Dr. Cristina Benedetti Addresses Politics and Meaning-Making in “Gathering on the National Mall”

Dr. Cristina Benedetti will deliver the lecture, “Gathering on the National Mall: Infrastructures, Logistics, and Political Meaning-Making” on May 27, 2021 at 2:00 PM EDT.

The National Mall in Washington, DC is a site of human meaning-making animated by various kinds of use: ceremony, celebration, memorialization, tourism, leisure, work, protest, and recently, insurrection. A unique political space, it has become a stage upon which various actors have called on their government and their fellow citizens to act. Building on the work of folklorists and other scholars who have turned their attention to the Mall, Dr. Benedetti suggest that employing the conceptual frames of infrastructures and logistics help surface new understandings about this landscape, and about those who have used it to make political and social claims.f

The lecture is sponsored by the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory at Indiana University. To register for the event, visit the IU Folklore and Ethnomusicology calendar or click this link.