Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Olivia Casagrande
(University of Sheffield)
Viola Castellano (University of Bayreuth)
Fabio Vanin
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Urban Space
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 16 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Addressing 'urban borderlands' as an analytical key concept for collaborative research practices at the crossroad of anthropology and geography, this panel focuses on these complex spatial configurations within metropolitan areas, investigating the physical, social and symbolic aspects they entail.
Long Abstract:
During the last years, the concepts of 'border' and 'borderlands' have become key within both geographical and anthropological studies focusing on frontier, migration, nationalism and (in)security (Andalzúa 1987; Alvarez 1995; Morehouse 2004; Agier 2016). Yet the most interesting feature of border-lands is the entanglement of their imaginative and concrete aspects, and the interdisciplinary shift required to grasp their complexity.
Not to be conceived of only as national frontiers and geopolitical borders, 'borderlands' represent spaces of friction, encounter and tension, to be often (but not only) found in the urban realm, unfolding their multiscalar and social production.
Aiming at building a reflection on 'urban borderlands' as an analytical key concept for collaborative research practices in between geography and anthropology, this panel focuses on these spatial configurations encompassing physical, social and symbolic aspects. We welcome contributions from both disciplines engaging with the transactional nature (Meeus, van Heur & Arnaut, 2019) of urban borderlands, spaces through which run boundary lines, as well as spaces that are lived and perceived as borders, without necessarily including physical divides but still representing areas of transition, friction, tension, mixture and negotiation.
Key for the analysis of how fractures are generated within the urban realm, engaging with exclusion, marginalization and processes of precariousness endured by certain population groups, the proposed focus also allows us to undertake the epistemological and methodological challenge of building exchanges between geography and anthropology by taking into consideration spatial, social, perceptual, and dimensions of the multiscalarity of borderlands and their reproduction within metropolitan areas.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the material and social production of urban borders in the context of communal production. It explores this through the relationship between reification, socialisation, and urban subjectivity amongst Ethiopian-Israeli Jews in the mixed Jewish-Palestinian city of Jaffa.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the material and social production of urban borders amongst Ethiopian-Israelis in a mixed Jewish-Palestinian city in contemporary Israel. Municipal governance regimes reify the Ethiopian population into a homogenous moral kehila (community), and socialise them into particular dati leumi (national-religious) networks. This is accompanied by discourses generated by veteran residents that stigmatise areas populated by Ethiopians. Yet ordinary Ethiopian residents voice criticisms of quotidian racism and produce new materialisations in the urban landscape — such as 2Pac graffiti tags and Ahmaric signed shops. This rearticulates borders, producing deterritorializations of urban space that run counter to the reifying narrative of kehila, as well as dominant conceptions of makom (Jewish place). As bordering is the default modality in a society hyper-aware of ethnonational and ethnic distinctions, borders are paradoxically both the source of urban segregation, and of the cultivation of distinctive urban subjectivities marking cultural and political reinvention.
Paper short abstract:
The paper provides an advance epistemic framework of individual life histories and alternate perspective to mainstream narratives on urban borderlands by locating commonalities and variations in borderlanders lived experiences in the context of the British-India Partition and its implications.
Paper long abstract:
The partition of British India in 1947 caused the biggest mass migration of the 20th century and a semantic and material partition of these borderlands affected communities on both sides of the territorial boundary in multiple ways. Impacting efficaciously the process of "bordering" of Selves against a factual or imagined "enemy Other". As a result, previously corresponding, often hybridized socio-cultural and religious traditions gradually transformed into means of conflict. Negotiations of citizenship and belonging came to be heavily influenced by hegemonic ethics of nationalism and statehood as well as religious conformism in contemporary society.
Locating the above with the help of displaced people at the borderlands of India and Pakistan is attempted in this paper. Questions of transnational migration in pursuit of "improved living conditions" and unable to meet aspirations reduces the migrants to remain outside the social stratification and receiving no state services and opportunities. Power dynamics at the urban borderlands including the village as well as the state level further marginalises their aspirations. The displaced community remains as outsiders in the power triangle of state, regional elites and local residents. Sense of social conflict, othering, lack of mediation, dialogue, negotiations are aspects that will be unpacked with the help of the Pak-Hindu community located at the borderlands of India and Pakistan specifically in Rajasthan state.
