Interviews with C&S Authors |
VOLUME 30, ISSUE 2 (AUGUST 2018)
“Mostly with White Girls”: Settlement, Spatiality, and Emergent Interracial Sexualities in a Canadian Prairie City
Susan Frohlick, Paula Migliardi, & Adey Mohamed
The following answers are from ADEY MOHAMED, a co-author of this article who was the lead community researcher on the research team. The lead community researcher role meant that Adey was the community liaison in Winnipeg and worked very closely with the youth participants to earn their trust and get them interested in the research project while she also got to know them enough to learn something about what the research project and themes meant to them. Adey is originally from Kenya and came to Canada about fifteen years ago as a young adult and sponsored refugee. She is finishing a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba and is a Research Assistant with the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Sue Frohlick.
1. Why should readers who are not specifically interested interracial sexuality or African immigrant and refugee youth in a Canadian city read your article?
Readers who are not specifically interested in interracial sexuality or African immigrant and refugee youth in a Canadian city should read this article because it shows the important role played by youth in breaking boundaries of race, culture and even religion. Moreover, it shows how black-white binaries are under transformation and are partly linked to housing and social-spatial practices within diverse cities.
2. How did this research project come about?
This research project came about as way to debunk theory that African newcomer youth are at higher risk of HIV than other youth groups. While conducting the research we realized that the youth were, in their daily lives as racialized immigrants and refugees, at higher risk of school drop-out and gang recruitment and that in reality many African youth were already well informed about the use of protection that they have learned from their country of origin, through schools, billboards, social media and from friends and relatives who were living with HIV or knew people who were living with HIV.
3. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
We used qualitative ethnographic research methods wherein a small team of researchers went into communities and interviewed youth, face-to-face, often more than once and involved collecting life stories or mini oral histories. A few of the interviews were walking interviews, where we traced the youth participants pathways of settlement in Winnipeg with them and they told us stories as we walked together. The project was linked with non-profit agencies who worked with African youth e.g. in schools, and after school programs, where team members volunteered time to gain trust from youth and learn firsthand about their everyday social worlds. We trained youth as peer researchers who recruited participants and then led focus groups themselves. We also interviewed stakeholders who are community leaders directly working with the youth.
We held events in the community where we invited youths from community, called “Junior Cafés,” to discuss issues affecting them, and a group of six youth hosted a HIV awareness “Pop Up Event” in Central Park, performing theatre games and involving the audience in questions and answers about HIV stereotypes and stigma.
BENEFIT- Most importantly, the youth benefited from the focus groups and the Junior Cafés- these gave them opportunity to discuss otherwise “taboo” topics like interracial dating and marriage, and also created safe space for them to be free of judgments and share their experiences. The downtown neighborhoods provided a bounded space where we could easily draw the line for who was included in the research and also easily access on foot.
CHALLENGES— The downtown area of Winnipeg is a complex social milieu, historically, contemporarily, and is gendered, classed, and racialized in complicated ways, and, for one example of many challenges we faced, it was often easier for us to access the young men who had more mobility than young women who tended not to be allowed the same freedoms.
4. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
I (Adey) could see this research building off the interracial sexuality aspects of the youths’ lives and subjectivities to the issue of transnational dating to better understand how that trajectory takes place. What I mean is that many of the youth we interviewed spoke of their country of origin and how they were still dating or of their first sexual encounters in refugee camps or as asylum seekers in a neighboring country. This complicates what’s commonly understood about settlement and immigrant youth sexuality as local or limited to one urban setting.
1. Why should readers who are not specifically interested interracial sexuality or African immigrant and refugee youth in a Canadian city read your article?
Readers who are not specifically interested in interracial sexuality or African immigrant and refugee youth in a Canadian city should read this article because it shows the important role played by youth in breaking boundaries of race, culture and even religion. Moreover, it shows how black-white binaries are under transformation and are partly linked to housing and social-spatial practices within diverse cities.
2. How did this research project come about?
This research project came about as way to debunk theory that African newcomer youth are at higher risk of HIV than other youth groups. While conducting the research we realized that the youth were, in their daily lives as racialized immigrants and refugees, at higher risk of school drop-out and gang recruitment and that in reality many African youth were already well informed about the use of protection that they have learned from their country of origin, through schools, billboards, social media and from friends and relatives who were living with HIV or knew people who were living with HIV.
3. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
We used qualitative ethnographic research methods wherein a small team of researchers went into communities and interviewed youth, face-to-face, often more than once and involved collecting life stories or mini oral histories. A few of the interviews were walking interviews, where we traced the youth participants pathways of settlement in Winnipeg with them and they told us stories as we walked together. The project was linked with non-profit agencies who worked with African youth e.g. in schools, and after school programs, where team members volunteered time to gain trust from youth and learn firsthand about their everyday social worlds. We trained youth as peer researchers who recruited participants and then led focus groups themselves. We also interviewed stakeholders who are community leaders directly working with the youth.
We held events in the community where we invited youths from community, called “Junior Cafés,” to discuss issues affecting them, and a group of six youth hosted a HIV awareness “Pop Up Event” in Central Park, performing theatre games and involving the audience in questions and answers about HIV stereotypes and stigma.
BENEFIT- Most importantly, the youth benefited from the focus groups and the Junior Cafés- these gave them opportunity to discuss otherwise “taboo” topics like interracial dating and marriage, and also created safe space for them to be free of judgments and share their experiences. The downtown neighborhoods provided a bounded space where we could easily draw the line for who was included in the research and also easily access on foot.
CHALLENGES— The downtown area of Winnipeg is a complex social milieu, historically, contemporarily, and is gendered, classed, and racialized in complicated ways, and, for one example of many challenges we faced, it was often easier for us to access the young men who had more mobility than young women who tended not to be allowed the same freedoms.
4. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
I (Adey) could see this research building off the interracial sexuality aspects of the youths’ lives and subjectivities to the issue of transnational dating to better understand how that trajectory takes place. What I mean is that many of the youth we interviewed spoke of their country of origin and how they were still dating or of their first sexual encounters in refugee camps or as asylum seekers in a neighboring country. This complicates what’s commonly understood about settlement and immigrant youth sexuality as local or limited to one urban setting.
Housing the contingent life course: domestic Aspiration and extreme poverty in peruvian shantytowns
kristin skrabut
1. In a sentence or two, how does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
“Housing the Contingent Life Course” encourages urbanists to examine how life course dynamics, domestic life projects, and livelihood strategies shape the built environment. Relatedly, it asks scholars to consider the social, political, economic, and institutional structures that produce informal urban landscapes that are too often read in aesthetic terms and as monolithic sites of “extreme poverty.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
A central project of this text is to apply Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’ concept of the “contingent life course” to an analysis of urban space. My formal interviews and everyday interactions with shantytown residents, surveyors, and city officials revealed a common tendency to conflate the physical development of shantytown homes with the familial development and moral standing of inhabitants. This tendency was likewise refracted in the literature on urban development, which projects particular development narratives onto shantytowns (often called “progressive housing” sites due to the ways residents are expected to build their homes progressively over time), and interprets lack of movement through different urban development stages as signals of poverty and stagnation. Without discounting the deleterious effects of precarious homes or inadequate infrastructure, this article draws on a “contingent life course” perspective – which replaces a focus on inevitable cycles with an emphasis on peoples’ fraught and uncertain decision-making as they pursue particular life projects – to illuminate the diverse ways people use houses in the periphery and to demonstrate how these uses inform patterns of peripheral urban development. Moreover, I suggest that anthropologists and policy makers alike perpetuate dangerous misreadings of these settlements when they analyze them in terms of disembodied cycles and trajectories, rather than considering the historically and institutionally informed aspirations, strategies, and insecurities that produce these urban forms.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in housing and informal urbanization in Peru read your article?
My analysis of the relationship between informal urbanization and contingent life course in Peru has important implications for scholars studying urbanization and housing in other parts of the world, not least because the issues, policies, and perceptions of urban space that I grapple with in this piece themselves have global reach. First, as Ananya Roy argues, the policy fixation on the built environment and what poverty looks like results in part from the Eurocentric gaze that dominates urban planning and policy fields, and is therefore likely to shape urban development policies around the world. Attending to the narratives and life projects of people who integrate these sites into their livelihood strategies, as I do here, may be one way to combat this. Additionally, the “progressive housing” and titling initiatives that inform housing strategies in Peru have been adopted by organizations like UN-Habitat and the World Bank and promoted worldwide as model policies. As such, the ideologies and imagined development trajectories I describe here may also have force in other world regions. Finally, as population structures and demographic regimes around the world shift, policy makers and anthropologists will need to pay more attention to the implications of these changes for the built environment. I hope that my application of the “contingent life course” perspective to urban development in Peru can serve as an important step in this direction.
“Housing the Contingent Life Course” encourages urbanists to examine how life course dynamics, domestic life projects, and livelihood strategies shape the built environment. Relatedly, it asks scholars to consider the social, political, economic, and institutional structures that produce informal urban landscapes that are too often read in aesthetic terms and as monolithic sites of “extreme poverty.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
A central project of this text is to apply Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’ concept of the “contingent life course” to an analysis of urban space. My formal interviews and everyday interactions with shantytown residents, surveyors, and city officials revealed a common tendency to conflate the physical development of shantytown homes with the familial development and moral standing of inhabitants. This tendency was likewise refracted in the literature on urban development, which projects particular development narratives onto shantytowns (often called “progressive housing” sites due to the ways residents are expected to build their homes progressively over time), and interprets lack of movement through different urban development stages as signals of poverty and stagnation. Without discounting the deleterious effects of precarious homes or inadequate infrastructure, this article draws on a “contingent life course” perspective – which replaces a focus on inevitable cycles with an emphasis on peoples’ fraught and uncertain decision-making as they pursue particular life projects – to illuminate the diverse ways people use houses in the periphery and to demonstrate how these uses inform patterns of peripheral urban development. Moreover, I suggest that anthropologists and policy makers alike perpetuate dangerous misreadings of these settlements when they analyze them in terms of disembodied cycles and trajectories, rather than considering the historically and institutionally informed aspirations, strategies, and insecurities that produce these urban forms.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in housing and informal urbanization in Peru read your article?
My analysis of the relationship between informal urbanization and contingent life course in Peru has important implications for scholars studying urbanization and housing in other parts of the world, not least because the issues, policies, and perceptions of urban space that I grapple with in this piece themselves have global reach. First, as Ananya Roy argues, the policy fixation on the built environment and what poverty looks like results in part from the Eurocentric gaze that dominates urban planning and policy fields, and is therefore likely to shape urban development policies around the world. Attending to the narratives and life projects of people who integrate these sites into their livelihood strategies, as I do here, may be one way to combat this. Additionally, the “progressive housing” and titling initiatives that inform housing strategies in Peru have been adopted by organizations like UN-Habitat and the World Bank and promoted worldwide as model policies. As such, the ideologies and imagined development trajectories I describe here may also have force in other world regions. Finally, as population structures and demographic regimes around the world shift, policy makers and anthropologists will need to pay more attention to the implications of these changes for the built environment. I hope that my application of the “contingent life course” perspective to urban development in Peru can serve as an important step in this direction.
"WE ARE VISIONING IT": ASPIRATIONAL PLANNING AND THE MATERIAL LANDSCAPES OF DELHI'S METRO
RASHMI SADANA
1. In a sentence or two, how does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
My article adds ethnographic dimension to the idea and practice of urban planning which has become important to anthropological studies of urban space and infrastructure as well as theorizations of global cities. By detailing examples of what I call “aspirational planning,” I show how everyday practices, ideas, and imaginaries carry and confirm the values of the globalized technocratic class.
