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- Convenor:
-
Rozita Dimova
(Ghent University)
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- C305 (access code C1964)
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 11 July, -, Thursday 12 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
This workshop examines the spatial politics of fear in different contexts. We ask how "affective topologies" intersect with class formation, urban governmentality and spatial segregation and how particular parts of a city come to be perceived as "dangerous places".
Long Abstract:
How do particular parts of a city come to be perceived as "dangerous places" to be avoided and as spaces governed by fear? What are the mechanisms that bring together space, violence and affect by making the "users of space" (Lefebvre 1992) emotionally vested in the perceptions of danger and unsafety? How do "affective topologies" intersect with class formation, urban governmentality and spatial segregation? By drawing on ethnographic cases from the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, we want to examine the working of spatial politics of fear in different contexts. We pay special attention to the materiality of space expressed in infrastructure, architecture, street art, and presence of material objects (actively utilized by people or displayed in shopping malls), and to the ways in which materialities - big and small - both signal and reproduce urban boundaries and affective topologies. Zooming onto the "irrational" effect of materiality to promote phantasmic narratives about "the dangerous other", we explore the making of dangerous places by combining a variety of approaches such as Marxist, psycho-analytic, material culture studies, queer studies, governmentality, etc. One of the key concerns we have is the role of the state and politics in mediating the relationship between space, violence, fear and materiality. By examining this relational nexus, we will attempt to disentangle political participation of specific groups and their claims over territory, space and time.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 11 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
‘Pirated’ music and movies, ‘fake’ fashion, and money smuggling collected from credit cards are unintended consequences of global neoliberalism. I introduce the concept 'illegality mesh' to describe the entanglement of informal and illegal activities in the Latin American urban space.
Paper long abstract:
Blank CDs from China and Korea supply the market for 'pirated' music and movies in Latin America. In Mexico, more than 400 million pirate CDs are illegally copied and sold across the country and, through transnational smuggling networks, reach as far as the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. 'Fake' bags and clothing are a booming sector in the popular, informal street economy of the region. Venezuelan smugglers collect credit cards to charge payments in Colombia, profiting from the disparity between the currency exchange in the formal and black markets. These activities have a far-reaching impact on the local economies, livelihood of urban populations, and state policies.
Piracy in music and movies, retail of fake accessories and fashion, or money smuggling, can only be understood as unintended consequences of global neoliberalism. Furthermore, these phenomena constitute new forms of illegality. In this paper, I introduce the concept 'illegality mesh' to describe the entanglement of shadow and illegal activities in the informal commerce in urban enclaves. To what extent are the different illegal economies related to each other? How are these spatialized in the urban context? Ethnographic material gathered in the San Juan de Dios market in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Colombian-Venezuelan border will be presented to discuss on the informal sector, the black market, and the creation of new criminalities under the influence of global neoliberalism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the communicative processes by which young neo-Nazis render the threat of violence in urban space legible for particular publics, as well as attempts to intervene upon and transform this semiotic landscape by oppositional actors.
Paper long abstract:
The emergence of urban spaces notorious for racist violence and considered dangerous for ethnic minorities has been a salient preoccupation in both public and scholarly debates in Germany. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with extreme right groups in East Berlin, this paper examines the communicative practices--performance, visibilization, erasure--with which they contest urban space and generate areas of fear for particular publics. I look at the deployment of semiotic techniques for the inscription of violence into the aesthetics of urban landscapes through the use of material elements: the body and bodily accessories, graffiti, propaganda items, or direct political actions. Providing a sophisticated repertoire of tactical possibilities, they enable the weaving of violence into aesthetic forms in ways that differentially address distinct audiences and perceptual sensibilities; alarming and hence effectively exclusionary for some, they remain hardly visible for others. At the same time, the paper also considers forces that seek to disrupt these semiotic landscapes by purifying them from indicators of violent potentialities. Such efforts at reconfiguring the aesthetics of urban space employ operations of erasure to conceal signs that may provoke anxiety and fear; as well as tactics of exposure that aim to exorcise sites of their menacing significations precisely by rendering their violence visible. In particular, I analyze how activists regularly embark upon excursions in which they remove racist and nationalist signs from the urban landscape, as well as a local mobilization by a coalition of state-like organizations in opposition to a neo-Nazi march.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research on a central bus station in the Ghanaian capital Accra, in this paper I explore the conflicting concepts of order and contingency as they become manifest in the everyday life of a West African city.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research on a central bus station in the Ghanaian capital Accra, in this paper I explore the conflicting concepts of order and contingency as they become manifest in the everyday life of a West African city.
Accra's central bus station is a site of uncertainty, unpredictability and, at times, of utter bewilderment. On its grounds a great many people interact with each other in a great many ways. Being a pivot of travel and trade, the station also serves as a haunt for a plenitude of workers, petty criminals and layabouts. For the transient traveller and trader, the experience of the station's well-established turmoil often translates into affects of anxiety and an acute sense of danger. For them, entering its yard equals exposing oneself to hazards of theft, fraud, insult and assault. For many of those who inhabit the station, however, it is the very unpredictability inscribed into the station's space that provides opportunities and shelter. For them, the station's chaos serves as a gateway to chance and, by this, as a means of livelihood.