The paper provides an advance epistemic framework of individual life histories and alternate perspective to mainstream narratives on urban borderlands by locating one's self through commonalities and variations in borderlanders 'everyday lived experiences'.
Paper short abstract:
The Israeli colonization over the Palestinian territories have shaped imaginaries and the way people understand borders. The city of Ramallah is therefore moulded by rumours.
Paper long abstract:
Ramallah, the Palestinian ersatz of capital located at 16 kilometres from Jerusalem, is not a megalopolis and it counts between 125.000 and 200.000 inhabitants. Nevertheless, numerous rumours and imaginaries shape the city as well as inhabitants' practices. At the same time, original inhabitants' discourses show a distance, a dangerousness of people and places "outside" the limits of the city centre (these imaginaries are not only correlated to the Israeli State, but they include also refugee camps, city's suburbs or other Palestinian cities). Such imaginaries produce precise movements which reveal some profound fractures among its Palestinian inhabitants.
My intervention will be based on an ethnographic fieldwork lead between 2012 and 2019 on youths living in Ramallah. It will explore the existence of different kinds of borders: institutional frontiers (refugee camps, Israeli settlements and wall, A-B-C administrative zone) and imaginary ones. In particular, it will be centred on the way the supposed character of people living in some precise areas influence mobilities of youths. Looking on their daily trajectories and internal borders between city's territorialities, my paper will deal with minorities, and internal and institutional hierarchies.
How do people perceive different territorialities of the city? How do they traverse them? How do perceptions contribute to the making of Ramallah and to inhabitants' daily geographies of the city?
Paper short abstract:
Mounting global migration and rising Inequalities bring new challenges to the urban borderlands. This paper suggests that we can better define local conditions and needs of marginalised ethnic minorities based on a mixed methods analysis of the urban periphery n Stockholm, Sweden.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses one of the fundamental societal transformations of the 21st century; the rapid urbanization of our planet bringing with it new opportunities and challenges. Currently, as a result of mounting global urban migration and rising Inequalities, there are significant debates as to the role of urban citizenship, urban politics and planning as such, in addressing the challenges and needs of immigrants and minorities living in marginal spaces in the urban borderlands of larger cities. This research suggests that via a use of mixed methods there is potential to better define immigrant minority populations local conditions and needs based on interviews and spatial analysis in Stockholm, Sweden. The research evaluates; (1) the nation state role in planning for urban bordering (2) spatial divisions at the city scale, and (3) the role of local community and civil society in, and individual's perception of, these urban bordering processes.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this ethnography of landscape and territorial governance is to demonstrate how the local Arab Alawite population of Defne, is now in the process of negotiating and reclaiming the legitimacy of its sense of belonging and cultural citizenship during everyday spatial and social practices.
Paper long abstract:
The AKP's (Justice and Development Party) new metropolitan municipality system, Law No. 6360 in Turkey, has fostered the emergence of new urban issues regarding the legitimacy of local and national discourses of identity formation and spatial belonging in the daily lives of the Arab Alawite population of the city of Defne, in Hatay. As a result, Defne is a new, ethnically segregated district that has been crafted out of a few of the main central neighborhoods, once a portion of Antioch's previous town planning.Therefore, the aim of this study is to demonstrate how the population of Defne, is now in the process of negotiating and reclaiming the legitimacy of its spatial and cultural citizenship. Consequently, this research provides an ethnography of landscape and territorial governance by blending observational techniques, based in-depth interviews and discourse analysis. The fieldwork research was conducted in Defne, 2019. In total, forty people were interviewed. According to the data points, the AKP's decentralization reform (Bayraktar & Massicard, 2012) and national discourses of cultural politics (Tambar, 2014; White, 2012) in Hatay, Defne's landscape appears as a new, yet symbolic constructed public space (Ben Rafael, 2009) that involves the Arab Alawite community's contestation of their cultural identity (Hall, 1990) and sense of spatial belonging. Moreover, the Arab Alawites are acting collectively as a new municipality power and, as aware citizens, are negotiating and reclaiming their cultural citizenship by contesting national notions of territorial governance through everyday spatial practices within the public space.