2. Why should readers who are not specifically interested in urban space and transport infrastructure in India read your article?
My article is about a specific material object - the Delhi Metro – but it’s really a story about how people imagine and enact (or don’t) ideas about equality in a megacity. I got interested in public transportation as a way to study cities because of the convergence I saw between social mobility, public space, and urban development. I was intrigued by the idea of metro systems as “social levelers” as well as capital-intensive behemoths that benefit – through raised property values and development corridors - the already wealthy. I wanted to probe this seeming contradiction, one prevalent in major cities across the globe.
3. How did this research project come about?
In the mid-2000s I was in Delhi finishing the research for my first book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, when I rode the Delhi Metro (which had opened in December 2002) for the first time. Having gone around Delhi for years in cars, on buses, and in auto-rickshaws, it was a completely new experience of the city. Two things stood out for me: (1) how this multi-line system had been built on and under an already dense urban landscape; and (2) how different classes of people were sitting side by side in a new kind of public space. I became interested in the new forms of sociality I saw on the trains, as well as the impact of stations on neighborhoods and market areas across the city. I also became drawn to the ends of the Metro lines, which went into the hinterlands of the city and were driving development in a particular way. I’ve long appreciated metro and subway systems in other cities – New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, etc. – but I don’t think I ever would have thought to study the metro in any of those places. There is something about the social and physical impact of the Delhi Metro that is totally unique – and for me - compelling.
4. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose those methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
I relied heavily on participant observation for this project, which enabled me to get to know the far-reaches of the city like never before (and to come to see that what were ends of the city for some were a set of beginnings for others) and meet an incredibly diverse set of city-dwellers. I rode the Metro, observed people, and often talked to them. I’ve clocked nearly four thousand hours on the Metro over the last ten years. It’s a different kind of participant observation than what you would do to study a particular community or geographic neighborhood. I would rarely see the same person twice. This was challenging at first since I had to figure out what it was exactly that I was studying. One day it might be urban anonymity, the next the relationship between an employer and her maidservant on the train. I wanted to capture the sense of the everyday, and so that meant riding the Metro as much as I could. As a counter-balance to my Metro riding, I did a lot of pre-arranged interviews – with architects and planners (as shown in this article), but also Metro officials, government bureaucrats, politicians, urban activists, auto-, e-, and cycle-rickshaw drivers, street vendors, and the list goes on. My story of the Metro is also a story about urban development in India – how and why agencies work and don’t work together; how poorer sections of society are further disenfranchised by the Metro as huge investment goes toward what is essentially a luxury good; how the Metro symbolizes and helps people enact an aspirational culture; and how Delhi’s Metro has become a blueprint for similar systems across India. A third method was following the discourse on the Metro in print and digital media. This kept me up-to-date on each phase of the construction and what the public mood about the Metro was. It was also a way to see how the press for the most part championed the Metro – which was a stated strategy of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. The DMRC knew they needed public support for such a massive infrastructure project, and they basically got it.
My article adds ethnographic dimension to the idea and practice of urban planning which has become important to anthropological studies of urban space and infrastructure as well as theorizations of global cities. By detailing examples of what I call “aspirational planning,” I show how everyday practices, ideas, and imaginaries carry and confirm the values of the globalized technocratic class.
2. Why should readers who are not specifically interested in urban space and transport infrastructure in India read your article?
My article is about a specific material object - the Delhi Metro – but it’s really a story about how people imagine and enact (or don’t) ideas about equality in a megacity. I got interested in public transportation as a way to study cities because of the convergence I saw between social mobility, public space, and urban development. I was intrigued by the idea of metro systems as “social levelers” as well as capital-intensive behemoths that benefit – through raised property values and development corridors - the already wealthy. I wanted to probe this seeming contradiction, one prevalent in major cities across the globe.
3. How did this research project come about?
In the mid-2000s I was in Delhi finishing the research for my first book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, when I rode the Delhi Metro (which had opened in December 2002) for the first time. Having gone around Delhi for years in cars, on buses, and in auto-rickshaws, it was a completely new experience of the city. Two things stood out for me: (1) how this multi-line system had been built on and under an already dense urban landscape; and (2) how different classes of people were sitting side by side in a new kind of public space. I became interested in the new forms of sociality I saw on the trains, as well as the impact of stations on neighborhoods and market areas across the city. I also became drawn to the ends of the Metro lines, which went into the hinterlands of the city and were driving development in a particular way. I’ve long appreciated metro and subway systems in other cities – New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, etc. – but I don’t think I ever would have thought to study the metro in any of those places. There is something about the social and physical impact of the Delhi Metro that is totally unique – and for me - compelling.
4. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose those methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
I relied heavily on participant observation for this project, which enabled me to get to know the far-reaches of the city like never before (and to come to see that what were ends of the city for some were a set of beginnings for others) and meet an incredibly diverse set of city-dwellers. I rode the Metro, observed people, and often talked to them. I’ve clocked nearly four thousand hours on the Metro over the last ten years. It’s a different kind of participant observation than what you would do to study a particular community or geographic neighborhood. I would rarely see the same person twice. This was challenging at first since I had to figure out what it was exactly that I was studying. One day it might be urban anonymity, the next the relationship between an employer and her maidservant on the train. I wanted to capture the sense of the everyday, and so that meant riding the Metro as much as I could. As a counter-balance to my Metro riding, I did a lot of pre-arranged interviews – with architects and planners (as shown in this article), but also Metro officials, government bureaucrats, politicians, urban activists, auto-, e-, and cycle-rickshaw drivers, street vendors, and the list goes on. My story of the Metro is also a story about urban development in India – how and why agencies work and don’t work together; how poorer sections of society are further disenfranchised by the Metro as huge investment goes toward what is essentially a luxury good; how the Metro symbolizes and helps people enact an aspirational culture; and how Delhi’s Metro has become a blueprint for similar systems across India. A third method was following the discourse on the Metro in print and digital media. This kept me up-to-date on each phase of the construction and what the public mood about the Metro was. It was also a way to see how the press for the most part championed the Metro – which was a stated strategy of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. The DMRC knew they needed public support for such a massive infrastructure project, and they basically got it.
