issues and is currently pursuing a Masters of Planning and Community Development at LaTrobe University.