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I am a Professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, USA. I teach courses in media studies, visual/material communication, critical/cultural studies, memory studies, and automobility, and I am the Director of the Placing Memory Project. My work as an analyst, photographer, and theorist focuses on the performative dimensions of everyday communicative behavior, particularly the ways that people negotiate shared public spaces and on the ways that objects, pictures, and spaces communicate beyond representation. I have published a number of scholarly and popular articles on roadside shrines, U. S. National Park snapshot photography practices, and the built environment of college campuses. My book on roadside shrines is titled Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). I have a BA in American Studies from Southwestern University (1989), and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (1997). Check out my current CV. Follow me on Academia and ResearchGate.
Recent Research Publications
Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside car crash shrines--or what I call road trauma shrines--are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space--a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines.
Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork on the roads of the American Southwest, this book works through photography and visual/material/spatial analysis to show how, one at a time, road trauma shrines perform a cultural trauma to drivers driving by them, forming a fragile but palpable and melancholy collective of drivers who sense road trauma together even if they do not know that they know road trauma themselves.
Online Publications
"Between the Windshield and the Rearview"
Included in The End of Austin:
An Exploration of Urban Identity
in the Middle of Texas. [first posted 2013]Making Space on the Side of the Road
A study of roadside memorials
to victims of car crashes in
Texas and New Mexico. [first posted 2004]A study of snapshot photography,
landscape, and tourism in the
contemporary American West. [first posted 1997]
Courses
Exhibitions of Student Work
An interactive story map of remembering and forgetting at Southwestern, centered on student research, writing, and photography.
Where the Mission Meets the Margin
An Organizational Study of
Houston Methodist Hospital.
Produced by students in Bob Bednar's
Organizational Communication class,
Summer 2024.
Fear and Loathing on the San Gabriel
A selection of nonfiction narratives
produced by students in
Bob Bednar's Journalism classes
since Fall 1999.
A virtual archive of websites
produced by students in Bob Bednar's
Advanced Mass Communication and
Visual Communication classes
from 1999-2015.An Organizational Study of
Southwestern University.
Produced by students in Bob Bednar's
Organizational Communication class,
Fall 1999.
Design, Photography, and Text © 2024 by Bob Bednar
Department of Communication Studies
Southwestern University
Georgetown, Texas 78626 USA
voice/text: (512) 863-1440
email: bednarb@southwestern.edu
