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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Wiseman, Michael. "Rising on the Levee: Stories After The Flood and The Construction Of Place," American Studies Program, University of Iowa, July 2001.
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of place, flood, and stories after the upper Mississippi River flood of 1993. In the small town of Keithsburg, Illinois, flood created a heightened sense of place. Place became a contentious, polyvocal experience formed in the cultural spaces provided by disruption. The stories told after the flood are less concerned with a continuous narrative of occupancy, associations with mythology, or the continuity in the relationships between lands and people. Place is storied primarily through the experiences of loss, encounters with others, and the brush with danger. The stories that shape place draw attention to the contingent, the indeterminate, and the ways places are remembered after flood. These collected stories from the small, river town of Keithsburg, Illinois demonstrate that place is an active process in the encounter with flood. The purpose of the fieldwork conducted for this study was to listen closely to people who had experienced flood and to collect and categorize stories, episodes, and explanations that spoke to people’s placed understandings of flood. The stories demonstrate that place is a movement from self to others. Selected life stories speak to the varied relationships between people, town, and river. It is through the voice of the participants as much as the stories that knowledge about the enormous challenges in flood and in placemaking are conveyed. The key role of place in this dissertation does not ignore the consequences of flood. Flood, like place, also contains multiple meanings that involve negative and positive associations. Flood, like place, is an eminently human experience whose meanings are diverse, conveyed through stories, and situated in particular cultural worlds. This dissertation also represents flood as an interpretive act where the people who have experienced it actively search for its changing meanings through time. Place and flood are the central concepts that engage this study.
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