Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship

A growing body of literature conceptualizes urban agriculture and community gardens as spaces of democratic citizenship and radical political practice. Urban community gardens are lauded as spaces through which residents can alleviate food insecurity and claim rights to the city. However, discussions of citizenship practice more broadly challenge the notion that citizen participation is inherently transformative or empowering, particularly in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring. This paper investigates urban community gardens as spaces of citizenship through a case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It examines the impacts of community gardens on citizenship practice and the effects of volunteerism on the development of community gardens. It explores how grassroots community gardens simultaneously contest and reinforce local neoliberal policies. This research contributes empirically and theoretically to scholarship on urban food movements, neoliberal urbanization, collaborative governance, and citizenship practice.     

Bathroom stories: Capturing embodied practices through screen-mediated relatedness

Online ethnography is often criticized for being less immersive than traditional ethnography. However, this article argues that the digital medium offers a distinctive way to connect researchers with their interlocutors. Online ethnography can help balance being intimate while respecting research participants by maintaining appropriate distance in anthropological fieldwork. The article presents a case study of bathrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic. It shows that online ethnography, which only allows access to what is seen and heard on the screen, creates a more limited, transient, flexible and ambiguous relationship with the research participants. This unique form of relatedness makes them more open to sharing their stories, images and videos about their bodily practices in bathrooms. The article emphasizes the potential of digital research methods to reveal the details of embodied practices. It invites anthropologists to explore the different ways of relating to digital and physical spaces in research.     

Modern observations: new ornithology and the science of ourselves, 1920–1940

The emergence and organisation of amateur networks of observation in Britain in the period between 1920 and 1940 are addressed in this paper. It examines the geographical, organisational and epistemological associations between networks of ornithological observation (traced through the British Trust for Ornithology), which emerged from the 1920s, and amateur ethnography (traced through Mass-Observation) which emerged in the late 1930s. I approach these ‘observational cultures’ as spaces which brought together new concepts of the local, of everyday nature and society, as well as the possibilities of changing the everyday. The paper suggests that popular observation during the period partly constituted a reframing of ways of knowing Britain differentiated through the everyday production of natural and social knowledge and the construction of the active citizen and new communities of practice.     

Environmental responsibility and the possibilities of pragmatist-orientated research

Human geographers have explored at some length the discourses and subject positions implicated in the recent rise of ‘environmental responsibility’. Assigning it either as an individual disposition enacted in various spaces, a performative ‘othering’ tool, and/or a form of ecological governmentality, these debates have said little about the role of research and researchers in encouraging environmental responsibility. Utilising arguments from William James’ ‘radical empiricism’, I argue that exploring practices through a pragmatist lens enables a tentative re-envisioning of environmental responsibility. Re-visiting my doctoral research into the household-level adoption of sustainable consumption practices, I claim environmental responsibility as an ethical experience felt at the moments when practices are reconsidered. Here, my presence played a vital role in this social experimentation, which, as pragmatists argue, is the fundamental basis of positive social change.     

Spaces of capability: Consumption geographies at an inner‐city university

Inner‐city universities are noteworthy in relation to food provisioning and consumption because of their locations and spatial characteristics. Among 18,500 university students surveyed by Universities Australia in 2017, one in seven reports being unable to eat in regular patterns. This finding suggests that it is important to explore how eating spaces at inner‐city universities intersect with students' eating practices. Ethnographic work conducted over three semesters in Melbourne at RMIT University's city campus revealed that around 100 microwaves installed there were used by students to prepare food in ways that may support regular eating. The research included observations, focus groups, and digital ethnography. Analysis of the findings suggests that the university's eating spaces and their material arrangements are related to students' on‐campus and off‐campus practices. Using both Walker's interpretation of Sen's capability approach—the social practice capability framework—and Schatzki's site ontology, I propose that this relationship produces spaces of capability, encouraging and enabling varied activities such as using leftovers, bulk cooking, and buying discretionary foods less impulsively. The study and its use of the idea of spaces of capability may foster new insights about the ongoing challenge to ensure student wellbeing and to consider the relationship of student wellbeing to broader issues such as sustainable consumption and environmental justice.     

