Paper short abstract:

How do arts organisations nurture artists in less well-resourced contexts? In 2016, several organisations for dance in Serbia lodged a court case against the Ministry of Culture. This paper explores ways in which alliances can form a conversation with state structures to change conditions of work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an example from fieldwork conducted in Serbia, and in the former Yugoslav space, between 2016-2018. Artists, cultural workers and NGOs in Serbia have been experiencing diminishing support from international community funds and foundations since their context is no longer considered a post-conflict hot-spot. But their efforts have been hampered by persistent semi-functionality of the state itself. The artistic communities regularly contest the grounds on which practice should operate, and the unpredictable financial arrangements affecting long-term planning. Many believe in the importance of the Ministry of Culture's role in distributing public funding, with art considered a public good, and that they have the right to work. Several groups connected to ballet and contemporary dance, unwilling to accept the procedures of the Ministry of Culture that were further compromising working conditions, self-organised in 2016 to lodge a court case against the Ministry. This action constituted this them as citizens who had the potential to impact upon state instruments, rather than being recipients of rights already enshrined and in practice. But seeing the barriers and attempting to change the situation was also a risk, for it placed the groups in an adversarial position, causing some to be ostracized. In 2019, the results of the case were announced, in favour of the alliance. I present this example to explore ways in which those operating in the transnational field of contemporary dance face conditions of abandonment at the local level, and can mobilise to change their context.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on employability schemes in two cities traditionally seen as 'left behind', this paper reflects on the policy discourse of individual responsibility which offers the promise of choice, without acknowledging the constraints of labour market opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

The promise of neoliberalism is that the intensification of market based forms of life grants individuals freedom to choose (Harvey 2005). Individuals who do not realise their dreams are understood, in this discourse, to not be working hard enough in exercising their choices. Despite claims that greater individualisation has weakened the effects of structuring forms such as social class (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), this narrative conceals the structure of opportunities that much social sciences research has demonstrated has significant effect on life chances (Leonard and Wilde forthcoming; Furlong and Cartmel 2007). Social trajectories of progress are frequently represented as an individual responsibility, both in policy discourses and interventions. Conceptually, this paper argues that deploying 'personhood' in conversation with neoliberalism forces recognition that the notion of the individual self who is individually responsible is a contemporary and contingent representation of personhood, rather than an a priori way of being. This paper explores this issue in the case of youth employability schemes, where the focus is frequently on 'fixing the individual' without reference to local labour market opportunities. Focusing on two cities traditionally seen as 'left behind' due to constrained labour market opportunities, this paper argues that even efforts to support young people result in the reproduction of their liminal position. While the schemes purport to offer freedom to control one's own condition of existence through upskilling, the constraints upon choice in the labour market goes unacknowledged.

Paper short abstract:

Gypsies and Travellers, as service nomads, have exploited left behind places, profiting the wider economy in multiple ways. Subsequent planning and political restrictions have brought unanticipated welfare state costs, economic loss and now forever abandoned, sometimes polluted places.

Paper long abstract:

Most states fear nomads, especially Gypsies or Travellers. Yet such service nomads have provided key economic contributions to the housedwelling economy. The supply of occasional goods and services demands mobility and random stopping places. Gypsies have preferred mobile homes, whether tents, horse drawn or motor caravans, exploiting pockets of unused land. Regular places are found either side of council boundaries reflecting escorted evictions beyond official borders.

By contrast, Gypsies' and Travellers' were welcomed by farmers for seasonal labour, conveniently providing their own accommodation. Other occupations have brought them to urban locations for metal recycling, housedwellers' re-roofing and fencing.

Suddenly, 1960 legislation criminalized caravan residence on privately owned or rented land if without official planning permission. Gypsies were subject to mass evictions. Ensuing roadside caravan clusters triggered the 1967 legislation requiring council provision of official Gypsy sites. Frequently, these adjoined rubbish dumps or polluting motorways, namely land rejected for housing. Nevertheless, suitable sites were gradually adapted and welcomed. However, new controversial Conservative 1994 legislation abolished official site provision. Gypsies were told to buy their own land. Planning permission was invariably refused e.g. the Dale Farm multi-million eviction. The government wrongly labelled this former scrap yard 'Green Belt'. Bulldozing released poisonous chemicals creating a new permanently left behind.

