Choreographing the Airport

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Towards a Practical Cosmopolitanism

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 1-35

3. Persistent Place or Thirdspace?

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 37-60

4. Mass Transits, Micro Transitions

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 61-82

5. Performing Self at the Border

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 83-101

6. Bodies Under Duress (The Dystopic Future is Here)

   • Justine Shih Pearson

   Pages 103-127

7. Back Matter

   Pages 129-133

   PDF

• Culture and space
• Airports
• Global mobility
• Transition
• Travel and transport
• Theory of space
• Bodily experience
• New mobilities
• Contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity
• Choreography

“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)

“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)

• University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

  Justine Shih Pearson

Justine Shih Pearson is a designer and scholar of contemporary performance and dance, and Honorary Associate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.