VOLUME 30, ISSUE 1 (APRIL 2018)
Urban Public Art: Geographies of Co‐Production Pages
Urban Public Art: Geographies of Co‐Production Pages
Coming soon.
VOLUME 29, ISSUE 2 (AUGUST 2017)
Introduction to Special Issue: Cities of Refuge and Cities of Strangers: Care and Hospitality in the City
FARHAN SAMANANI
1. How does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
Cities are dense and busy, and becoming more so. There’s been a lot of reflection on how the urban form might influence the sorts of social relations we are able to form with strangers. I argue that focusing in on relationships of care and hospitality are particularly important because they often entail very close, intimate attention paid to strangers. Such relationships aren’t always easy to form and sustain, and looking at how they come about can tell us a lot about the possibilities and limitations of city life on our social relations more broadly.
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
There has been a lot of very interesting writing on care over the past few decades, that I find particularly useful. Stemming from feminist debates around the value of domestic labour, in the 80s and 90s a group of feminist philosophers started writing about care not just as an activity we do from time to time, but as an ethic – as a different way of thinking about how we relate to one another. Their basic idea was that care, as an ethic, involves recognizing that dependency and interconnection are core elements of human life, and that we can shape ourselves in fulfilling ways by attending to the experiences, dependencies and possibilities for connections of others. This was a view, in other words, that didn’t see people as stand-alone individuals, but as fundamentally shaped and enriched by connection.
This view has gone on to shape a range of more recent work that has traced the ways in which caring relationships are formed. And this work has tended to emphasize that such relationships are often not easy to build. When we care for someone, we take some responsibility for shaping their experience of life in this world. But the experiences of others are notoriously difficult things to communicate and understand – think of someone trying to explain why their particular family dog was the best dog, or why, even though their partner can act like a jerk sometimes, they still love them. We might be able to identify with such experiences at a general level, but normally we do so by projecting our own experience onto that of others. To actually understand another person in their own terms – to get at their personal, particular experience of having a pet, or being in a challenging relationship – often requires very careful and empathetic attention to people’s lives. And what scholars of care have emphasized is that these relationships therefore take time to form, and work to sustain.
Because of this difficulty, care can go wrong very easily. Think of the struggle care workers might face with dementia patients, trying to get them to eat or wash, when the patients themselves feel disoriented and afraid and don’t want to do any of those things. The scholar Annmarie Mol has likewise written about diabetics who keep giving themselves the wrong doses of insulin, because they’re just frustrated and fed up with living with this complicated disease that constantly feels like it’s limiting their life. Getting care right, then, means fitting it into the complexities of life for those being cared for. And certain technologies and tools, like blood monitors for diabetics, or family albums for dementia patients, might help with this process. But others can hinder it. This is where the city comes in – as a collection of different buildings, technologies, and images all arranged in a particular way, which can sometimes hinder care, but sometimes enable people to find new ways of caring for one another.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in care and hospitality, read your article?
Care and hospitality might sound like niche topics – they might sound like they are only relevant to those interested in nursing or hotels, or that sort of thing. But what the feminist philosophers who’ve written on care have argued is that it’s a fundamental dimension of all human life – that we are all not only dependent on the attention and support of others, but that we become the people we are only because of these connections. There are certain moments, like if you end up in hospital, or if you go to a restaurant or go to stay with a relative or strange, where your dependence on care and hospitality become particularly obvious. But my article, and our special issue more broadly, has attempted to highly the fact that care and hospitality are also just a part of everyday life.
For example, when you vent to a colleague about how your boss has no sympathy for your schedule, you feel a bit better afterwards because at least that colleague understands – that’s a small act of care right there. Or, sticking to the workplace, if you’re feeling uneasy in your desk chair – if you’re wondering if you might do better with a standing desk, or a yoga ball – you’re effectively thinking about your workplace as a place of hospitality; you’re asking if the technologies (and people) there, are able to accommodate the particularities of your life, whether that’s your bad back, your tendency to fidget, or whatever. What we’ve tried to highlight in this issue is that thinking more in terms of care and hospitality brings our relationships and dependencies with other people and with our environment more into light. These relationships play a huge role in making us human and in shaping our experiences, and attending to them may allow us to live more humanely with ourselves and others.
Cities are dense and busy, and becoming more so. There’s been a lot of reflection on how the urban form might influence the sorts of social relations we are able to form with strangers. I argue that focusing in on relationships of care and hospitality are particularly important because they often entail very close, intimate attention paid to strangers. Such relationships aren’t always easy to form and sustain, and looking at how they come about can tell us a lot about the possibilities and limitations of city life on our social relations more broadly.
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
There has been a lot of very interesting writing on care over the past few decades, that I find particularly useful. Stemming from feminist debates around the value of domestic labour, in the 80s and 90s a group of feminist philosophers started writing about care not just as an activity we do from time to time, but as an ethic – as a different way of thinking about how we relate to one another. Their basic idea was that care, as an ethic, involves recognizing that dependency and interconnection are core elements of human life, and that we can shape ourselves in fulfilling ways by attending to the experiences, dependencies and possibilities for connections of others. This was a view, in other words, that didn’t see people as stand-alone individuals, but as fundamentally shaped and enriched by connection.
This view has gone on to shape a range of more recent work that has traced the ways in which caring relationships are formed. And this work has tended to emphasize that such relationships are often not easy to build. When we care for someone, we take some responsibility for shaping their experience of life in this world. But the experiences of others are notoriously difficult things to communicate and understand – think of someone trying to explain why their particular family dog was the best dog, or why, even though their partner can act like a jerk sometimes, they still love them. We might be able to identify with such experiences at a general level, but normally we do so by projecting our own experience onto that of others. To actually understand another person in their own terms – to get at their personal, particular experience of having a pet, or being in a challenging relationship – often requires very careful and empathetic attention to people’s lives. And what scholars of care have emphasized is that these relationships therefore take time to form, and work to sustain.
