Community Sense of Place
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| Derek H. Alderman Associate Professor, Department of Geography President, Southeastern Division of the AAG (SEDAAG) Brewster 227-A East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858 Voice: 252-328-4013 FAX: 252-328-6054 aldermand@ecu.edu |
Community Outreach Interests
My interests lie in the area of assisting communities with the development and planning of cultural tourism resources, specifically those related to heritage or historical issues. I have previous experience analyzing and/or evaluating the impact of community festivals, film-induced tourism, sports and food-based tourism, and place promotional strategies. I am especially interested in working with African American communities in the American South as they seek greater visibility within the wider heritage tourism landscape and the development of civil rights-related memorials and tourist destinations.
Research Interests
As a cultural geographer, my main research interests focus on examining the relationship between the politics of place-making and tourism promotion and development and how tourist places and spaces serve as arenas for the negotiation of identity, social power, memory within communities. Much of my interest lies in analyzing the extent and nature in which the African American historical experience is incorporated into the southern landscape, particularly the commemoration of the civil rights movement and the American slave experience. I have a general interest in southern popular culture. For example, I have written about the geography of NASCAR, the Internet as electronic folklore, Graceland as a pilgrimage landscape, the politics of Wal-Mart, and the cultural history of kudzu.
Notable Publications
Dwyer, Owen J. and Derek H. Alderman (In Press) Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Book published by Center for American Places and University of Georgia Press.
Alderman, Derek H. and Owen J. Dwyer. 2004. “Putting Memory in its Place: The Politics of Commemoration in the Post-Civil Rights Movement South.” In WorldMinds: Geographical Perspectives on 100 Problems, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers
Jones, Kimberly L. and Derek H. Alderman. 2003. “Antiques Tourism and the Selling of Heritage in Eastern North Carolina.” North Carolina Geographer 11: 74-87.
Alderman, Derek H. 2002. “Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscapes.” Tourism Recreation Research 27(2): 27-34.
Courses
GEOG 4315/6315: Geographic Images/Advanced Geographic Images
GEOG 4335/6335: Geography of Tourism/Tourism Development
GEOG 7300: Seminar in Geography of Heritage
