ABSTRACT
Lara Pawson’s This is The Place To Be is like no other journalist’s memoir. Pawson’s background is conventional enough: she worked for the BBC World Service from 1998 to 2007, reporting from Mali, the Ivory Coast, and Sao Tome and Príncipe. This chapter focuses on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to propose the notion of the cultural space which incorporates the various cultural forms inspired by the text. It explores some of the interviews and reviews linked to its publication, considering the paratextual elements essential to the cultural space occupied by the text. The French theorist Pierre Bourdieu is celebrated for introducing the notion of cultural capital. Accordingly, cultural capital operates as a social-relation within an economy of practices, comprising all of the material and symbolic goods which are considered rare and worth acquiring. The centrality of Pawson’s meditations on violence is also captured.