Performing Guangzhou and Guangzhou Ren: analysing popular music in Guangzhou

The main purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which popular music in Guangzhou is implicated in the performance of places and identities, and how it is located in Guangzhou. Drawing on the qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews, this research analyses the popular music and musical performances in Guangzhou through three spatial dimensions: the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues and the human bodies. The findings of this research suggest that popular music in Guangzhou sets up the emotional communications and engenders different spaces for the participants to negotiate their embodied identities; popular music and musical performances make the connections between three spatial scales—the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues, and the human body—through its capacity of social mediation and the musical performances articulate the power relations between local residents, the local and national authorities, and the global. This research can be read as a contribution towards the wider literatures on musical performance and the exploration of doing/making place and place-based identity through popular music.     

Rethinking historiography and ethnography: Surrealism’s intellectual legacy

ABSTRACT

Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.     

Critical urban collaborative ethnographies: articulating community with Sappho for Equality in Kolkata,India

This article reflects on the notion of community through a collaborative ethnographic study with women loving women in Kolkata. Performing critical urban ethnographies in the global south and writing about sexualities that defy easy spatial categorizations are vital for those who seek to extend the scholarship of sexualities beyond the ‘gayborhood paradigm’ in the global north. This article focuses on how women loving women understand community and activism in Kolkata, a city that exists within tireless attempts at economic rejuvenation and vibrant modes of living. The question of community is moot in political activism around decriminalization of same-sex relationships and social legitimacy of the same. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic work with Sappho for Equality, an activist collective working with sexually marginalized women in eastern India, we engage with community as a space through which women loving women articulate marginalization and strategically connect with normative social institutions. I begin my discussion by introducing the notion of critical collaborative ethnography as a way to practice accountability in social research. Following that through select ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how a ‘queer community’ is not a predetermined end but is always in the making: a process that forms and dissipates within specific material contexts, activist practices, and social encounters.     

Theology,Idolatry and Science: John Williams’ Missionary Ethnography and Natural History of the South Pacific

This article contributes to the recent scholarly efforts toward a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Protestant missionaries and the practice of natural history and ethnography in the early nineteenth century. Exploring John Williams’ work in the South Pacific, I argue that not only was Williams practicing science in the form of ethnography and natural history, but that his theology was, in fact, central to his scientific work. Through a careful exploration of Williams’ account of his missionary activities in the South Pacific, I contend that Williams’ conception of idolatry served as an explanatory tool that shaped the practice of his ethnography. In the minds of missionaries like Williams, whereas Christianity’s truth was universal, idolatry was the worship of a false god: false because it was just a deification of a particular desire rather than worship of the universal God. This conception of idolatry shaped Williams’ contention, central to his ethnography, that the islanders’ religion was a product of their particular cultural needs. In this way, I argue, Williams used a theological concept to perform explanatory scientific work, contributing to the idea that religion is a product of culture, a notion that became central to nineteenth century studies of religion.     

Assessing Methodologies in Archaeological Ethnography: A Case for Incorporating Ethnographic Training in Graduate Archaeology Curricula

Abstract

Archaeologists have increasingly turned to ethnography as a tool for understanding the contemporary social context of material culture, archaeological practice, and ‘de-colonizing’ archaeology. Furthermore, ethnographers have turned their analysis to the practice of archaeology, providing insights into key ethical dilemmas. This work has produced signi?cant dialogue, demonstrating the potential for research and collaboration at the interface of two sub-disciplines. However, much of the research to date has relied on a limited range of ethnographic methods. We suggest that archaeologists working in this area would bene?t from using a wider repertoire of ethnographic data collection tools and ethics training opportunities. We advocate for greater collaboration between archaeologists and ethnographers and provide suggestions on methods that are well-suited for use in archaeological practice. In the long term, the most effective and far-reaching solution may be to incorporate ethnographic methods training as fundamental to graduate programmes in archaeology.     

