Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic study of the proposed redevelopment of the Ladywood Estate in Birmingham, UK, This paper examines the potential contributions of anthropology to struggles against large-scale urban regeneration projects.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the potential contributions of anthropology to struggles against large-scale urban regeneration projects. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the proposed redevelopment of the Ladywood Estate in Birmingham, UK, I argue that anthropology, when practiced as a form of engaged and activist research, can play a crucial role in supporting community resistance, exposing the workings of power, and contributing to the development of alternative visions for urban development. By situating anthropology as a tool for scrutinizing the opacity surrounding regeneration projects and the attempts by residents to imagine and implement strategies and tactics to influence decision-making, the study calls for a more engaged and activist approach to anthropological research—one that recognizes the ethical imperative to support communities facing dispossession and to contribute to the development of radical demands and alternative urban futures.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores practices of slow activism in Birmingham, UK, and asks what this way of working makes possible in a city experiencing monumental and fast-paced change.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores practices of slow activism: long-term, relational work decoupled from “temporalities of success” (Shange 2019) and definitions of progress that require goals, impact statements, and quantifiable results. Taking as ethnographic sites spaces in Birmingham, UK that bring together anti-poverty activists, third sector professionals, community leaders, and policy makers, this project seeks to understand how change is conceptualized, followed, and translated where privilege is given to the often uncomfortable attentiveness of slowness. These anti-poverty groups are working to create lasting social change through slowly building durational relationships—enacting new worlds in the present. This sits in marked contrast to the embattled urgency of traditional activist work, based in narratives of immediacy, with powerful, visible, overwhelming action, and the focus of anti-poverty policy, which pushes for the quickest and most efficient solutions. As Birmingham sits in the contradictory position of bankruptcy and rapid urban expansion, it has emerged as a pivotal site to investigate the politics of poverty and the necessary materialization of radical new anti-poverty strategies within more mainstream discourse. Additionally, this paper centers methodological questions around the cross-pollination of ethnographic and activist methodologies.

Paper Short Abstract:

I explore the ethnographic challenges of following favela activists’ continuous making of the favela as we move together through Rio de Janeiro’s interstices to counter the routine enactment of these territories as spaces of death.

Paper Abstract:

A true obsession in Brazilian scholarship, Rio de Janeiro’s favelas have been historically imagined as locations somehow apart even when uncomfortably close, places anthropologists must visit and live in if they want to depict this persistently unknown, despite overly researched, dangerous, yet seductive paradigm for outer urban spaces. Departing from an ethnography built alongside favela activist networks, a social movement weaved between different favelas and the asfalto, or asphalt (i.e., non-favela neighbourhoods), I describe how the favela cannot only be researched on the move but as a result of this movement, which, nonetheless, reacts against the socio-territorial confinement favela residents endure as privileged targets of a war on drugs—one which treats them, if not criminals, at the very least complicit with them. This paper, thus, explores the intricacies of an ethnography of the favela emerging from the city’s interstices as it moves along the territorialities of the favela activists struggle. It focuses on how bodies, T-shirts, banners, pamphlets, and slogans, the living and the dead reassemble in various interrelated but essentially unequal locations, linking favelas and the city centre to unbury and counter the routine enactment of the favelas as spaces of death and illegible suffering. 

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper showcases the ways children navigate a top-down pedagogy on diversity and difference in a ‘superdiverse’ primary school. It considers how an anthropology of childhood can contribute to understanding processes of discrimination, exclusion and resistance that are currently in the making.

Paper Abstract:

This paper showcases ethnographic encounters with young children’s identity politics as they navigate and (re)define the concepts of diversity and difference in a ‘superdiverse’ primary school. In schools throughout the UK, but perhaps especially in cities that can be characterised as superdiverse, it is becoming increasingly common for children to receive a ‘top-down’ pedagogy of diversity that is created for them in the curriculum. This pedagogy encourages children to embrace diversity and respect many ‘types’ of difference. Yet, children are simultaneously bringing together their own understandings at the periphery of this pedagogy, where they may or may not embrace the principles it wants them to have.

The children also demonstrate how an anthropology of childhood can contribute to understanding processes of discrimination, exclusion and resistance by showing how they receive and interrogate educational diversity initiatives that target them. Accordingly, this paper shows the ways children actively engage with dominant and alternative discourses in context of a pedagogy that responds to an increasingly diverse school and population. Through pretend play and artistic activities with an adult researcher, children aged nine to ten spontaneously bring to the surface some of the most contentious matters in schools today: transgender rights, gender equality, gender critical discourses, Black Lives Matter, processes of racial exclusion and more. The children's voices speak to extensive research on how diversity initiatives often do not achieve the inclusive environments and institutional cultures they promote and rather serve to mask underlying power imbalances, especially regarding race and gender.