Deprived of sites, ethnic contacts and familiar occupations, Gypsies have been forceably housed, placed on benefits and anti-depressants. Farmers now depend on labour from foreign migrants sheltering under plastic. Ironically, intermittent caravan access to varied stopping places once profitted both Gypsies and housedwellers.

Paper short abstract:

How is EU funding used to imagine equality and opportunity in an era of 'left behind' places? In this multi-sited paper (Wales and Central Europe), we explore the disjunctures between techno-political promises of progress and local capabilities.

Paper long abstract:

Sut defnyddir cyllid o'r UE i ddychmygu cydraddoldeb a chyfleoedd mewn cyfnod o leoedd a 'adawyd ar ôl'? Yn y papur aml-safle (Cymru a chanolbarth Ewrop), archwiliwn y datgysylltiadau rhwng addewidion technegol-gwleidyddol am gynnydd a medrau lleol.

The European project has long promised to smooth the socio-economic map, with 'Cohesion' the second largest EU budget line. Despite decades of regional development programmes, "What has the EU done for us?" has become a question of the Brexit-era zeitgeist - perhaps voicing the feeling of being 'stuck' with inequality. While the media's quasi-ethnographic discovery of 'left behind' places has made headline infamy ("Town Showered with EU Cash Votes to Leave EU"), the European Commission has responded with communication campaigns, insisting on "What the EU does for you". Yet, as we observe in this paper, the discursive implication that those purportedly 'left behind' merely do not know about EU funding sits at a disjuncture from their experiential knowledge of their own lives. Stepping further, we argue that Cohesion Policy's techno-political promises of progress can foreclose what Sen (1993) would recognise as local capabilities. Sketching vignettes from our respective fieldwork in Wales and the Austro-Czech-Slovak-Hungarian border region, we treat EU funding as a kind of ethnographic object - that is parcelled, transported, and affectively inscribed. We explore how funding becomes an object for imagining equality, while transformative promises of a better future become materially enacted in ways that can, conversely, locally re-inscribe the sense of simply seeing more of the same.

Paper short abstract:

The North East of England is often presented in mainstream media as a left-behind place. I consider the origins, role and hoped-for outcomes of The Eclipse, a newspaper project that aims to counter externally-produced identities of "stuckedness" by (re)taking control and (re)writing the narrative.

Paper long abstract:

It's not hard to find evidence of the North East of England's construction as a "left behind" place: the image of Margaret Thatcher's "walk in the wilderness", symbolic of industrial decimation; newspaper articles puzzling over a Leave majority, despite possible post-Brexit departures of the Nissan factory and EU funding; "shocking" mainstream media images and stories of drunken "nights on the Toon"; filmic depictions of poor North East lives, as in I, Daniel Blake. 'People still think of us as a place with smoking chimneys, flat caps and whippets - a kind of 1970s sitcom,' says Newcastle Council Leader, Nick Forbes. 'We're not like that, we haven't been for nearly 40 years' (New Statesman, 23.02.2018).

The Eclipse attempts to change the story. An "alternative tabloid" produced by, for and with the people of the region, it is - importantly - still a physical object, distributed face-to-face. By engaging directly with local people as it's handed out in the region's communities, the group responsible makes "spaces for conversation, [to] understand common issues and be empowered to do something about those issues."

Drawing on ethnographic research (as part of the production team) and interviews with the newspaper's creators, I explore the project's origins, perceived role and hoped-for outcomes. Grassroots journalism is nothing new, but there is more to this project than filling a local news gap. It is, I argue, an attempt to counter externally-produced identities of "stuckedness" by taking control of the medium and (re)writing their own narrative.

Paper short abstract:

The idiom 'left behind places' was frequently mobilised after the UK referendum on EU membership. Residents were said to have delivered the result and to have used the referendum as protest. The paper interrogates assumptions behind the notion of 'left behind' and asks who benefits from it.

