Since its implementation in 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) has greatly informed preservation practice in the United States. As a primary text for the professionalization of the field of preservation, it not only acts as a law, but establishes an ideological framework that informs practices which impact public memory in the US by determining what places remain, how they are transformed (or not), and whose stories they tell. The objective of this study is to explore the communicative dimensions of the NHPA to better understand how its rhetoric informs practice, and thus, informs public memory in the US. This study employs a meta-method of crystallization which engages a range of analysis methods. First, I conducted a close rhetorical analysis of the NHPA’s text which provided insight into ideologies within the law, opportunities for practice, and limitations on practice through the law’s definitive conceptualization of public memory. Next, I completed a qualitative case study of a preservation organization. I participated in extended field observation, conducted interviews with organizational staff, and engaged in walking methods in the city. The analysis offered insight into local discourses (everyday talk) which built into Discourses (ideologies) and demonstrated how the NHPA informs d/Discourses of preservation, even when it is not required. Although local practice was informed by the NHPA, the analysis also revealed methods for challenging and resisting the NHPA. Finally, I engaged in arts-based methods to examine how National Register listings (products of the NHPA) provide aesthetic and narrative precedents for determining ‘significance’ and worth in preservation practice. Through a poetic exhibition entitled Mythed Places, I artistically analyzed the NRHP, arguing that by giving historic sites the quality of myths, the NHPA attempts to arrest multiple unfolding narratives of places in service of a national myth. This project demonstrates that the NHPA communicatively constructs US preservation practice through its ambiguity, implied morality, and formation of a mythic national community. Although the current structure requires preservationists, even those not legally bound to the NHPA, to work within its framework, this study showcases ways to disrupt the discursive boundaries and practice preservation more critically.

Tourism is not always a lighthearted affair. Visitors are often attracted to places associated with dark and complex pasts, where communities host a wide range of lived experiences, memories and associations. While tourism has potential to facilitate progress and create opportunities, it may also emphasize a place’s hardships or its controversial history. For tourism development to be ethical and sustainable, it is vital to understand its community impacts, including how it may influence residents’ perceptions and wellbeing.This research investigated residents’ senses of affect and emotion within touristic spaces of Mostar, a re-emerging destination city in Bosnia and Herzegovina that experienced some of the worst physical destruction and human casualties during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. An interdisciplinary, multiple-methods approach employed qualitative and quantitative methods, including an intercept survey, resident interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography.
In Part 1, construal level theory of psychological distance was applied in quantitative, survey-based research to understand how tourism may impact residents’ affective responses to local places. In Part 2, fourteen young adult residents were invited to experience their city as “tourists for a day,” visiting attractions alongside the researcher and reflecting upon their experiences via a three-stage interview process. The resulting article specifically explores the concept of affective atmospheres, drawing connections to interdependence theory. Part 3 employed a creative and introspective autoethnographic approach incorporating journaling, poetry and photography to examine the researcher’s own experiences and observations as a visiting researcher in a post-war city. This inquiry was inspired by works from cultural geography engaging non-representational theory and affect theory.
These three discrete studies under a shared thematic umbrella allowed for an in-depth exploration of affect, emotion, and lived experiences within touristic spaces of a post-war, recovering city. Overall, findings suggest that residents perceive tourism as a generally positive force, fostering senses of pride and creating opportunities for the city to move on from the persistent social and economic repercussions of war. However, the social and affective impacts of war are deeply engrained within the fabric of the city, and tourism has the capacity to emphasize differences and discomforts amongst residents and visitors alike.

Since the late 1990s thousands of new Border Patrol agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and additional immigration checkpoints have been added to the Mexico-U.S. border region. This unprecedented increase in boundary enforcement has strained existing relationships and created new separations between people and places in the borderlands. Southwestern Arizona has been impacted in especially dramatic ways, as the “hardening” of the international boundary has transformed conservation and indigenous spaces into theaters of drug interdiction and immigration control. This dissertation explores this transformation in southwestern Arizona, a region that was known by Spanish Colonial administrators as the Papaguería. With the community of Ajo at the center of the narrative, this dissertation explores the ways that industry and conservation have long shaped the social relations and the landscape of the region. The destruction of old borders, the creation of new borders, and the redefinition of space has been an ongoing process that continues to define some groups of people as insiders and other groups as outsiders. In the current era of border security echoes from earlier colonial encounters reverberate into the present, shaping landscapes and the lives of local residents in the contemporary Papaguería in significant ways.