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- Convenors:
-
Annika Lems
(Australian National University)
Melinda Hinkson (Institute of Postcolonial Studies)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the placemaking practices that are pursued in the face of intensifying processes of displacement, financialization and surveillance. It sheds light on the strategies and resources people deploy as they attempt to make sense of, endure, and overcome the challenges of the present.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores place-making practices in a world marked by acceleration and disruption. The dynamics of the present can press down upon people in ways that feel overwhelming, as if there is no escape. Climate change and the pandemic intensify awareness of the destructive dimensions of global interconnectedness and relatedly, a sense of powerlessness to effect change. Yet in the face of such pressures people do find simple and ingenious ways to secure spaces of respite, create meaningful dis-junctures, as well as coalitions, and in other ways assert some semblance of control over their everyday lives.
We welcome papers that explore the responses, strategies, techniques and resources people deploy as they attempt to make sense of, endure, and overcome the challenges of the present. In particular we ask, what kinds of place-making practices are pursued in the face of intensifying processes of displacement, financialization, and/or surveillance? What are the fine-grained ways in which exclusion and oppression are practiced and experienced? What ethnographic and analytic light can anthropologists shed on the landing places people attempt to carve out for themselves amidst experiences of uncertainty, containment, stress? We are interested in case studies that take up transforming people-place relationships and engage histories of dislocation and human and environmental damage. Holding in view interrelationships across intimate and planetary scales, our aim is to explore the range of place-making practices that emerge from contemporary struggles as well as the conditions of creative destruction in which they are called out and reproduced.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper has a two-fold objective of documenting and evaluating the lived experiences of Afghan transnationals residing in Delhi and Kolkata, and using that to corral a phenomenological perspective on displacement in which displacement is understood as a mode of being-in-place.
Paper long abstract:
A formative experience of the 21st century, displacement, which generally describes a forced movement away from one’s home/land, is a fundamental reality of our times. However, despite being a waking reality for millions across the world, the existing literature has largely been interested in knowing ‘what goes on while one is displaced’ or ‘what it means to be displaced’. To know what goes on or what it means to be displaced, however, is not the same as understanding what it is like to be displaced and how this displacement is experienced. Interested in addressing such phenomenological inquiries, my paper will reflect on the socio-spatial negotiations of the Afghan transnationals as they dwell in displacement in the Indian cities of New Delhi and Kolkata.
In so doing, the intent of my paper is to show that displacement, which is otherwise reduced to being the antithesis of placement and a passive event, is an active condition inhering constant, continuous negotiations. In fact, my paper parts ways with the prevalent notion of displacement, which sees it either as a loss of place or approaches it as a vanguard of mobility, to argue that it must (also) be seen as a mode of being-in-place that has bearing one's idenitity and their experiences in/of the everyday.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores everyday place- and home- making practices among Eritrean migrants from humanitarian backgrounds who live in Melbourne. It locates practices amid broader histories and socialities, and contributes to theorising on translocality and relational placemaking.
Paper long abstract:
Fleeing one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, Eritreans have traversed far and wide in search of a better life. In Australia, a distant corner of a growing Eritrean diaspora, they have tried to make places and homes for themselves while navigating new and often challenging environments. In this paper, I explore everyday place- and home- making practices among Eritrean migrants from humanitarian backgrounds who live in Melbourne. Drawing on fieldwork in Melbourne’s western suburbs, I describe my interlocutors' encounters and connections in public and semi-public places and spaces (e.g., streets, a car parking space, small shops and cafes), and the impact of practices such as greeting, recognising others, and various forms of support, on making places more inhabitable and cultivating senses of localness. The paper locates these practices amid broader histories and socialities that go beyond Australia, and contributes to theorising on translocality and relational dimensions of placemaking. Finally, I consider the significant role of my interlocutors in connecting between recent migrants and their novel environments, and in reproducing and extending the localities they inhabit.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss how caregivers render the refugee shelter a safe place that should protect its young residents from external pressure and provide them with a space for being young. I carve out tensions between their vision of a safe place and young residents’ engagement in place-making.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shelter for underaged refugees in East-Germany, this paper engages with the refugee shelter as a place in the making. Focusing on caregivers’ attempts to create a protected space for refugees, I engage with the ways in which adolescence and behavior caregivers associate with puberty disrupt this undertaking. The shelter as a safe place should protect its young residents from external pressure and provide them with a space for being young. Through a careful analysis of everyday care practices, I trace how caregivers strive for creating a comfortable and secure atmosphere, in which residents enjoy time being young and catch up on things caregivers assume they have missed. I argue that this dedicated efforts for a safe place can indeed become a resource for the residents, who, to a certain extent, are given small spaces of experimentation to invest in their own forms of place-making. However, being young entails making gut decisions, transgressing rules and order, and thus also unconventional forms of doing place. Therefore, adolescence brings about new conflicts between adolescent residents and adult caregivers. Looking at place-making through the lens of puberty enables new insights into contested place-making in situations of displacement, normative expectations that are being articulated through place, and how young people invent their own forms of transgressing place.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I analyse the everyday strategies urban informal settlers in Fiji undertake to secure their livelihoods as processes of culture- and place-making.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I trace the human economy of informal urban settlements in Fiji. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the peri-urban edge-lands outside Fiji's largest commercial centres my discussion focuses on the everyday strategies squatters employ in order to secure their livelihoods at the fringes of the expanding market economy. Rather than analysing these mundane strategies of survival in simple economistic terms, I am interested in them as processes of culture- and place-making, and pay particular attention to human-environmental relations and new forms of socialities that emerge in the heterogeneous, rapidly changing, and unstable context of squatter settlements.