ABSTRACT

Place-making and meaning-making often occur simultaneously; they are highly interrelated. The place-making designs are intended to immerse an individual in an environment saturated with material imbued with symbolism that subordinates the viewer; the imagery that fills out the physical space is sometimes intended to cause and foment a sense of self-doubt in potential agency of the individual. In order to better understand the gap between geography-as-cultural-proxy and atomized cultural experiences, this chapter examines state management of physical and metaphorical spaces and dialogs with collective-action framing theory. The direct control of language—perhaps more accurate, control of representational images of language—is one of the more ubiquitous and powerful components of place-making around the US political space. The US political body employs three central dimensions of supposed linguistic superiority in its attempts to project a natural status of English in the spaces it claims: graphization, standardization, and criminalization.