Because of this difficulty, care can go wrong very easily. Think of the struggle care workers might face with dementia patients, trying to get them to eat or wash, when the patients themselves feel disoriented and afraid and don’t want to do any of those things. The scholar Annmarie Mol has likewise written about diabetics who keep giving themselves the wrong doses of insulin, because they’re just frustrated and fed up with living with this complicated disease that constantly feels like it’s limiting their life. Getting care right, then, means fitting it into the complexities of life for those being cared for. And certain technologies and tools, like blood monitors for diabetics, or family albums for dementia patients, might help with this process. But others can hinder it. This is where the city comes in – as a collection of different buildings, technologies, and images all arranged in a particular way, which can sometimes hinder care, but sometimes enable people to find new ways of caring for one another.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in care and hospitality, read your article?
Care and hospitality might sound like niche topics – they might sound like they are only relevant to those interested in nursing or hotels, or that sort of thing. But what the feminist philosophers who’ve written on care have argued is that it’s a fundamental dimension of all human life – that we are all not only dependent on the attention and support of others, but that we become the people we are only because of these connections. There are certain moments, like if you end up in hospital, or if you go to a restaurant or go to stay with a relative or strange, where your dependence on care and hospitality become particularly obvious. But my article, and our special issue more broadly, has attempted to highly the fact that care and hospitality are also just a part of everyday life.
For example, when you vent to a colleague about how your boss has no sympathy for your schedule, you feel a bit better afterwards because at least that colleague understands – that’s a small act of care right there. Or, sticking to the workplace, if you’re feeling uneasy in your desk chair – if you’re wondering if you might do better with a standing desk, or a yoga ball – you’re effectively thinking about your workplace as a place of hospitality; you’re asking if the technologies (and people) there, are able to accommodate the particularities of your life, whether that’s your bad back, your tendency to fidget, or whatever. What we’ve tried to highlight in this issue is that thinking more in terms of care and hospitality brings our relationships and dependencies with other people and with our environment more into light. These relationships play a huge role in making us human and in shaping our experiences, and attending to them may allow us to live more humanely with ourselves and others.
L'Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City
PATRICK MCKEARNEY
1. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
I try to understand contemporary care for people with learning disabilities through the unlikely prism of Hannah Arendt’s account of Ancient Athens in The Human Condition (1958). I do so because Arendt connects questions about dependence and care, to the matter of how we become political subjects.
Rather than focusing simply on the public or individual qualities that make a citizen, Arendt also looks at how developing those qualities relies on acts of care and relationships of dependence. In particular, she provides a framework for describing how different forms of citizenship involve relegating or promoting considerations of dependence to the private or the public sphere.
I find this a particularly helpful framework for thinking about the vexed and highly contentious relationships between public and private, dependence and independence, in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities in the UK. In particular, Arendt’s categories allows me to pull out what is so different about my field site, L’Arche: in which the private sphere of the household - the site of key relationships of dependence - is also the space in which people with intellectual disabilities achieve their most significant form of social and political belonging.
2. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in dependence read your article?
The relationship between dependence and political belonging is of immense important to my informants. But not to them alone.
Questions about dependence, and the necessity of overcoming it, have typically occupied a prominent place in philosophical and political debates about what it means to be a human subject and to engage in and contribute to society. In recent years, feminist scholars, urban studies academics, authors from within disability studies, and anthropologists have re-examined the role that reliance might play in human life – frequently concluding that our need for others might best be imagined as not a hindrance, but an opportunity.
My paper draws on and contributes to this conversation through a particularly compelling case study of a L’Arche community that places dependence at the centre of its social life, in the context of a political and economic system that places great stock on autonomy. In investigating this example, the article develops a way of attending to the complex interaction between ideologies and practicalities in the formation of patterns of human reliance.
3. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
I am currently working to produce a book that examines the ethical dynamics of caring relationships within L’Arche. I take L’Arche’s unique approach to the dependence of people with intellectualities on others as my starting point, and go on to explore the consequences of it for the lives of the carers and the cared for in this community. What does it mean for people with intellectual disabilities to rely so extensively on the care of others? In a social environment deliberately designed around the needs of these individuals, is their dependence on others of any ethical or pragmatic consequence? Or does L’Arche’s way of providing care enable these individuals, typically excluded from social life, to occupy a prominent, active, and valuable role in its communal life?
The book asks these questions of my ethnographic material in order to develop a way to examine them in other contexts too. I am currently beginning a research project that looks at these issues outside of the setting of the developed capitalist economy of the UK, in countries where welfare funding is far less extensive than it is in Britain. In situations, for instance, where relationships of reliance are widespread, and autonomy not held as a particular value, how do people with intellectual disabilities fare? What kinds of relationships of dependence are they involved in, and what are the consequences of these modes of reliance for the formation of these individuals as ethical and economic subjects? My aim in asking these questions, of the limit case of people who are especially reliant on others, is to generate an open and comparative conversation about the social context of disability, need, and reliance – a discussion that stands to extend our understanding of the nature of subjectivity, care, and dependence more generally.
I try to understand contemporary care for people with learning disabilities through the unlikely prism of Hannah Arendt’s account of Ancient Athens in The Human Condition (1958). I do so because Arendt connects questions about dependence and care, to the matter of how we become political subjects.
Rather than focusing simply on the public or individual qualities that make a citizen, Arendt also looks at how developing those qualities relies on acts of care and relationships of dependence. In particular, she provides a framework for describing how different forms of citizenship involve relegating or promoting considerations of dependence to the private or the public sphere.
