Paper short abstract:

This research explores Ipanema Beach, focusing on its socio-spatialities in relation to its economic informalities. The Beach's specificities reproduce Rio de Janeiro's wider urban relations of segregation and inequality, inasmuch as it transforms them through the care promoted by informality.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores the geographies of Ipanema Beach, focusing on its socio-spatialities and its informal economic activities. It investigates the extent to which the specificities of Ipanema Beach reproduce or transform Rio de Janeiro's wider urban social relations of segregation and inequality, using postcolonial methodology and ethnographic fieldwork.

Theoretical concepts such as geographies of care, economic informality, democratic public space and Ipanema's demophobia are used to analyse the Beach's social relations between beach-goers and beach workers and the spatial relations between the Beach and the wider city. The research shows that the socio-spatialities of Ipanema Beach reproduce Rio's wider relations in ways such as othering between beach-goers, class and racial discrimination and violent conflict. Simultaneously, the context of Ipanema Beach also transforms wider urban relations by constituting socio-spatial interactions shaped on care that enhance community co-existence and de-stabilise wider urban segregation. Informal vendors practice care and sociability as a form of insurgent citizenship that responds to wider socio-economic instability. Care is practised through collective solidarity between beach workers, such as helping one another and keeping each other safe. The spatial circulation of informal vendors and their relations with beach-goers further promotes care, for instance keeping beach-goers safe and building convivial relationships based on respect.

As such, Ipanema Beach acts as a key arena in Rio by revealing how wider social relations can be transformed through care, making it a worthwhile site of geographical inquiry and offering constructive lessons 'from within' that can relationally transform Rio de Janeiro's wider socio-economic fabric.

Paper short abstract:

Some British musicians started a Chinese orchestra to commemorate the victims in the tragedy of Chinese cockle pickers at the beach of Morecombe Bay. This orchestra performs for Chinese communities to celebrate Chinese New Year. They also have global journey to exchange with Chinese musicians. Through their inter- cultural communication, these British musicians practise the concept of cultural integration.

Paper long abstract:

It is not a pilgrimage; however, it is a cultural exchange. Every autumn a group of British musicians travel to Hong Kong and perform Chinese music for Hong Kong audience.

They are the local musicians from Lancashire, UK. They participate weekly rehearsal at a music centre in Morecambe Bay. During the Chinese New Year, they perform Chinese music all over the county in Chinese communities to celebrate this traditional festival.

This group is called “the Long Walk Chinese Orchestra”, which was a music project launched as the healing response for a tragedy. It happened at Morecambe Bay during the period of Chinese New Year in 2004, while twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers drowned when they worked at this beach. These people’s death and the disclosure of the modern slavery shocked the Morecambe community. As the victims were illegal immigrants from the Fujian Province of China, the musicians from Morecambe started to learn Chinese music and organised this Chinese Orchestra.

The cross- cultural musical communication was stimulated by the beach tragedy, and then it constructed and expanded a social space filled with the people and knowledge about “the other culture”. In the UK, this orchestra has connected the local people, the Chinese communities and the Chinese students from Universities. In the global view, it promotes the Chinese culture such as daily life, traditional festivals and natural sceneries through musical language.

With the interviews and discussions with these musicians, this research argues the possibility of a cultural solution to the traumatic social events. In this case the music education has been applied to improve the awareness of cultural variety and cultural integration.

Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic pilot study of two English-speaking digital communities centred on therapeutic clay use revealed a distinct understanding of the body and health within microbial frameworks. The body was treated as porous to microbes, yet clearly bounded through people's understandings of toxicity.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary pilot study understandings of the healthy and unhealthy body amongst communities centred on the therapeutic use of clay. Research was conducted through participant-observation as well as interviews in two predominantly English/US-American digital communities centred on clays and interpreted through anthropological frameworks of the microbiome and toxicity. This was complemented by MIC determination and spotting of clay samples against E.coli to investigate potential probiotic or antibacterial effects.

Across both digital communities, people shared an image of the body as a porous yet clearly bounded container of microbes and micro-things that can enter and leave the body. The therapeutic function of clays used on their permeable bodies is that they "pull out" "toxins", "bacteria", "chemicals", and "impurities", thus providing control over the contents of the body. Intriguing to observe was that concepts of toxicity and non-toxic-ness crossed the boundaries of traditional nature-culture divides both inside and outside the body. Rather than a human body that is one with the microbes around it, the participants' bodies remained exclusive to the particles in and on them that they considered in-place. Through this, health became both an exploration of individuality and generalised into "things that are good or bad for you". This distinction suggests the necessity of an Anthropocene concept of the human beyond the Homo microbis to account for a new form of bodily exclusivity developing in response to wider spread awareness of the human microbiome amongst English-speaking digital communities.