This ambiguity in the perceptions and utilizations of the station's space is a reminder of the contingencies that rule many spheres of everyday life in contemporary West African cities. Life at the station shows us that where the 'present order of things' defies comprehension, evoking limits of control and knowledge, both fear and chance proliferate. In this context, ideas of order and contingency coincide with each other, and so do feelings of safety and danger and expectations of opportunity and threat.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the development of socio-spatial structure of modern Moscow, and focuses on the processes connected to a 'new wave' of migration as well as widening of gap in living standards; analyzes the possibilities of formation of 'dangerous places' on ethnic and/or social bases in Moscow.
Paper long abstract:
Nowadays Moscow, the largest megalopolis in Russia, faces the same challenges and problems, as other world megalopolises (labour migration, gap in standards of living and common weal, overpopulation, pollution, etc). At the same time, we see that the Soviet heritage of urban development and registration of population laid down some limitation, that still influence on the formation of new "dangerous places".
In the paper we argue, the socialist urban development is the basis for a process of socio-status segregation in modern Moscow. The 'privileged quarters' as well as 'problem districts' or so-called 'proletarian outskirts' have arisen during the Soviet times in large. In the Soviet period these 'privileged quarters' were inhabited by communist party nomenklatura, top bureaucracy, artists and differed from other districts because of its brick-build houses with sizeable apartments. The periphery districts traditionally face transport problems, depressing monotony of the standard building and have the image of 'not-really-Moscow' in the perception of Muscovites, because they have emerged on the land of villages, included into Moscow urban area borders 1970s. Labour migrants (so called "limita") occupied these new residential areas.
Today the growth of temporary ethnic labour migration from the C.I.S. countries generates new trend in development of "dangerous places" in Moscow, at least, as Muscovites perceive it.
The paper on the base of analysis of public opinion polls, interviews with Moscow officials working in social and housing sphere, ratings of Moscow secondary residential property (worked out by major real estate agencies), tries to formulate the main trends of development of "dangerous places" in Moscow.
Paper short abstract:
The paper shows how the social notoriety of a school in the Roman periphery has been reframed as an ethnic issue. Tying together gossip and legislation, parents and local politicians reconfigured a community case of social disadvantage into a national case of identity and failed integration
Paper long abstract:
Primary school "Pisacane" is located in "Torpignattara" neighborhood, the eastern periphery of Rome, namely in a sub-area known as Marranella. It has more than 90 percent foreign pupils, the vast majority of them being second generation immigrants. Nonetheless, it suffers from a serious problem of underutilization, since it could accommodate over 500 children but they are now about 130. The reasons for this uneven use of the school may be traced back to the bad reputation (crime, gambling and drug dealing) that Marranella began to have back in the 1970s, two decades before the arrival of immigrants. Since then Pisacane was known as the school of the infamous part of the neighborhood, and middle class parents more concerned about social distinction started to bring their children to a new school outside Marranella.
Thus, already from the late 1970s the numbers at Pisacane began to decrease and when the immigrants from Asia, North Africa and South America began to settle in the area, they found cheaper accommodation in Marranella and brought their children to the closest school, which was Pisacane.
In this presentation I show how the bad "social" reputation of Pisacane from the 1970s has been recast within an "ethnic" frame, thus keeping its notoriety with a new inflection. I focus on how gossip and word of mouth have been reconfigured by local and national politicians, so that a case of social disadvantage and under-representation of Italians in a school has been translated into a national case of failed integration.
Paper short abstract:
This paper challenges different types and aspects of “fear” and “danger” in the dynamic milieux of various northern Mexican border towns and discusses how citizens and local artists –as human seismographs– react to recent trends.
Paper long abstract:
Due to its exuberant murder rate, Ciudad Juárez has received the questionable award as being the "world's most dangerous city" several times. Media and respective governments may be seen as considerable protagonists in the distribution of this "glorious chapter" of the city's history. Thanks to the on-going conflict among drug cartels and the army, the former have celebrated various field days in recent times. But how do locals live with and within this supposed site of danger?
Another example is Tijuana -"Tijuana la horrible"-, the prototypical "sin city" with notorious neighbourhoods such as "la Coahuila", where the arts scene is flourishing and happily addressing angst, unrest, and fear. In its works, Nortec Collective, an ensemble of border artists, is combining topics such as insecurity and sorrows, but also rapture and rampancy with stereotypes, myths, legends, and reality.
However, on the border between Mexico and the US one may also find sections which are referred to as the "white border". Are cities like Ciudad Acuña, Piedras Negras and San Luis Río Colorado, which show a relatively low crime rate, oases of peace, of which the compatriots in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros only can dream of?
And: What is danger? What is fear? Has disquiet always to do with bloodshed and weapons? Identity issues contribute as well, at times, to a growing uncertainty amongst fronterizos on both sides of the border.