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- Convenors:
-
Chiara Cacciotti
(Polytechnic and University of Turin)
Michele Lancione (Polytechnic of Turin)
AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), Lecture Room 101
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will discuss the condition of liminality related to housing precarity by questioning its conventional definition as a temporary in-betweenness, together with how it can become an example of social depotentiation or transform itself into collective political stances.
Long Abstract:
Conventionally, anthropological understandings of 'liminality' define it as a condition of temporary in-betweenness, in which a transition to a differential state is assumed. In other disciplines - such as urban studies - the same notion is related for the most to describe so-called 'marginal' contexts. In this panel, we are interested in exploring differential and more nuanced ways of understanding 'liminality' beyond current readings. We are doing so, inspired by research that has looked at conditions of housing precarity in a processual and situated way (Baxter and Brickell 2014; Vasudevan 2015), where the 'liminal' and the 'marginal' cannot be simply defined by 'transitionary processes' and/or social exclusion (Thomassen 2014; Cacciotti 2020). With this we mean to explore those situations in which experiences of 'housing precarity' show that the 'liminal' is both a space of potential annihilation and dispossession, as well as a space that can be inhabited against prevailing forces (Lancione 2020; Simone 2016).
We are interested in contributions that situated experiences of precarious housing and their politics of liminality at the intersection of everyday experiences and longitudinal and structural processes of economic, cultural, societal and racial dispossession.
Through conceptual and empirical work (involving, for example, squats and other informal occupations, evictions, homeless centers, reception centers), this panel will shed light on how a localized liminal and precarious housing condition can become an example of social and economic depotentiation or transform itself into collective political stances.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the failure of social welfare state on the example of private hostels. Insufficient and inhumane temporary housing for the most marginalized, mainly Roma people. It shows how regulations of welfare system can instead of protecting cause risks and operate as a social control.
Paper long abstract:
Private hostels – tiny apartments located in socially excluded areas owned by “slumlords” are the answer to low capacity of social housing and discriminatory housing market in Czechia. The apartments and hostels have insufficient living conditions and low hygiene standards. They are inhabited temporarily as the last option before living rough. Roma people rent accommodation in private hostels at extremely high prices. The result of this situation is growing poverty business based on renting private hostels. Through its measures and regulations, the state aim to „fight against poverty businessmen”. This fight become the official state social policy.
With the help of collected interviews with Roma women the paper shows how these measures directly negatively affect people living in poverty and how the social policy is gendered and racialized. Welfare system is being revised with stricter conditions for people who are recipients of social benefits to other forms as workfare, prisonfare or centaur state (Wacquant, 2009; 2010) The welfare state not only fails to protect and take care of the marginalized, but deepens the housing precarity crisis and increases the risks of poverty.
At the same time the state is dependent on private hostels, as there is no standard housing available for Roma. The paper observes the switch from protecting to punishing the poor. We can see this trend worldwide, here I present it on the example of private hostels and the fight against them.
Paper short abstract:
Housing precarity manifests itself in the moment of eviction. Eviction is an opportunity to ethnographically assist to the magic of creation of “liminal” forms of citizenship, which experience an ontological insecurity determined by the ambiguity of their status.
Paper long abstract:
Precarity seems to be intimately connected with housing. The term “precarious”, in fact, was first used in the 17th century as a legal term to describe the situation in which a tenancy was held by a third party (Vasuvedan 2014, 14). The term describes that which is “obtained by entreaty, depending on the favour of another, hence uncertain” while its Latin etymology precarius (from prex - prayer) confirms the reference to “a state of insecurity that is not natural but constructed”. Housing precarity manifests itself in its most vivid ferocity in the moment of eviction (Pozzi 2020). Eviction thus becomes an opportunity to ethnographically observe not only the legal mechanisms of production of precarity, but also to assist - as Bourdieu would say - to the magic of creation of “liminal” forms of citizenship, which experience an ontological insecurity (Madden, Marcuse 2016) determined by the ambiguity of their status. In short, eviction represents an anthropopoeic device of invention of a liminal other: the homeless. Starting from the ethnographic analysis of evictions, observed since 2013 between Portugal, Italy and Cape Verde, it is proposed to reflect on housing precarity and social liminality as decisive factors in the differential production of citizenship, intended as a key element of a wider politics of abandonment that seems to characterize the lives of vulnerable populations.
Paper short abstract:
Through a series of conjunctures of inhabiting crowded housing among precarious migrants in London and the UK's border towns, this paper develops the notion of spillover to chart the embodied, affective economies, capacities, potentialities and politics of uncrowding life at the limits of property.
Paper long abstract:
This paper offers a series of conjunctures from London and the UK’s coastal border towns to explore the embodied and affective economies, capacities and potentialities of inhabiting densely occupied housing among precarious migrants – from over-crowded rental sublets to repurposed military barracks and hotels in the covid-19 pandemic. The paper offers the conceptual language of ‘spillover’ and a politics of uncrowding to assess these capacities and potentialities at the spatial and ontological limits of property marked by racial, heternormative histories and power-geometries of dispossession (Abourahme 2014; Roy 2017; Lancione 2019). Here, spillover sketches an embodied, affective liminality that is simultaneously bound by and exceeds the ‘cramped space’, containers and volumes of crowded migrant housing while being marked by precarious itineraries of im/mobility (Walters and Lüthi 2016; Sharpe 2016; Simone 2020). The paper traces a politics of uncrowding through multiple potentialities, from acts of refusal and claiming space for one’s self with others in the face of biopolitical and accumulation-driven logics of containment, to radical demands to realign volumetric urbanism from exchange to use value and against state bordering practices.
Paper short abstract:
Under the Cantareira forest in São Paulo, landslides and flooding are just two dimensions of risk ecologies affecting precarious dwellings. My ethnography contrasts bureaucratic accounts with ecologies of risk and reconstruction assembled around Black and Brown women in the afterlife of colonialism.
Paper long abstract:
At the feet of the Serra da Cantareira forest in São Paulo, dwellings perched on the hills' slopes are at risk of landslides, while hydrological hazards threaten shacks built along creeks, canals, and rivers. Landslides and flooding are just two dimensions of more complex materiality and ecology of risk that escape bureaucratic modes of accounting, census, and mapping. These include everyday bodily injuries, crumbling infrastructure, polluted waters, deadly mosquito viruses, and hazardous objects. At the same time, top-down governmental approaches do not consider the economies and networks of subsistence assembled by and around Black and Brown women in risk areas, including food selling, scavenging, and the reuse of furniture and appliances. Their spatial networks encompass domestic kitchens, open dumps, and improvised street stalls. They also involve the circuits of family allowances provided by different systems of power, like the state, the church, and drug trafficking. Through ethnographic and visual fieldwork in the periphery of São Paulo, I repopulate bird's-eye views of risk dynamics with people and their everyday lives. I examine materiality and ecologies of risk both as places where effects occur and as media through which biopolitics is enacted. What material and ecological formations enable biopolitics? How can we break them apart in a way that forecloses potential for gendered and racialized predation? How do liminal presences in risk areas exceed and haunt institutional framing? How can material and ecological narratives disrupt the afterlife of colonialism perpetrated through precarious dwelling?