{"id":8,"ordinal":0,"modified":"2026-09-18 18:24:23","content_modified":"2026-09-18 18:24:23","featured":0,"title":"Remembering Student Practices","creator":null,"description":"<p>Regardless of how a place is set up, the everyday inhabitants of that place generate their own uses. The now classic theorization of this dynamic comes from Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Every Life (1984), de Certeau characterizes this a dynamic between \"strategy\" and \"tactics.\" Strategy is a place-making force of those in power. For de Certeau, strategy establishes official places that can be maintained and defended by those who have institutional authority over them. Tactics, however, are the everyday practices of those who inhabit places set up by those in power. These tactics can align with power, but often they resist, contest, or re-signify places of power as places of tactics, where those who do not have the power to control the places they inhabit make space for their own inhabitations, however temporarily.  Sometimes, as is the case with student practices around the Cullen Tower, Monstrance, and Story Tree, the institution appropriates these resistive practices into its own place-making processes, which creates a tension around who owns the practice.\r\nThe entries in this theme are about how Southwestern students, past and present, have resisted, contested, or re-signified the places established by the adults in charge of them to create their own authentic practices, and how this process is always entangled in larger cultural dynamics around power. and place.</p>","postscript_text":"","tour_img":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/d010636d956ba8d5c9644db31eb52de4.jpg","items":[{"id":82,"title":"Stepping on the Seal","latitude":30.6355252793253356458080816082656383514404296875,"longitude":-97.66517930764484844985418021678924560546875,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/d010636d956ba8d5c9644db31eb52de4.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/d010636d956ba8d5c9644db31eb52de4.jpg","subtitle":"Southwestern's storied Seal contains a few more stories than most people realize.","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}},{"id":83,"title":"The Cullen Tower as Memory Place","latitude":30.633785150042800893288585939444601535797119140625,"longitude":-97.6677219844121964342775754630565643310546875,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/1a890533a99229c87d9c23b95b187ba6.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/1a890533a99229c87d9c23b95b187ba6.jpg","subtitle":"When a resistive place-making practice by students becomes institutionally condoned, whose memory place is it?","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}},{"id":49,"title":"\"Monstrance for a Grey Horse\"","latitude":30.63465745433935438768457970581948757171630859375,"longitude":-97.6657693495925514071132056415081024169921875,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/90910eeea586edb6aec175075db8f644.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/90910eeea586edb6aec175075db8f644.jpg","subtitle":"In just a few years after it appeared on campus, this enigmatic sculpture has become a good-luck charm and object of worship for many Southwestern students.","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}},{"id":21,"title":"Story Tree","latitude":30.6351138693731144257981213741004467010498046875,"longitude":-97.66487339576002568719559349119663238525390625,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/8d91d28b8037834524f14a79e0f7aa62.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/8d91d28b8037834524f14a79e0f7aa62.jpg","subtitle":"Whose place is it?","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}},{"id":140,"title":"The Women's Studies Alcove as Memory Place","latitude":30.634579776325860933638978167437016963958740234375,"longitude":-97.665907142634523552260361611843109130859375,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/25814bb267f1ee271321c7a403cd00d2.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/25814bb267f1ee271321c7a403cd00d2.jpg","subtitle":"Inside this space in the Library for remembering the history of Feminism at Southwestern and much more.","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}},{"id":52,"title":"Brown Challenge Fountain","latitude":30.634717458777384280210753786377608776092529296875,"longitude":-97.66519000332328914737445302307605743408203125,"thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/389bb992e0931d351c5e900acef940e3.jpg","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/389bb992e0931d351c5e900acef940e3.jpg","subtitle":"A shrine to fundraising at Southwestern, claimed by students for a different purpose.","address":null,"custom":{"subtitle":null,"text":null}}]}