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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Buchczyk
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Steph Grohmann (University of Edinburgh)
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- Stream:
- The Future of 'Traditional' Art Practices and Knowledge
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 3.02
- Sessions:
- Friday 6 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions on urban information flows and knowledge infrastructures that critically engage with different knowledge practices in the context of contemporary 'urban challenges'.
Long Abstract:
In a rapidly urbanising world, two out of three people will be living in cities by 2050. Urban environments are therefore focal points of key social, political and ecological challenges. But while the UN's Sustainable Development Goals aspire to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable", cities are also becoming the loci of contestations and struggles over sustainability, spatial inequality, heritage and history and urban democracy. At the heart of these challenges are the diverse, overlapping and often conflicting knowledges that form the information architecture of the city - the invisible flows and reservoirs of 'data' (including, but not limited to, electronic data) that interlace the built environment with intersecting 'webs of meaning'.
We invite papers that critically engage with urban information flows and knowledge practices in the broadest sense. This could include: competing knowledge economies in the city, practices of information sharing and mapping, contested and marginalized urban knowledge practices, questions of explicit vs. implicit knowledges in/of the city, information and/as social power, urban knowledge materialities , technological and technologized knowledge, and disruptions to information flows and their consequences. We also welcome contributions that critically interrogate the categories of 'knowledge' and 'information' in an urban context: What counts as knowledge/information and knowledge acquisition, and who determines that? How does information facilitate or impede democracy, creativity, co-production, governance and innovation, and what 'Info-wars' emerge from these processes? What is the role of anthropology/ethnography in building and mapping urban information infrastructures?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 6 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will discuss how specialised knowledge relating to housing policy and law is acquired and used, or at times rejected, by a group of London homeowners who are resisting the dispossession of their properties, and the implications of this for local democratic processes.
Paper long abstract:
Urban regeneration schemes are widespread in the contemporary city. As sites that engender processes of privatisation, dispossession and displacement, they are also greatly contested and often become the centre of bitter disputes. In this paper I will present material collected during fieldwork in one of London's largest public housing estates - a site that has been undergoing redevelopment for 15 years and that is currently earmarked for demolition. I will focus on the activities of a group of homeowners who are actively resisting the dispossession of their properties, and in particular I will hone in on the ways in which access to information about the scheme, knowledge about housing policy and law, and the ability to deploy such pieces of information are negotiated by residents who have little or no prior experience of such matters. Sites of decision making, such as council meetings, public inquiries and tribunals hinge on the use of highly specialised legal and technical forms of knowledge. A number of innovative strategies for gathering, understanding, sharing and using this specialised knowledge are developed by residents, as a way to negotiate with the local authority responsible for the regeneration. At times this specialised knowledge and language is also rejected outright, and alternative forms of framing the regeneration are used, leading to conflict and profound incommunicability. I will argue that this complex and conflictual encounter between different regimes of knowing reveals profound limitations present within the democratic decision-making structures and within the governance systems of local city planning.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a multivocal exploration of the range of legal, political, and esoteric and secret forms of knowledge - and apparent non-knowledge - deployed by a variety of actors, to contest, justify, or otherwise explain the 'evictability' of (women) traders at a Malian market in urban Senegal.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is a multivocal analysis (Campregher 2010) of the eviction of (women) traders at a market in downtown Dakar, Senegal. The Malian market was established around the terminus for transnational trains running between the capitals of Senegal and Mali and was run primarily by women of Malian and Mande background. The paper explores the different forms of knowledge put forward by various actors, both to save the market and to justify or explain the 'evictability' of the women traders. This includes legal, political, and esoteric and secret knowledge, as well as apparent non-knowledge.
Malian elites and male traders in particular drew on various forms of knowledge to discursively draw the boundaries of governance within the city and establish who was inside or outside of these boundaries and hence, determine who could be evicted (Pezzano 2016). Ironically, though, high-level correspondences with authorities, identity political claims, or knowledge of the laws governing evictions and contracts of lease appeared less powerful than esoteric and secret knowledge in keeping eviction at bay.
Strikingly, however, amidst this cacophony of voices the women who had built and run the market remained largely silent during the eviction process. The final part of the paper interrogates 'the silence of women' (Brett-Smith 2014) in light of cultural and gendered notions of secrecy, knowledge and power among the Mande; and in the wider context of political upheaval and regime change in Dakar at a time when actors, who were normally silenced, suddenly spoke out of turn (Fredericks 2014).
Paper short abstract:
Anthropological knowledge offers a unique way of thinking about and responding to health and well-being as experienced by newcomers in their host society. In this paper we explore ways of working in partnership with the city to repurpose assets to support of improved newcomer health and well-being.
Paper long abstract:
Mass migration (voluntary or forced) challenges held identities and can often provoke the adoption of reactive positions towards otherness. Working in partnership across multiple disciplines and sectors we are faced with the
challenge of how to engage multiple groups and individuals in dialogue that responds positively to these
challenges, especially as they impact health and well-being in the everyday.
The Canadian government has set out its plan to increase its intake of migrants over the next three years with the intention of settling over 1 million people by the year 2021. This is an exciting and positive response and in contrast to the goals of its nearest neighbour the USA which has significantly reduced its numbers, however, this not without internal challenges.
