The three key things that seem to effect the way that students map and interact with campus are on or off campus residence, transportation method, and major; it should be noted that I believe gender and race have a fairly significant impact on how interviewee’s gave meaning to and experienced campus, and while past conversations with students of various gender identities and with students of color indicate that this is true, I do not have any data to support this hypothesis due to my sample group being composed entirely of white women. These traits have a clear impact on what buildings the students use, how they move around campus, and how they view the surrounding area. These traits are not all static and have, of course, changed over the
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Contrasting the student’s way of mapping campus and the initiations way of mapping campus revealed that the experience of the students I spoke with rarely lined up with the image promoted by Tulane admissions.
In class we discussed Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space and I originally interpreted the concepts of social practice and representational space was extremely static. Initially I thought of institutions/people in power creating both the representations of space and the representational space as the space was created and civilians only really having an influence in the social practice however, while interviewing people, I realized that students have their own …show more content…
While in my interviews we mostly discussed the way the students constructed their space each conversation at some point ended up touching on Tulane’s institutional history as a medical school, as deeply linked to the confederacy during the civil war, and as a school that did not desegregate until the 1960’s. The students I spoke with all felt that the historical and sociopolitical context that Tulane formed and developed within was extremely important to the way the perceived the instruction, I am not sure this opinion is shared by the entire student body, my sample pool is biased this direction because I performed my interviews right after a Students Organizing Against Racism meeting during which my friends and I had discussed this specific topic. Tulane does not cover this information up but it is certainly not mentioned often in any of the small blurbs describing the history and purpose of buildings that are linked in the campus
Contrasting the student’s way of mapping campus and the initiations way of mapping campus revealed that the experience of the students I spoke with rarely lined up with the image promoted by Tulane admissions.
In class we discussed Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space and I originally interpreted the concepts of social practice and representational space was extremely static. Initially I thought of institutions/people in power creating both the representations of space and the representational space as the space was created and civilians only really having an influence in the social practice however, while interviewing people, I realized that students have their own …show more content…
While in my interviews we mostly discussed the way the students constructed their space each conversation at some point ended up touching on Tulane’s institutional history as a medical school, as deeply linked to the confederacy during the civil war, and as a school that did not desegregate until the 1960’s. The students I spoke with all felt that the historical and sociopolitical context that Tulane formed and developed within was extremely important to the way the perceived the instruction, I am not sure this opinion is shared by the entire student body, my sample pool is biased this direction because I performed my interviews right after a Students Organizing Against Racism meeting during which my friends and I had discussed this specific topic. Tulane does not cover this information up but it is certainly not mentioned often in any of the small blurbs describing the history and purpose of buildings that are linked in the campus