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Ordinary Places of Postmigrant Societies: Dealing with Difference in West and East German Neighbourhoods
Get PDFThe starting point of the contribution is the question of how the dynamics of social encounters in the city are shaped by specific migration histories, local discourses, economies and policies. Against this background, the article analyses the perceptions and localised practices in dealing with social difference and diversity in a comparison of East and West German neighbourhoods. However, this is not about a hierarchizing evaluation, but about understanding urban encounters in the migration society as contestations of social and class recognition, which are played out at different levels and in specific urban places. Based on narrative interviews and field observations, it is shown how urban coexistence is experienced and negotiated in everyday settings between routines and new conflicts. A postmigrant perspective—as a heuristic point of entry—aims to take hegemonic understandings of societal belonging and exclusion under migration-related conditions into question
Territories of Extraction: Mapping Palimpsests of Appropriation
Get PDFThis article—framed as a methodological contribution and at the intersection between the critical urban, urban political ecology and world-ecology disciplines—builds on Corboz’s metaphor of ‘territory as a palimpsest’ to explore the representation of the socio-economic and ecological processes underpinning uneven development under extractive capitalist urbanization. While the palimpsest approach has typically been used to map transformations of more traditional urban morphologies, this work focuses instead on remote extraction territories appropriated by the global economy and integral to planetary urbanization. The article suggests the central notion of ‘palimpsests of appropriation’ as a lens to map the extraction processes. It does so in its multi-scalar and temporal dimensions and on the basis of the three intertwined frames—i.e., the productive, distribution and mediation palimpsest—shortly exemplifying its use on the ground for the iron ore extraction territory in the Swedish-Norwegian Arctic. With this, the article contributes to the development of an expanded representational methodology and conception of territories of extraction—where social and natural production are brought together—illustrating how appropriation has been (re)shaping each of the frames throughout historical thresholds, but also how socio-natures are being (re)made in its image
Between Hospitality and Inhospitality: The Janus-Faced 'Arrival Infrastructure'
Get PDFAlthough ‘arrival infrastructure’ is central to the experience of migrants arriving in a new city, is it sufficient to form a ‘hospitable milieu’? Our article compares newcomers’ experiences with ‘arrival infrastructure’ in two European cities: Brussels and Geneva. Based on ethnographic research with 49 migrants who arrived a few months earlier, we show that arrival infrastructure is Janus-faced. On one hand, it welcomes newcomers and contributes to making the city hospitable. On the other hand, it rejects, deceives and disappoints them, forcing them to remain mobile—to go back home, go further afield, or just move around the city—in order to satisfy their needs and compose what we will call a ‘hospitable milieu.’ The arrival infrastructure’s inhospitality is fourfold: linked firstly to its limitations and shortcomings, secondly to the trials or tests newcomers have to overcome in order to benefit from the infrastructure, thirdly to the necessary forms of closure needed to protect those who have just arrived and fourthly to those organising and managing the infrastructure, with divergent conceptions of hospitality. By using the notion of milieu and by embedding infrastructure into the broader question of hospitality, we open up an empirical exploration of its ambiguous role in the uncertain trajectories of newcomers
Mapping and Explaining Media Quality: Insights from Switzerland’s Multilingual Media System
Get PDFIn this article, we analyse how various macro- and meso-level factors influence news media’s provision of hard news, an important element of media quality. The research draws on a content analysis of more than 100,000 news items between 2015 and 2019 from 53 print, radio, TV, and online news outlets in Switzerland, a small state with three linguistically segmented media markets, each of which is partially influenced by a large neighbouring country (Germany, France, and Italy). The research design takes into account the multi-dimensional character of hard news and allows for analysis with explanatory factors on different levels: On the meso-level, ownership types complemented with media types, and on the macro-level language regions of different market size. Findings show large differences in the importance of hard news overall and these findings are consistent across the three dimensions of hard news (topic dimension, focus dimension, style dimension). Hard news orientation differs especially between private and public media, but also within privately held media outlets, and less so within public media, which points to a general quality culture embedded within public media organizations. Thus, rather than by language region and the according media market size or by ownership types, quality differences can be best explained by media types
Reach or Trust Optimisation? A Citizen Trust Analysis in the Flemish Public Broadcaster VRT
Get PDFIn democracies, one of Public Service Media’s (PSM) main roles is to inform the public. In a digital news ecosystem, where commercial, citizen, and alternative news sources have multiplied, questions about the ability and need for PSM to fulfil this role are increasingly being raised. While the role of PSM can and should be scrutinized, a too-narrow a focus on an informed citizenry may obfuscate aspects, other than audience reach and objectivity, that are key to this information role, such as trust. Against this background, this article studies whether and to what extent citizens still trust the news and information services of their public broadcaster, asking if that trust is still high, whether there is a difference between groups in the population, and if trust is in line with reach. Based on a representative survey of news users in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium, the article studies the reach and trust scores of the brands of VRT, Flanders’ PSM, and compares them to those of its main competitors, with a specific focus on differences in terms of age, education levels, and political orientation. The results suggest that VRT struggles more than the main commercial players to reach young people and the lower-educated, but still leads when it comes to trust. The data show the continued importance of widening our assessment of PSM beyond market-focused indicators of reach
