Blacksburg Walks – An Interdisciplinary Special Study Class

In the spring semester 2011, SPIA doctoral student Anja H. Bieri taught a special study class in the School of Public and International Affairs in Virginia Tech's College of Architecture and Urban Studies that set out to combine documentary art and urban geography. Anja has a background in social sciences and the performing arts and joins these disciplines into an aesthetic cultural geography. Inspired by that year's academic common book by Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, this class studied the cultural geographies of food and environment in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The class discovered the multiple layers of history, culture and politics in the Appalachian landscape and in the social practices of university and community members. Offering, in a first step, a theoretical framework allowing for a critical study of food production and consumption and sustainability discourses, the class, in a second step, learnt basic documentary research skills like interviewing, story telling and building a narrative, and composing sound. Walking and sensory perception were highlighted in this class' sensory approach to aesthetic education, since the project's outcome was to produce audio-walks through Blacksburg exploring the social relations of the local food and environment.

Thus, the third pedagogical moment was to learn how to join the theoretical framework and the research material into an aesthetic creation in the form of a sound composition for a guided audio walk. Next to dramaturgy, considerable software skills had to be managed by the students. Four different audio-walks were produced: one with a general focus on sustainability in Blacksburg, one on wild edibles on the Virginia Tech campus, one on the relations between the phenomenon of instant gratification and 24/7 consumption, and one on the dynamics between personal and collective processes of defining choices in regards to the consumption and production of goods.

While the project wishes to further the exchanges between the university and the Blacksburg community, a big part of its target audience is Virginia Tech's freshmen, offering them a guided exploration of the culture, geography and history of their new community. The walks are accessible online for anyone to download. Moreover, the website contains a community cookbook and a guestbook, hoping to receive further inputs on facts and stories to complement the proposed walks and to keep the project ongoing.