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- Convenors:
-
Gabriele Orlandi
(Ca' Foscari - University of Venice)
Panas Karampampas (Durham University)
Paula Escribano (University of Barcelona)
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- Chair:
-
Cris Shore
(Goldsmiths)
- Discussant:
-
Agata Hummel
(University of Warsaw)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/017
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel encourages an anthropological perspective on public policies, considering them as spaces of negotiation, inclusion, and hope, as well as social actants resulting in violence and exclusion. Moreover, by looking at the Mediterranean it allows a narrow and novel comparative perspective.
Long Abstract:
Social and cultural reactions to the current Covid19-related crisis have generally resulted in new legitimacy for public intervention, thus disavowing once again the narrative of a State roll-back due to neoliberal globalization. This panel calls for a renewed anthropological attention to the manifold ways in which public policies shape the lives of ordinary people, (re)producing subjectivities, dispositions, and regimes of meaning.
Considering the social normativity performed by policies, it is possible to stress, at the same time, that strategies and tactics enacted by people and actors carrying on their own agenda make such dispositifs unstable. This makes ethnography particularly well-suited for understanding how public policies work - while avoiding the unconscious reproduction of State's logic - and for exploring the social spaces that those policies produce and reshape.
We will look in particular at the countries of the Mediterranean: featuring an amalgam of political instability, quasi-welfare, as well as imposed austerity, these countries constitute an excellent case for reframing our comprehension of the State, as well as of supranational, regional and municipal institutions. Recent literature points out that people there show comparable attitudes towards institutional violence of which public policies are a significant component. Thus, whilst contributing to revisit the Mediterranean as a field of study through comparison of current "policy worlds" this panel welcomes proposals on 1) the perceptions of policies, both of bureaucrats and targeted subjects, as well as on 2) how policies shape livelihoods and are, in turn, reshaped by the latter.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
In this intervention I propose a critical insight on the social production of tourist destinations through the study of the role deployed by the state and public action in this process.
Paper long abstract:
As many other social problems and phenomena, tourist destinations are easily taken for granted. Therefore, when studying them, we should try to deploy an exercise of defetichisation; which means focusing on the social conditions, relations and practices through which tourism and the destinations are produced.
In this contribution, I present a critical perspective on the social production of Penedès region (Spain) as a wine tourism destination by introducing the state and public action - that's it, the study of political and bureaucratic practices, and public policies too - as central phenomena to consider in it. Drawing from the bourdieusian model of fields, I will present some considerations on how tourism destinations come into being by being recognized - and, thus, regulated - as such by different forms and instantiations of the state. Or, in other words, how tourist destinations are instituted through public intervention (being tourism a "matter of state") thus transforming the social and economic structures of the region. The intervention will focus on the role of the technicians and policymakers from the Penedès' Tourism Consortium, who operated as mediators between the field of tourism and the winemaking field, fostering the circulation of logics from the first to the second.
The fieldwork sustained in the region between 2018 and 2021 lies on an historical ethnography, which combines a diachronic regard on the sociogenesis of wine tourism (based on semi-structured interviews and the analysis of public policies), with a synchronic ethnographic approach to the current political and public theatralizations, interventions, and practices around tourism.
Paper short abstract:
The author analyses how different public policy frameworks – the City, State and the European Union – envision urban futures and direct city-making processes. The focus in on the Croatian harbour city of Rijeka, defined as a European Capital of Culture in 2020.
Paper long abstract:
The paper shows how different public policy frameworks – the City, the State and the European Union – work together, negotiate their directions and, in some cases, collide while transforming a city into a European Capital of Culture (ECC). The focus is on city-making processes and the imagining of urban futures triggered by the ECC 2020 initiative in the Croatian harbour city of Rijeka. The author analyses how diverse levels of public strategies and policies define and activate projects of urban regeneration and cultural diversity, while simultaneously promoting the politics of urban difference. Those mechanisms are observed in the context of pandemic measures that had a strong impact on the organization of the Rijeka 2020 programme. The author also discusses the role of the Mediterranean in recreating the city along the lines of “the Port of Diversity”. That concept encompasses evocations of the Mediterranean use of open public space and of the Mediterranean – dynamic and cosmopolite – lifestyle.
The emphasis is placed on ways in which citizens of Rijeka experience, affirm or challenge strategic interventions in their hometown. The aim is to present how the ECC project comes to life in their narratives and practices. Special attention is paid to changes in local uses of urban space, to affective capital created in the process and to the ECC legacy in the city. The paper is based on the public policy analysis, as well as on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork that has been carried out in Rijeka since 2019.
Paper short abstract:
In 2016 a law proposed a general regulation for hemp production in Italy. While the law did not legalise cannabis psychotropic use, it was used to legitimise a new "cannabis light" market. The paper explores the social aftermath of the law, moving between different actors and scales of analysis.
Paper long abstract:
At the end of 2016 a national law (242/2016) proposed a general regulation for the cultivation and transformation of Cannabis sativa L. in Italy. The law mentioned several uses of hemp, a plant that had disappeared for decades in the Italian countryside, but it did not open to the legalisation of its psychotropic components, disappointing the anti-prohibitionist movement who had sought the legalisation of the whole plant.
The new law was used however in order to legitimise the opening of a new "cannabis light" market, based on a non-psychotropic cannabinoid, CBD. Inflorescences and extracts below the psychotropic threshold were proposed to consumers and new cannabis shops spread throughout the country. Prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists debated the legality of this new market. What did the law permit and what not?
The paper will delve into the mix of entrepreneurial intuition and political strategy that characterised the first attempts to open a commercial path to cannabis normalisation, challenging the limits or expanding the content of a law. Bridging anthropology of policies and law, it will interpret the Italian cannabis regulation as a policy arena resulting from the conflictual relationship between different actors around the regulatory space opened by the Law 242. It will situate the Law 242, as a policy instrument, within a broader social landscape, following different scales of action, moral stances and economic perspectives of certain social actors, from the national entrepreneur to a small growers association in Northern Italy.