Paper short abstract:
The Green Line, the border that cuts through the capital city of Cyprus becomes a space of identity production and negotiation as urban explorers penetrate its delicate abandonment
Paper long abstract:
Urban borders represent the oxymoron of cohabitation and division. While symbolic borders are often observed as anthropological spaces of liminality and/or division, physical borders present spaces where anthropology and geography may come together to understand spatialized expressions of division. In Cyprus, the contested border known as the Green Line cuts through the capital city dividing the two main ethnic groups on the island. Identities are formed and challenged against the border, while Cypriots struggle to establish themselves in a post-conflict and post-colonial present. The old town, engulfed in the circular Venetian walls, becomes a semi-circle of exploration for many groups of explorers who seek to negotiate the past and present. The border, apparently penetrable only through a small number of official crossings, remains as a strip of destruction and abandonment that hosts a life of its own. The explorers that feature in this visual paper challenge the border's rigid physicality through expeditions to its physical and symbolic core. This paper explores the borderland's urban decay as a space of creativity, inspiration and identity production through the perceptions of urban explorers. The geopolitical context of the urban borderland creates a space for the negotiation of identity at a multiscalar perspective. Reproductions of the past through various narratives, such as heritage and tourism, are challenged in this observation of the ruin as the authentic remainder of the past. This paper is informed by a 15-month long ethnographic research.
Paper short abstract:
With the 1947 Partition of British India and the burgeoning stream of refugees as the backdrop, this paper analyses how the social and mental scape of the urban space of Calcutta came to be fractured along various fault lines that created borders--more 'felt' rather than 'seen'.
Paper long abstract:
This paper does not focus on borders or borderland per se, but seeks to flesh out the dynamics and varying equations played out in the very heartland of an urban centre, located away from the margins of the nation-state. Taking the city of Calcutta as the site of study against the backdrop of the 1947 Partition, this paper attempts to explore the psyche of the inhabitants that translated into fractured social space within the city, leading to pockets/enclaves/ghettos. Culling information from a wide array of sources, namely, oral narratives, memoirs, government documents, the paper would try to identify the fissures and fractures among the residents of the city which eventually was reflected in the re-contouring of the living pattern. Fault-lines operated at several levels—between the migrants and the local Hindu population (both sharing the same religion and speaking the same mother-tongue with variations in dialect), between the migrants (based on their original place of residence back in East Bengal), between the local Muslims and the migrants (both belonging to the same ethnic stock and often speaking the same language with variations in dialect), between the local Muslim population (both sharing the same religion but variations in economic status and language)—the borders that remain etched in the recesses of the mind and get translated in the social scape of the metropolis. Thus, though located away from the border in the physical sense of the term, the metropolis displays an uneven socio-cultural-linguistic topography with several 'zones of contestation.'
Paper short abstract:
This case study examines how a guided walk, with its sequence of stories presented from the past and the present day can be choreographed with examining urban landmarks whilst walking through streets in London to provoke a reconsideration of accepted cultural values and norms.
Paper long abstract:
Guided walks offer a sociable learning setting where multiple layers of social / cultural issues can be presented to participants, to convey complex and unexpected interpretations of our cities' histories. A guided walk around the perimeter of Lincoln's Inn Fields is presented as a case study, to investigate how story telling in an experiential setting can be a powerful presentation medium for learning about the city, and for raising deep questions about shared cultural values. Lincoln's Inn Fields, with its history of illicit gambling activities residing alongside "respectable" renowned institutions, offers the ideal setting for investigating cultural and social issues. Iconic landmarks - the site of the demolished Debtor's Law Court, the architect John Soane's House and Museum, the infamous Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, the residence of contemporary artist Anish Kapoor - provide the backdrop for descriptions of little known events excavated from present-day and Georgian / Victorian times. Contemporary attitudes are evaluated by comparing historical and contemporary scenarios across a range of themes (the duality of homelessness and conspicuous material wealth, obsessional ambition and professional reputations, roles of death and legacy, affluence and indebtedness, Victorian attitudes and current social norms, social responsibility and class divide). This case study gleans light on how carefully selected narratives can be astutely orchestrated with the choreographed movement through city streets, to provoke a discussion between people who had gathered informally for a one off event, and leave with a thoughtful reconsideration of their assumptions and accepted cultural values.