About the Project
The city of Nashville is a landscape layered with stories. At every turn, there are messages to be consumed, about music, progress, industry, and civic pride. This project invited students to question those messages through the lens of anti-consumerism, culture jamming, and ad-busting. Rather than promoting a seamless narrative of growth and success, this project engaged fellows in acts of “de-influencing,” asking what remains unspoken or unseen behind Nashville’s most recognizable landmarks. Interstate 40 (the Music Highway), the Adventure Science Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the State Capitol Building, and Marathon Village (Marathon Motor and Music Works) will serve as options for our sites of inquiry, each offering an opportunity to reconsider how the city’s physical and symbolic landscape mediates identity, power, and belonging. Mentors led fellows in applying methods from visual culture, public history, and critical geography to explore the social and economic networks that produced these sites. Fellows strengthened their proficiencies in research, communication, and collaboration through the use of Vanderbilt’s library resources. Fieldwork at each site was paired with archival research, developing the ability to synthesize observation with historical interpretation.
Mentors
Stephanie Morgan; Peter Chesney
Fellows
Millan Gupta; Alicia Huang
Project
Fellows created storymaps demonstrating how archival discovery and scholarly analysis can uncover new ways of seeing both Nashville’s past and its present narrative.
12 South: The Boomerang Effect of Urban Return Under Branding & Palatability (Alicia Huang)
Goldmine in the Sky: Tracking the Development of SoBro & the Emergence of Nashville's Money Printing Machine (Millan Gupta)