Marina Peterson's work considers civic performance as a space for the investigation of arts, cities and citizenship in the context of globalization. Drawing primarily on ethnographic material on downtown Los Angeles, her research has engaged with topics that include public concerts, gentrification and the arts, and a homeless theater project to consider how urban publics are constituted by the arts, how cities are sites for citizenship organized through relative inclusions and exclusions, and how performance can facilitate civic participation.

Her Performance Studies courses include Sound, Publics, Space and Time, The Body, Performance and the City, and Ethnographic Research Methods.

Professor Peterson is also active as a cellist, performing primarily experimental contemporary and improvised music. She has received funding from Meet the Composer, the Ohio Arts Council and Arts for Ohio.

Publications include:
Sounding the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press., forthcoming.

Garden, City, World: Los Angeles’ Late Twentieth Century Multicultural Arts Festivals. In The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces. Robert Gehl and Victoria Watts, eds. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming.

Translocal Civilities: Chinese Modern Dance at Downtown Los Angeles Public Concerts. In Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects. Saskia Sassen, ed. Pp. 41-58. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Patrolling the Plaza: Privatized Public Space and the Neoliberal State In Downtown Los Angeles. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development. 35(4):355-386, 2006.

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~petersom/