In this paper, we will speak to our most recent research exploring newcomer emotional wellness and integration into the Canadian west. We will focus on the way that anthropological knowledge offers a unique way of thinking about and responding to health and well-being as experienced by newcomers in their host society. Here we explore ways of working in partnership with the city to repurpose assets to support of improved newcomer health and well-being.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on a collaborative research project with community based advocates for people struggling to access social protection in Delhi. It considers how the shift to online delivery of public services creates new knowledge economies and forms of mediation in low income neighbourhoods.
Paper long abstract:
In Delhi people living in low income neighbourhoods have legal rights to access a range of social protections. However, due to intersecting factors of low literacy, multiple dimensions of poverty, discrimination, corruption and poor service delivery many people have difficulty in accessing these rights. These challenges are complicated by the Indian government's efforts to move the application process for services online, replicating a global movement towards "digital by default" service provision. This paper emerges from a collaborative research project in Delhi with NGO 'community mobilisers' from low income neighbourhoods who monitor local service delivery, and act as advocates for people struggling to access social protection. It considers how the shift to what these advocates call the 'online mode' creates problems for those without internet access, appropriate language skills, or the experiential knowledge of how to interact with computer interfaces. The shift to the online mode opens a new knowledge economy in Delhi. "Cyber-cafes" sprout in neighbourhoods as approaching deadlines for online applications to government schemes open up opportunities to charge for assistance and the preparation of supporting documents. At the same time community mobilisers apply their grounded knowledge to help people safely negotiate application processes through street outreach. Experiential knowledge, the reliability of information and the necessity of mediation intersect with concepts of struggle, empowerment and active citizenship. Is the challenge to untangle them, or to find accommodations that will suit all those involved?
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at showing the results of a field research conducted in Casablanca (Morocco) in 2017. It focuses on the social life of waste, intended as event that produces exchange and sharing processes between people, places and objects, through formal and informal practices.
Paper long abstract:
After a 9 months field research period conducted in Morocco, this paper aims to set out the main points of the social life of urban waste studied in Casablanca. Waste is intended as an event that produces exchange and sharing processes between people, places and objects, through formal and informal practices, spatially and temporally defined. After a fundamental analysis of the administrative, political and legal aspects of waste management system in Morocco, we will focus on the main characteristics and the main social actors involved in the current waste-disposal system in Morocco and more specifically in Casablanca.
The ethnographic study will illustrate two main "phases" of the social life of waste, interpreted according to the perspective and practices of central social actors: the waste-recovery phase, realised by the so-called "bou'âra" or "chiffonniers" (informal waste-pickers);
the storage of the materials collected in the "goulssa", collection and selection waste-storage centres, usually located in the suburbs and owned by wholesalers and semi-wholesalers.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will analyse the process of the planning enquiry into the A303 Stonehenge (Amesbury to Berwick Down) scheme and the way in which information, different narratives and knowledge practices are included or otherwise by the examining authority.
Paper long abstract:
This ethnographic research focuses upon the planning enquiry into the upgrading of Amesbury to Berwick Down section of the A303 in Wiltshire. The scheme proposes to construct a 3.2km (2 mile) tunnel - a new section of dual two-lane carriageway to address traffic problems associated with the current single carriageway that passes to the South of Stonehenge. The scheme cuts through the UNESCO World Heritage Site surrounding the monument itself. Consequently, the enquiry process attracts multiple voices, reflecting the local, archaeological, environmental and spiritual meanings with which the monument and its landscape are imbued. This paper will explore the ways in which information, different narratives, and the diverse and sometimes conflicting knowledges inform the process, but also the ways in which those are squeezed into concepts such as 'rational evidence' and are required 'to make a case' in order to have a chance of being considered. Furthermore, the paper will critically engage with this planning enquiry, in particular with the performative elements of the process in which some forms of narrative or knowledge come to dominate others.
Paper short abstract:
Employing (net)ethnographic data, the focus of this paper is on practices and representations of 'water in the village' as a 'natural' materialising the standards of middle-class' identities and aspirations and the (not very) unpredictable failures of that projects in two Bucharest suburbs.
Paper long abstract:
As in other major Eastern European cities, Bucharest has experienced a robust urban sprawl on the outskirts, toward nearby villages. This has created a number of connectivity issues including the overuse of wastewater treatment plants and flooding of land, a permanent (and Promethean) struggle to improve water quality in newly wells. At the same time, the phantasms of autonomy and proximity to nature have also translated into specific middle-class' housing aspirations focused on water presence as well, such as owning an autonomous private fountain in the yards of their detached family houses. One of the first plans that the new residents develop after building their home is to find out from neighbours or online discussion groups about how to dig a 'natural' water fountain, including endless set of technical details. Simultaneously in gated communities there arise ample discussions about the problems generated by the treatment plant. Employing (net)ethnographic data gathered from an online group of middle-class residents in Bucharest's suburbs, the goal of this paper is to examine the meanings, practices and representation of 'water in the village' as a 'natural' (i.e. clean), substance embedded in such imagined landscape that materialise the standards of middle-class' identities and aspirations. I will also present the failures of such projects, including past ecological damage of industrial agriculture that render the 'natural' autonomous water as undrinkable water due to pollution with nitrites and pesticides.