Paper long abstract:

A powerful and dominant narrative after the referendum was that 'Left Behind Britain' had revolted - that the vote to leave the EU was an act of resistance by those who had not benefitted from the long-term effects of globalisation, and had suffered most from the policies of austerity . The spatial images that juxtaposed the results of the referendum with 'Left Behind Britain' were repeated over again and demarcated post-industrial towns and cities that had suffered, and not recovered, from the loss of manufacturing jobs, and a London, the South East and a few financial centres in larger cities that were flourishing. Such dominant images and narratives occluded massive differences within each of these 'camps' and did not go unchallenged. But the concept of 'left behind' has remained potent and, applied to both people and places, has gained traction in academic, media and political discourse since the referendum. What work is it doing?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the affective dynamic of parenting between a mother and her son, mapping out the limits of their imaginations of the future as they prepare for the son to 'leave the nest' but feel unable to imagine a future that will be any different from their past and present circumstances.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the structural inequalities that have a history of influence on the aspirations and imaginations of people who feel trapped, or stuck, in a familiar sense of crisis as they depend on state financial support to make ends meet. It explores articulations of uncertainty about how to imagine a future beyond dependence on the state that will be any different from their present and historical circumstances (Hage 2009: 97). Specifically, this paper presents ethnographic insights into the affective dynamic of parenting between a mother and her son, mapping out the limits of their imaginations as they prepare for the son to 'leave the nest'. Parenting marks time in the most intimate of ways. It also confronts parents with the passing of time in terms of biological 'growth' that sequences time for us. And in and through the practices of mothering and preparing for the future, we find mother and son at the limits of their imaginations. It is at this limit when see a strong affective dynamic in a 'relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility' (Berlant 2011: 2), a cruel optimism that comes in and out of focus with an inability to identify a tangible path upon which this imagined yet sequenced future can rest.

References:

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Hage, Ghassan. 2009. "Waiting out the crisis: on stuckedness and governmentality". In G. Hage (ed.) Waiting. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Pp. 97-106.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the contemporary shift towards radical right-wing political views in Eastern Germany by focussing on local perceptions of social abandonment in rural Brandenburg.

Paper long abstract:

With the recent increase in popularity of the nationalist party Alternative for Germany in the Eastern regions, and anti-migrant marches in Chemnitz and Cottbus, public debate in Germany has been ceaselessly interrogating the causes for such radicalisation of political views. The understanding of the East as a "left behind" place, alongside broad assumptions about the consequences of capitalism or the ex-DDR citizens' resistance to democratic rule, figure prominently among explanations. These reflect a "Western" perspective that is often completely alien to the local's own understanding of the experience and causes of social abandonment and political change.

My paper, based on anthropological fieldwork on the continuing resurfacing of the dead bodies of WWII soldiers in rural Brandenburg, is an attempt to produce a first extensive ethnographic treatment of the question. It investigates the local experience of social abandonment with a particular emphasis on the effects of living literally surrounded by the physical ruins of both the socialist DDR and of WWII, in rural regions where the landscape is marked by explosion craters and decrepit DDR factories. At the same time, this paper will demonstrate that, in spite of a widespread perception of hopelessness and stagnation, individual narratives of post-socialist change emphasise resourcefulness and creativity in reinventing oneself following the collapse of the socialist state.

Ultimately, I will argue that reunified Germany is perceived as perpetuating a form of silencing that characterised the DDR, as the locals' experience of war and of socialist dictatorship were once more repressed and not incorporated into the new German state.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the experience of being left behind from the perspective of urban squatters in Fiji. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork I analyse how Fiji's urban poor experience inequality and how they develop socialities and economic strategies in order to secure their livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss the practical experience of being left behind from the perspective of informal urban settlers in western Fiji. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork I demonstrate how the notion of being 'left behind' have multiple meanings both in symbolic and practical terms for this growing demographic of urban squatters. On one level many of my interlocutors explained that they had been drawn to towns and cities by a fear of being left behind in villages that offered few opportunities for economic improvement, personal freedom or social mobility. On another their everyday experience of living at the fringe of the urban is often described as a struggle to keep up and gain access to basics. In my analysis I engage with these discourses as forms of local heuristics pointing me towards new insights about how Fiji's urban poor not only experience inequality but also how they develop new forms of socialities and economic strategies in order to overcome socio-economic disadvantage and secure their livelihoods. More broadly I use this particular study to reflect on how research data on the everyday economic practice of disadvantaged people can be operationalised politically and inform social justice discourses.