I find this a particularly helpful framework for thinking about the vexed and highly contentious relationships between public and private, dependence and independence, in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities in the UK. In particular, Arendt’s categories allows me to pull out what is so different about my field site, L’Arche: in which the private sphere of the household - the site of key relationships of dependence - is also the space in which people with intellectual disabilities achieve their most significant form of social and political belonging.
2. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in dependence read your article?
The relationship between dependence and political belonging is of immense important to my informants. But not to them alone.
Questions about dependence, and the necessity of overcoming it, have typically occupied a prominent place in philosophical and political debates about what it means to be a human subject and to engage in and contribute to society. In recent years, feminist scholars, urban studies academics, authors from within disability studies, and anthropologists have re-examined the role that reliance might play in human life – frequently concluding that our need for others might best be imagined as not a hindrance, but an opportunity.
My paper draws on and contributes to this conversation through a particularly compelling case study of a L’Arche community that places dependence at the centre of its social life, in the context of a political and economic system that places great stock on autonomy. In investigating this example, the article develops a way of attending to the complex interaction between ideologies and practicalities in the formation of patterns of human reliance.
3. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
I am currently working to produce a book that examines the ethical dynamics of caring relationships within L’Arche. I take L’Arche’s unique approach to the dependence of people with intellectualities on others as my starting point, and go on to explore the consequences of it for the lives of the carers and the cared for in this community. What does it mean for people with intellectual disabilities to rely so extensively on the care of others? In a social environment deliberately designed around the needs of these individuals, is their dependence on others of any ethical or pragmatic consequence? Or does L’Arche’s way of providing care enable these individuals, typically excluded from social life, to occupy a prominent, active, and valuable role in its communal life?
The book asks these questions of my ethnographic material in order to develop a way to examine them in other contexts too. I am currently beginning a research project that looks at these issues outside of the setting of the developed capitalist economy of the UK, in countries where welfare funding is far less extensive than it is in Britain. In situations, for instance, where relationships of reliance are widespread, and autonomy not held as a particular value, how do people with intellectual disabilities fare? What kinds of relationships of dependence are they involved in, and what are the consequences of these modes of reliance for the formation of these individuals as ethical and economic subjects? My aim in asking these questions, of the limit case of people who are especially reliant on others, is to generate an open and comparative conversation about the social context of disability, need, and reliance – a discussion that stands to extend our understanding of the nature of subjectivity, care, and dependence more generally.
Beyond the Ethnic Enclave: Interethnicity and Trans‐spatiality in an Australian Suburb
LINLING GAO‐MILES
1. How does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
The neighborhood that I study is a spatial outcome of global migration, and its experience helps us to reconsider the shifting dynamics of the metropolitan center and periphery. By interrogating the reproduction of Chinatown or enclave theories, I propose a framework of ethnic and spatial interconnectivity. Indeed, through the lens of this multiethnic suburban neighborhood, I consider the paradoxes of urban neighborhoods’ responses to international migration or globalization that have had a direct impact on the landscape of cities.
2. What should readers take away from your piece?
The neighborhood in my study corresponds to the emergence of “suburban Chinatowns” in other global metropolitan areas on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a “suburban Chinatown” is suggestive of the formation of (multi)ethnic districts of all sorts resulting from enhanced crossing-border movements whether at a regional scale or in a global context. I offer a framework beyond ethnic enclaves to consider the spatial expression or product of this sort of transnationalism. I hope that my piece will stimulate further discussions about discursive spatial outcomes of intercultural and interethnic encounters in each local context.
3. How did this research project come about?
As an ethnographer, I am constantly informed (and challenged) by the things that my research subjects find significant. Like many of my colleagues in overseas Chinese studies, I go to Chinatown as soon as I arrive in a new place. Unexpectedly, on my first day in the Chinatown in Melbourne, I was redirected to Box Hill (the neighborhood in my study) by a Chinese informant. At the time, I was interested in identity narratives, but after completing my Ph.D. dissertation and going back to Box Hill for more fieldwork, it became clear to me that narratives about space and place are indeed indispensable to identity politics.
4. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
In a forthcoming chapter (in an edited volume) about Box Hill, I explore the politics of space and identity intertwined in social constructions of a place. In the future, I hope to link the study of places such as Chinatown and Box Hill to new trends in consumer culture among the transnational Chinese (such as immigrants, tourists, and students), and in doing so, I aim to explore transnational nodes of connectivity that reproduce space and cultures of consumption through activities such as purchasing and touring.
The neighborhood that I study is a spatial outcome of global migration, and its experience helps us to reconsider the shifting dynamics of the metropolitan center and periphery. By interrogating the reproduction of Chinatown or enclave theories, I propose a framework of ethnic and spatial interconnectivity. Indeed, through the lens of this multiethnic suburban neighborhood, I consider the paradoxes of urban neighborhoods’ responses to international migration or globalization that have had a direct impact on the landscape of cities.
2. What should readers take away from your piece?
The neighborhood in my study corresponds to the emergence of “suburban Chinatowns” in other global metropolitan areas on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a “suburban Chinatown” is suggestive of the formation of (multi)ethnic districts of all sorts resulting from enhanced crossing-border movements whether at a regional scale or in a global context. I offer a framework beyond ethnic enclaves to consider the spatial expression or product of this sort of transnationalism. I hope that my piece will stimulate further discussions about discursive spatial outcomes of intercultural and interethnic encounters in each local context.
3. How did this research project come about?
As an ethnographer, I am constantly informed (and challenged) by the things that my research subjects find significant. Like many of my colleagues in overseas Chinese studies, I go to Chinatown as soon as I arrive in a new place. Unexpectedly, on my first day in the Chinatown in Melbourne, I was redirected to Box Hill (the neighborhood in my study) by a Chinese informant. At the time, I was interested in identity narratives, but after completing my Ph.D. dissertation and going back to Box Hill for more fieldwork, it became clear to me that narratives about space and place are indeed indispensable to identity politics.
4. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
In a forthcoming chapter (in an edited volume) about Box Hill, I explore the politics of space and identity intertwined in social constructions of a place. In the future, I hope to link the study of places such as Chinatown and Box Hill to new trends in consumer culture among the transnational Chinese (such as immigrants, tourists, and students), and in doing so, I aim to explore transnational nodes of connectivity that reproduce space and cultures of consumption through activities such as purchasing and touring.
You Care More for the Gear Than the Geezer? Care Relationships of Homeless Substance Users in London
JOHANNES LENHARD
1. What should readers take away from your piece?
There is a specific view on drugs prevalent in today’s society: substances, such as heroin and crack are evil and the root cause for suffering and pain. The keep people like my homeless informants on the street. While I am not disputing this, I am presenting a more nuanced picture of the relationship between drugs and the user. By applying the concept of care, I am able to describe the connection between drugs and the drug user as something dynamic, less flat and one-sided and potentially even with – temporarily – positive outcomes.
2. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
As an anthropologist I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with people on the street of London. Over the course of three summers, I spent my days with the same group of roofless people who were all also users of heroin and crack. Ethnography – spending as much as time as possible with my informants in their everyday environment – is perhaps the only method which would have allowed me to find out the intricate details about the illegal routines of drug taking. It took long months of accompanying people in their daily lives to be let into this world. At first, it was complicated to establish this kind of necessary rapport. My informants spent a lot of their time on busy streets of East London trying to earn their drug money begging. I was interrupting their work schedule. There were always people around. It was not easy to find spaces where they felt comfortable talking to me and showing me their drug practices. Only over time, when I entered their more private make-shift huts and squats was I able to observe these details.
3. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
Personally, I have over the last three years been working on a similar project in France. Again, focused on roofless people who in many cases are struggling with addiction – alcohol or hard drugs – I was examining the role drugs play in the survival and home-making practices of my informants. I am capturing the most important finding in this direction with the concept of drug time; I argue that my informants were cutting themselves out of time through their drug taking habits. They were able to push worries about the past, an uncertain outlook onto the future and even pain in the present away – again at least temporarily. In the end, this tactic would most probably collapse in itself but the temporary relief was helpful for many of my informants. I expect that there will be more research in this direction of uncovering unexpected details around drug habits particularly given the current nature of what is often referred to as the opiate crises.
There is a specific view on drugs prevalent in today’s society: substances, such as heroin and crack are evil and the root cause for suffering and pain. The keep people like my homeless informants on the street. While I am not disputing this, I am presenting a more nuanced picture of the relationship between drugs and the user. By applying the concept of care, I am able to describe the connection between drugs and the drug user as something dynamic, less flat and one-sided and potentially even with – temporarily – positive outcomes.
2. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
As an anthropologist I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with people on the street of London. Over the course of three summers, I spent my days with the same group of roofless people who were all also users of heroin and crack. Ethnography – spending as much as time as possible with my informants in their everyday environment – is perhaps the only method which would have allowed me to find out the intricate details about the illegal routines of drug taking. It took long months of accompanying people in their daily lives to be let into this world. At first, it was complicated to establish this kind of necessary rapport. My informants spent a lot of their time on busy streets of East London trying to earn their drug money begging. I was interrupting their work schedule. There were always people around. It was not easy to find spaces where they felt comfortable talking to me and showing me their drug practices. Only over time, when I entered their more private make-shift huts and squats was I able to observe these details.
3. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
Personally, I have over the last three years been working on a similar project in France. Again, focused on roofless people who in many cases are struggling with addiction – alcohol or hard drugs – I was examining the role drugs play in the survival and home-making practices of my informants. I am capturing the most important finding in this direction with the concept of drug time; I argue that my informants were cutting themselves out of time through their drug taking habits. They were able to push worries about the past, an uncertain outlook onto the future and even pain in the present away – again at least temporarily. In the end, this tactic would most probably collapse in itself but the temporary relief was helpful for many of my informants. I expect that there will be more research in this direction of uncovering unexpected details around drug habits particularly given the current nature of what is often referred to as the opiate crises.
VOLUME 29, ISSUE 1 (APRIL 2017)
White Evangelical Congregations in Cities and Suburbs: Social Engagement, Geography, Diffusion, and Disembeddedness
MARK T. MULDER, AMY JONASON
1. How does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
Our article considers the way that white evangelicals have (perhaps) started to embrace cities on their own terms as part of the “great inversion.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
I am persuaded by urban political economy and its signifance in explaining how power shapes the contours of cities.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in white evangelicals, read your article?
Our article complicates narratives about white evangelicals, but also demonstrates how beholden they are as a group to their cultural tool kits in their engagement of urban neighborhoods.
4. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
We utilized ethnography in this study. With participant observation and semi-structured interviews, we were able to better portray the narratives and cultural tool kits that white evangelicals rely on when they engage urban neighborhoods.
5. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
In our current political climate and with the debates surrounding gentrification, the role of religion will continue to need to be assessed and analyzed.
Our article considers the way that white evangelicals have (perhaps) started to embrace cities on their own terms as part of the “great inversion.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
I am persuaded by urban political economy and its signifance in explaining how power shapes the contours of cities.
3. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in white evangelicals, read your article?
Our article complicates narratives about white evangelicals, but also demonstrates how beholden they are as a group to their cultural tool kits in their engagement of urban neighborhoods.
4. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
We utilized ethnography in this study. With participant observation and semi-structured interviews, we were able to better portray the narratives and cultural tool kits that white evangelicals rely on when they engage urban neighborhoods.
5. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
In our current political climate and with the debates surrounding gentrification, the role of religion will continue to need to be assessed and analyzed.
