Paper short abstract:

Industrial production continues to cause the abandonment and destruction of spaces, where populations live without services and opportunities. The recovery practices offer possibilities for reorganisation based on the social infrastructure of family and spatial ties.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal analyses the practices of recuperation of urban spaces and how they reflect social meanings and ways of organizing settlements and relationships. The research based on the context of the Old city of Taranto (Apulia, Italy) seeks to deepen the connections between an urban area affected by historical phenomena of abandonment and the industrial development of the steel industry and the consequent spatial expansion of the city. The Old city's abandoned number of buildings in physical decay represents an opportunity to reconstruct a new space for living, relations, and work. Family units and social organizations resist abandonment, continuing to live and occupy the available spaces in the old city. These groups suffer a form of social marginalization and violence: they live in an area abandoned by the rest of the town without access to services and opportunities to improve their conditions. For these reasons, the ethnographic investigation focused on the organization of recovery initiatives and abandoned spaces, promoted by an informal group called "I Ragazzi Della Città Vecchia" (The Boys of the Old City). These practices highlight the centrality and importance of space as a fundamental resource for the social reproduction of inhabitants, relationships and economies. The reproduction of social infrastructures based on the kinship and neighbourhood relations of the inhabitants involved in the recovery allows them to resist abandonment and the absence of infrastructures. Trought a spatialization of the social infrastructure, the inhabitants defend the living dimension from the violence of depopulation and abandonment.

Paper short abstract:

Questions of social reproduction and identity in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, are interwoven with how care and social exclusion become discursively negotiated and practiced. The paper will discuss how values of freedom reproduce and traverse internal alienations and how they represent hope and precarity.

Paper long abstract:

Questions of social reproduction and identity in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, are intricately interwoven with how care and social exclusion become discursively negotiated and practiced. Different governmental agents and public discourses in Ulaanbaatar draw on concepts of freedom for purposes of distinction or inclusion and extend concepts of freedom "chölöö" and liberation to particular historical periods, summoning a common identity. Ulaanbaatar residents employed in the informal sector have ambivalently linked values of freedom to notions of social (in)equality and the restraints and (im)possibilities to (fully) care. David Harvey identified value(s) of freedom as core reference and key value within neoliberal discourses. However, discourses employing freedom can draw on an extended trajectory in Mongolia as it was equally referenced in socialist rhetoric, albeit under different premises. Moreover, the reference to and discourse concerning these values (re)produce social divisions causing "internal alienation" (Justin Stagl). Following the remark of a young mother employed in the informal sector, who claimed that violent social interactions in Ulaanbaatar during the time of the global pandemic have become comparable to the city's violence prevalent in 2008, the paper will explore the precarities, ambivalences and divisions involved in these references to freedom and their relation to identificatory practices and discourses. It will ask how social exclusion and violence are instituted and practices of care and hope traverse or reproduce these internal alienations.

Paper short abstract:

Marriage is not the same everywhere. However they are interpreted, conjugal ties as a mechanism of social reproduction can be used innovatively but can also prove to entail constraints whose violence can endure for a lifelong.

Paper long abstract:

Marriage is an institution that is not the same everywhere so that the concept of marriage used in different countries does not overlap homogeneously. Yet, however they are interpreted, conjugal ties as a mechanism of social reproduction keep being important elements of individual’s life and can be used innovatively to image lives completely different from those otherwise foreseeable in a given socio-economic and cultural context but can also prove to entail constraints whose violence can endure for a lifelong. This paper shall discuss different forms in which marriages have been seen as social ties crucial to social mobility and to mobility. Some examples will be discussed of southern Somali refugees in Tanzania, Kenya and the USA and their marriages. While, boys and girls refugees in Tanzania spent much effort to avoid the usual practice of arranged marriage to find ways to keep studying; others, as resettled refugees in the USA, do the same but with completely different results. If some refugee women in the USA tended to refuse arranged marriage and to follow their individual loving desires, a certain number of ex-refugees girls and boys, nowadays turned into American citizens, come back in Tanzania to look for their spouses. The panorama of choices made by a number of boys and girls of this group of refugees, part of whom resettled in Tanzania and part in the United States since the 2013, shows how powerful conjugal ties still are not only in the imagery of an African group but even more in the context of border regimes in which marriage is the only legal status that allows for an easier travelling across the borders. Conjugal ties being powerful factors of social change may also carry enduring structural violence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the moral imagination that local humanitarians invested to sustain their moral project in a refugee camp in Montenegro for fifteen years. It focuses on ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2007), such as disappointment and burnout, that indicate situations in which agency is blocked and suspended.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the moral imagination that local humanitarians invested to sustain their moral project in a refugee camp in Montenegro for fifteen years. It focuses on the sense of disappointment and burnout among the local humanitarians, or ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2007) that stand in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions, such as anger or rage, indicating situations in which agency is blocked and suspended. The case in point was a sense of the local humanitarians that they could neither meet their goals, nor leave the refugee camp. This sense of suspended agency was also shaped by their belief that the international humanitarian industry in the developed world had mechanisms in place to protect workers from burnout.

The paper explores what the emergence of disappointment and burnout among the local humanitarians tells us about humanitarianism and its diverging forms more broadly. Such a focus illuminates that the contemporary Balkans is simultaneously included in the humanitarian imaginaries of the Global North and excluded from actual participation in international humanitarian projects due to structural constraints. Burnout, disappointment, and similar ‘ugly feelings’ emerged among the local humanitarians in Montenegro due to a discrepancy between being invited to join humanitarian imaginaries of the Global North and the structurally shaped impossibility to ever meet the set humanitarian goals.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism to explore how parents, mainly women, negotiate norms for poorer parents to aspire for their children’s upward mobility and spatial concentrations of enforced child removal in “deprived” neighbourhoods in Britain.

Paper long abstract:

If a naturalisation of motherly love underpins patriarchal allocations of childcare, then what social processes shape the emotional attachments of primary caregivers to their children? Britain in the 2010s saw calls (mainly towards women) for lower-income parents to aspire for their children’s upward social mobility, along with increasing stigma towards poorer working-class women as “bad mothers.” Such women could thus find themselves tasked with single-handedly undoing the potential effects of class inequality on their children’s futures. Since the 1980s there had also been an ongoing punitive shift in child protection social work. Practices of monitoring and, in extreme cases, forcible child removal disproportionately affect neighbourhoods designated as “deprived.” To explore the subjectivities of parents, mainly women, living on one such housing estate [housing project] in southern England, this paper critically engages Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism. Faced with the prospect of forcible child removal, women’s expressed ideas about being a good parent generally became secondary to (or even wholly subdued in favour of) defending against the possibility of coercive intervention. The paper thus argues that optimism can sometimes be defensive rather than aspirational, especially in the face of lawful expropriations, and that these two forms of optimism – aspirational and defensive – may interact and even paradoxically reinforce one another. For a critical understanding of the normative emotions often associated with unpaid labours of social reproduction, the paper highlights the value of considering how coerced dispossessions interact with the psychical attachments that in Berlant’s reading are optimism’s ground.