Jessica Jacobs
I am a geographer whose work focuses on heritage and tourism in the Middle East. I am particularly interested in how heritage is visualized, remembered and enacted through the production of tourist space. My research methods and outputs use filmmaking, creative mapping and other community focused strategies that aim to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.
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Papers by Jessica Jacobs
Perhaps this grand heritage is one of the reasons for this disconnect: because this amazing cultural heritage is understood more as a link to an idealised ‘European’ origin past, than a contemporary Syria. Tourism to Syria has been shaped by the idea we should go and see it before they become like us.
Perhaps this grand heritage is one of the reasons for this disconnect: because this amazing cultural heritage is understood more as a link to an idealised ‘European’ origin past, than a contemporary Syria. Tourism to Syria has been shaped by the idea we should go and see it before they become like us.
*Zaher Al Saghir was forced to leave Syria in 2012 with his Italian wife Guilia. Their home in Damascus has been destroyed and they now live in Scandicci, Firzenze with their son Yacoub
In this short piece sound and image are de-linked causing the viewer to become aware of the connections (or lack of connections) between the two different senses. Moving images are still and act as signifiers – they are literally signs but the viewer is not given any guidance how to read them. This form of film often raises more questions than it will ever answer. Is there an argument in the sequence of images or is it random? What is the relationship between sound and image?"
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PAPER GEOGRAPHIES
Significant Geographies: Reflections from a Paper Age
The link above takes you to a video recording of Doreen Massey filmed in February 2016 as part of a test run to develop a project with Open Space (OU) and the Royal Geographical Society.
Our aim was to use the substantial archive of materials that Doreen has collected over her career as the basis for an argument and analysis of the significance of geographical thought at certain crucial moments (in which Doreen was involved) over the last (nearly) half-century.
Provisionally titled ‘Significant Geographies: Reflections from a Paper Age’ Doreen wanted to use her archives within the arc of an overall narrative, to weave together stories, videos, interviews, photographs with a theoretical analysis of the role of geography in a few selected ‘moments.’ As a book, a website and exhibition.
For Doreen the ‘message’ was not so much about her life but an argument and demonstration of the significance of geographical thought in some crucial real-world situations. Moments that took place in a time when activism was strongly linked to, and often the source of the best academic research.
This project examines how Levantine heritage is interpreted today by focusing on two major capital cities in the region. Damascus, often described as the city with ‘the longest history in the world’, represents a paradigmatic site of traditional
Arab-Levantine heritage; Amman, on the other hand, is popularly perceived as embodying a more recent tradition of Levantine modernity and is of crucial importance in the formation of a postcolonial national identity. These two cities thus symbolize two very different understandings of a ‘Levantine’ urban and national heritage.
Using a rich mix of methodological approaches, including ethnographic film, the project will investigate the varied
re-productions, their impacts on cultural tourism, and the ways in which such local re-imaginations of the past intersect with globalised understandings of local and regional political identities."
Yet while their iconic status as camel-riding natives are integral to the successful marketing of the Sinai's tourist industry – offering a way in to the romance and magic of the desert landscape - this image is now increasingly in the hands of the Egyptian and international tour operators.
Images used to fix and stereotype people can also be used to upset and rework these stereotypes. Made with local Bedouins, this exploratory film looks at the impact of tourism on local Bedouin communities and explores the tensions between demands on Bedouin to maintain a tradition of timelessness in a modern tourist industry.
Sinai Sun, a film by Jessica Jacobs. Made with Alexa Firat (Temple, Pennsylvania) and Hussein Abu Ahmed, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
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Promoting the positive representation of marginalised communities in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa through the production of participatory filmmaking and screening workshops and other activities."
Orientalist and colonialist imaginaries, and France and Britain in particular, from colonial times up to the present, have played an important role in the definition andOrientalist and colonialist imaginaries, and France and Britain in particular, from colonial times up to the present, have played an important role in the definition and protection of its ‘heritage’.
Heritage and questions surrounding its ownership are not only contested notions in themselves but today play a crucial part in the ongoing production and negotiation of collective identities.
Until now Western models and practices of heritage mapping and
management have been the most influential in conceptualising historical conservation and its relation to local identity in both Jordan and Syria. These practices have been closely intertwined with international tourism and discourses of Levantine ‘colonial nostalgia’. Recently however new concepts of heritage and history have started to emerge where localised ‘rediscovereries’ of urban heritage are coming into contact (and beginning to compete) with Western (and nostalgic colonial) imaginations of non-Western history and culture.
This paper introduces a new three year ESRC-funded geographical research project that aims to analyse how different imaginations of place and identity are contested and created within current projects of urban restoration in two very different
Levantine cities: Damascus – presented as the city with the longest history in the world – and Amman – a city often seen to have no (significant) history at all. This project will use film and other ethnographic research methods to examine the
relationship between ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and ‘Western’ geographical imaginations of the Levant sand its people from a postcolonial and geopolitical perspective.
Keywords: Heritage tourism, Middle East, Levant, colonial nostalgia, urban heritage, Bilad al-Sham, Amman, Damascus"
In recent years, however, partly helped by technological advances offering easier and more direct access to video and production software, geographers across the discipline are beginning to use audio-visual methods in greater numbers. Yet while it is claimed that the geographical analysis of film has ‘come of age’ (Aitken and Dixon 2006) the same cannot yet be said of geography’s theoretical engagement with their value as a research methodology.
This session will showcase the work of geographers who use film and video as a research method in any capacity, and who are also beginning to critically theorise their contribution to this exciting field.
However text is just one of the visual methods available to us as researchers in our production of knowledge. Film is another that is often overlooked in Geography. This panel session will explore the qualities that film as a research output can bring to our research, particularly the use of digital film as an online media resource and its usefulness in helping us to visualise abstract arguments.
This panel session will explore the qualities that film as a research output can bring to our research, particularly film as a teaching tool, the role of gender in film research or production, and film as a form of research that uses web-based media networks and travels in new and exciting directions beyond the academy.
With a focus on heritage, tourism and contemporary visual practice in the Middle East, this seminar takes as its starting point research recently carried out by geographer Jessica Jacobs (Royal Holloway, UoL) in Damascus and Amman for the ESRC-funded project ‘Re-branding the Levant’.
She uses a form of participatory film-making as the key method for her research, with the camera being used to reveal new insights into how we navigate place and the past.
The seminar will additionally bring together a number of artists/practitioners to show work and compare similar forms of experimental film and video practices.
It ultimately seeks to: address how artists and researchers use lens based practices as creative methodologies, identify where, if at all, similarities may be found between their approaches and to create the space for further discussion and understanding between the two fields.
The seminar features responses by Tate Britain curator Nora Razian. Other contributors include Damascus-born photographer, Hrair Sarkissian, Karen Mizra and Brad Butler (no.w.here) and Maysoon Pachachi (Oxymoron Films)
This event has been co-organised by Jessica Jacobs (Royal Holloway, UoL), Evelyn Wilson (LCACE), Nora Razian and Paul Goodwin (Tate Britain) as part of the LCACE Inside Out Festival.
Supported by Tate Britain, The Delfina Foundation and Research and Enterprise, Royal Holloway, University of London.
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