Cleaning Up Bodhgaya: Conflicts over Development and the Worlding of Buddhism
JASON RODRIGUEZ
1. How does your article speak to the scholarship on cities and/or globalization?
My article is largely about efforts on the part of stakeholders in Bodhgaya, India, which included residents, home owners, business owners, streetvendors, and others, to organize an opposition to the implementation of a set of measures that were intended to produce Bodhgaya as a different kind of pilgrimage and tourism destination. The key contribution I hoped to make in my article was to argue that unexpected, contingent coalitions can coalesce to enable land-grabbing efforts. Furthermore, I hoped to show that exploring such coalitions and the responses that they elicit can be useful for understanding “the state,” “globalization,” and “neoliberalism.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
The key theoretical perspectives I have appropriated in my City & Society article are an approach to “the state” that foregrounds cultural practice and relations as constitutive of what we call “the state,” actor-network theory, and an appropriation of Michael Herzfeld’s concept “monumentalization,” which looks at the evacuation of lived spaces in an effort to create spaces akin to theme parks.
3. What should readers take away from your piece?
I hoped readers would take away a model of resistance to land grabs and monumentalization and a sense of the difficulties of organizing an opposition to government tourism plans in a place where development aspirations are pervasive. This is especially the case in the face of the brute realities of economic necessity and the need to subsist, as well as in the face of the potential income-generating opportunities that tourism development projects promise.
4. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in Bodhgaya, India read your article?
I hope there are a number of broader implications that are applicable to contexts other than Bodhgaya, India. These include understanding the cultural relations and discourses that produce “the state,” as well as the conflicts and messy and contingent alliances that inform the sorts of cultural relations and transformations that often get glossed as “development.”
5. How did this research project come about?
I was in Bodhgaya, India to study NGOs and development efforts, but this specific project came about serendipitously. Though I was interested in the Master Plan for Bodhgaya and the plans to transform the town into a different kind of tourism destination, I simply could not have foreseen that the Indian government would begin moving forward with the implementation of the measures I describe in my article, nor that a town wide opposition movement would emerge.
6. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
My research methods included participant observation, interviews, and what I would call engaged anthropology, which looked like joining an activist coalition that sought to interrupt a set of changes that many residents of Bodhgaya opposed and felt were unjust. A number of Bodhgaya residents had their homes and businesses demolished as part of the implementation of the Master Plan for Bodhgaya, and were eager to do something about it and involve a sympathetic researcher in their struggle. The methods I used were largely a function of the specificities of the context and the fact that I was doing research on an emergent situation with an unforeseeable endpoint and resolution. I hope that my article is useful to other researchers in this respect as well – as an example of engaged research with a population of people who are facing threats to their livelihoods and the loss of their homes.
7. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
Many parts of the Master Plan for Bodhgaya were temporarily shelved, but the town remains a hugely important site for Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims and tourists, and sees an ever-increasing volume of visitors each year. Moreover, tourism remains one of the biggest potential sources for generating income and for upward mobility. I plan to continue to visit Bodhgaya and pursue research as things continue to unfold in unexpected and unforeseeable directions.
My article is largely about efforts on the part of stakeholders in Bodhgaya, India, which included residents, home owners, business owners, streetvendors, and others, to organize an opposition to the implementation of a set of measures that were intended to produce Bodhgaya as a different kind of pilgrimage and tourism destination. The key contribution I hoped to make in my article was to argue that unexpected, contingent coalitions can coalesce to enable land-grabbing efforts. Furthermore, I hoped to show that exploring such coalitions and the responses that they elicit can be useful for understanding “the state,” “globalization,” and “neoliberalism.”
2. What theoretical perspective is particularly important in your text? Why is it important?
The key theoretical perspectives I have appropriated in my City & Society article are an approach to “the state” that foregrounds cultural practice and relations as constitutive of what we call “the state,” actor-network theory, and an appropriation of Michael Herzfeld’s concept “monumentalization,” which looks at the evacuation of lived spaces in an effort to create spaces akin to theme parks.
3. What should readers take away from your piece?
I hoped readers would take away a model of resistance to land grabs and monumentalization and a sense of the difficulties of organizing an opposition to government tourism plans in a place where development aspirations are pervasive. This is especially the case in the face of the brute realities of economic necessity and the need to subsist, as well as in the face of the potential income-generating opportunities that tourism development projects promise.
4. Why should readers, who are not specifically interested in Bodhgaya, India read your article?
I hope there are a number of broader implications that are applicable to contexts other than Bodhgaya, India. These include understanding the cultural relations and discourses that produce “the state,” as well as the conflicts and messy and contingent alliances that inform the sorts of cultural relations and transformations that often get glossed as “development.”
5. How did this research project come about?
I was in Bodhgaya, India to study NGOs and development efforts, but this specific project came about serendipitously. Though I was interested in the Master Plan for Bodhgaya and the plans to transform the town into a different kind of tourism destination, I simply could not have foreseen that the Indian government would begin moving forward with the implementation of the measures I describe in my article, nor that a town wide opposition movement would emerge.
6. What methods did you use in your project? Why did you choose these methods? What benefits and challenges did these methods have when conducting research in this urban environment?
My research methods included participant observation, interviews, and what I would call engaged anthropology, which looked like joining an activist coalition that sought to interrupt a set of changes that many residents of Bodhgaya opposed and felt were unjust. A number of Bodhgaya residents had their homes and businesses demolished as part of the implementation of the Master Plan for Bodhgaya, and were eager to do something about it and involve a sympathetic researcher in their struggle. The methods I used were largely a function of the specificities of the context and the fact that I was doing research on an emergent situation with an unforeseeable endpoint and resolution. I hope that my article is useful to other researchers in this respect as well – as an example of engaged research with a population of people who are facing threats to their livelihoods and the loss of their homes.
7. Where do you see research on this topic going in the future?
Many parts of the Master Plan for Bodhgaya were temporarily shelved, but the town remains a hugely important site for Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims and tourists, and sees an ever-increasing volume of visitors each year. Moreover, tourism remains one of the biggest potential sources for generating income and for upward mobility. I plan to continue to visit Bodhgaya and pursue research as things continue to unfold in unexpected and unforeseeable directions.