Three Types of Denial: Think Tanks as a Reluctant Civil Society Elite
Get PDFThink tanks, or policy advice institutions, are civil society organizations producing and delivering social analysis to policymakers and the wider public. Their aim is to influence policy in a given direction. Compared to most other civil society organizations, they hold relatively privileged positions, both in terms of wealth (on average bigger budgets and staffs), political influence (their very raison d’être), knowledge (educational level of the staff), and social networks. Thus, it seems beyond dispute that think tanks adhere to the elite of civil society. This article focuses on think tanks’ negative self-identification, on their reluctance to accept labels. Not only are think tanks unwilling to take on the elite designation, some of them also deny being part of civil society, and some go one step further in denying identification with the think tank community. These multiple denials are expected if we recall Pierre Bourdieu’s observation that “all aristocracies define themselves as being beyond all definition” (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 316). The analysis focuses on how this definitional ambiguity is discursively constructed. Think-tankers are often described as situated in an interstitial space between such fields as politics, civil society, media, market, and academia. While this intermediary position is the source of their unique role as converters of various forms of capital, it also complicates the identity formation of think tanks. The argument is illustrated by Polish think tanks and the data consists of original interviews with think tank leaders. The article provides a novel perspective on think tanks and on civil society elites
Memory in Sacred Places: The Revitalization Process of the Muisca Community
Get PDFThe Muisca community of Suba, located in Bogota, Colombia, is a place-based community whose epistemology is rooted in what is now an urban environment. After enduring over five centuries of segregation, marginalization, displacement, and near cultural obliteration, the Muisca community has thrived to the present day and is currently undertaking the task of re-indigenization through the revitalization of their traditional knowledge and the process of ethnogenesis. The effects of urbanization on the Muisca have not only changed the physical spaces which they inhabit, but it has also disrupted the relational patterns between the community and their sacred places. This severing of the community from their sacred places has had the effect of further invisibilizing the Muisca’s ethnic identity in the national social imaginary. As a form of resistance to their marginality, the Muisca are engaging in symbolic practices, in both public and private spaces, as a means of cultivating ideological resistance, memory revitalization, and generating new meanings of their collective identity. This article, based on an ethnographic case study, seeks to examine how the Muisca community is symbolically re-appropriating their sacred places in this urban context to mend the social fabric of the Muisca community. As such, this revitalization project represents an attempt to reconstruct a forgotten indigenous identity by rewriting the historical memory of a community that disappeared from the national discourse
Socio-Spatial Segregation and the Spatial Structure of ‘Ordinary’ Activities in the Global South
Get PDFPlanning practice in the Global South often defines a border between formal and informal developments ignoring the complex and nuanced reality of urban practices and, consequently, worsening segregation. This article proposes an alternative view of socio-spatial segregation that shifts the distinction between formal/informal towards one that emphasises access to opportunities and their relationship with the spatial structure of the city. Under this alternative framework, applied to the case of the Valle Amauta neighbourhood in Lima, Peru, we reflect on how socio-economic activities, shaped by spatial conditions and social practices, increase or reduce socio-spatial segregation. Our findings suggest that a shift towards strategies aimed at increasing accessibility to centrality, provided by the density of social and economic activities, could offer new opportunities for planning practice and theory in the Global South
Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo
Get PDFThe article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system
Social Media, Populism, and Migration
Get PDFSeveral scholars have attributed high hopes to social media regarding their alleged ability to enable a nonhierarchical and freely accessible debate among the citizenship (Loader & Mercea, 2011; Shirky, 2011). Those hopes have culminated in theses such those describing the social web as being a ‘new public sphere’ (Castells, 2009, p. 125) as well as in expectations regarding its revitalizing potential for the ‘Habermas’s public sphere’ (Kruse, Norris, & Flinchum, 2018, p. 62). Yet, these assumptions are not uncontested, particularly in the light of socially mediated populism (Mazzoleni & Bracciale, 2018). Interestingly, research on populism in the social web is still an exception. The same is true for the populist permeation of the social media discourse on migration, as a highly topical issue. This study seeks to elaborate on this research gap by examining to what extent the Twitter debate on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) was permeated by populist content. For this purpose, almost 70,000 tweets on the most important Hashtags referring to the GCM that took place in Marrakesh in December 2018 were collected and the 500 widest-reaching tweets analysed in terms of their populist permeation. Against initial expectations, the empirical findings show that populist narratives did not dominate the Twitter debate on migration. However, the empirical results indicate that ordinary citizens play an important role in the creation and dissemination of populist content. It seems that the social web widens the public sphere, including those actors who do not communicate in accordance with the Habermasian conceptualization of it