Outlaw Capital: Accumulation by Transgression on the Paraguay–Brazil Border

Outlaw economies are a key, but under-appreciated, feature of late capitalism. With an ethnography of what one journalist called “the largest illicit economy in the Western Hemisphere” on the Paraguay–Brazil border, this article contributes empirical findings about the production of space for extralegal economies. Contributing to debates about geographies of the illicit, I theorise outlaw capital, a form of capital that negotiates profits and distributes rents through situated forms of deals, bribes, and schemes. Outlaw capital zones particular places as sites of useful transgression. Powerful spatial imaginaries then cast them out of thought, despite their connections to spaces of authorised economic practice. Outlaw capital’s diverse, flexible spatio-economic forms benefit from explicit and tacit state support. As an example of theory building from the South, outlaw capital can help us think broadly about the power and politics of accumulation by transgression as a key logic of outlaw capital.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.     

Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human

Though geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a 'distribution of the sensible' that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more-than-human world of Semi-Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern-day technoscientific biology operates.     

The ultimate return: Dissent,apostolic succession,and the renewed ministry of roman catholic women priests

ABSTRACT

Significant numbers of practising Roman Catholics dissent from the Church’s orthodox teachings, especially those relating to sex, gender and contraception. Many such dissenters even occupy positions of ecclesiastical authority themselves. This raises interesting questions about how dissent manifests differently in various Christian traditions; how disagreement about fundamental principles only become legible if expressed in particular ways. This paper draws on research on Roman Catholic Woman priests whose claim to sacerdotal legitimacy rests on their having been ordained in apostolic succession by bishops within the Roman Catholic Church. It asks how do women priests negotiate both difference and repetition at the very same time. The ethnography prompts deeper reflection on Christianity’s long history of dissent which I argue has been written from a predominantly male and Protestant perspective. One in which dissent that leads to institutional differentiation is prioritized over dissent borne quietly that seeks to contain itself.     

Children’s agency in accessing for spaces of play in an urban high-rise community in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This research explores children’s agency in negotiating for play spaces in Malaysia within the context of an urban high-rise community. Fieldwork was conducted with 31 children between the ages of four to 12 years old. A qualitative, child-centered approach to data collection was employed using participatory research methods. The study reveals how children gain access to play spaces and details their innovative strategies in maximizing play opportunities in a community with limited infrastructural and social support. It highlights how children claim the use of communal spaces within the housing compound, reinvent designated play spaces, resist adult rules around restricted spaces and embrace elements of global culture for meaningful play opportunities. The paper argues that children exercise agency in accessing play spaces, and by so doing, extend and expand their lived geographies which are not just spatial, temporal and social but also invented and imagined.     

Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit

This article examines the ways in which Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Ballroom community create black queer space to contend with their spatial exclusion from and marginalization within public and private space in urban Detroit, Michigan. Existing in most urban centers throughout North America, Ballroom culture is a community and network of Black and Latina/o LGBT people. In this ethnography, I delineate the multiple functions of two mutually constitutive domains of Ballroom culture, kinship (the houses) and ritualized performance (the ball events). I use queer theories of geography and draw from Sonjah Stanley Niaah's notion of performance geography to examine the generative socio-spatial practices that Ballroom members deploy to forge alternative possibilities for Black LGBT life in Detroit. In many ways, members of the Ballroom community work to challenge and undo the alienating and oppressive realities of built environments in urban centers by undertaking the necessary social and performance labor that allow its members to revise and reconfigure exclusionary and oppressive spatial forms.     

Collective mindfulness: Somatic attention to group and self in meditation practice in Israel

Mindfulness is commonly portrayed as a solitary practice in which one turns attention inward to notice feelings, thoughts and sensations that arise in the mind and body. Yet the training and practice of mindfulness often take place in a group setting, indicating that the process of turning inward is dependent on an intersubjective space. Based on an extended ethnography of Israelis who train in body-based mindfulness in the context of Vipassana meditation practice, we analyze collective mindfulness spaces, including group sittings, virtual group sittings and the use of mindfulness applications. We show that mindfulness offers a unique kind of togetherness. It opposes direct social engagement while still offering a supportive social space where others move from an audience to bodily co-dwellers. We track the tensions in replicating this form of togetherness in virtual settings, where, paradoxically, the physical distance ends up exposing people's social identities while still limiting embodied synchronization. We illustrate how the social spaces of mindfulness serve as liminoid sanctuaries beyond everyday social-interactive life, providing relief from the political and economic stress in which Israelis live.