The unifying themes of my research are contemporary cultural landscapes, cultural studies, and power. I attempt to understand and critique how various cultural conflicts are socially produced and reproduced in space. I examine the everyday lived landscapes of contemporary Western society, specifically the communal meeting spaces of our cities, such as shopping malls, indoor or underground cities, public libraries, and tourist sites. I also examine the immaterial places and identities represented in the various media to which we are exposed on a regular bases: the symbolic landscapes of print advertisements and film. These enquiries are informed by contemporary social theory, and thus draw upon, and hopefully contribute to, such issues and concepts as class, consumption, gender, identity, postmodernism and semiotics. I have recently completed a paper employing a semiotic analysis of the representation of masculinity and place in the symbolic landscape of the printed promotional advertisements of ‘Big Brothers’, a fratriarchal, philanthropic, service club (Recent Paper). I am currently in the midst of conducting a three-year collaborative study of the place of Canada’s central public libraries in an age of increasing telecommunications, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).(Current Paper)