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Who and how learns the city. Attuning as a newcomer and re-attuning to others' arrival processes
No full textThis contribution aims to discuss the challenges and possibilities that are opened up by approaching the research's field as a restless and tentative navigation of its contingent dispositions. It examines the (ordinary) situation of inquiry in a setting where the researcher has a personal experience with the process under scrutiny - adopting thus certain knowledge and assuming some commonalities in developing her positioning towards listening -, and yet she is inherently distant and different for how meanings, powers and temporalities play out a subjective understanding and practical knowledge.
Building on the concept of attunement understood «not only as being with, but being with in a similar way» (Ahmed, 2014, p.16), the paper seeks to examine the processes of constant and generative re-attunement and un-learning (Jazeel & McFarlane, 2010) that take place "in the field".
To do so, I will present the actual reconsiderations and reframing issues of my investigation concerning processes of settling (physically and affectively) and newcomers' subjectivities constructions in Brussels. My respondents and myself share the condition of having to learn the city and the one of migrant, as well as the urban context in which our practical enskillment and situated knowledge is constructed. This often sets an open ground for confrontation, but nevertheless needs to be continuously decentred through the process of listening and re-weaving together unexpected narratives (both as in stories and in forms of narration) and the emergence of multiple components, processes and forces that make up life (Lancione 2016) and arrival atmosphere.
So doing, I hope to contribute to the debate of how the development of a flexible and ongoing sensibility through the act of re-attuning to aspects that had not been accounted for in an initial stage, might brings a transformative impact both in terms of knowledge production and in invigorating the potential of the research encounter
Making arrival, making the city. Newcomers' becoming through and with Brussels
No full textThis research concerns processes of arrival of international migrants to a new city, and draws on a field enquiry in Brussels, Belgium's main metropolis and European Union's de facto capital.
It investigates how newcomers' actions, narratives and agencies are (re)configured, consciously and not, in the process of arriving - both physically and affectively - in the city. So doing, it examines how the process of arrival stirs mutual reconfigurations of newcomer people and ultimately of the city itself.
Even though scholarship has dealt with multiple aspects of human mobility and urban migration, this work argues that the performative and mutual becoming of both people and space through their interdependent variations due to arrival has not yet been fully documented. Thus, it calls attention to the contingent relationalities unfolding among the newcomer subject(s) and the urban space(s). To look at such configurations in neither predetermined nor fixed ways, it works within the processual turn of migration studies, critical mobilities studies and post-colonial urban studies; and it builds on the work of scholars who, with relational, vitalist and situated approaches plea for the interrogation of epistemological categories of knowledge in order to foster open and vital understandings of socio-spatial phenomena.
Processes of arrival are conceived as one of the open-ended configurations of urban/human relations in the ordinary experience of mobility that is so poignantly characteristic of contemporary urban social reality. The study thus focuses on these processes for understanding 1 - the emergent relations they produce between people and spaces; 2 - how those contribute to the variations of newcomers' subjectivities in becoming new dwellers of Brussels and 3 - how they impact on the changes in the city due to the existing/potential forms of sociality involved in arrival.
The research is pursued through qualitative research methods. It gains on qualitative research materials, namely in-depth interviews with newcomer subjects and participant investigation in the urban space through which new dwellers make entry to the city. It considers in the study newcomers with very diverse types and conditions of access to mobility, namely international newcomers seeking asylum and intra-European migrants, referred as Schengen movers.
By studying arrival processes of very different newcomers, it is possible to fathom the unexpected similarities of their processes of arrival and especially the particularities that differentiate the possibilities to work out ways to arrive. It emerges that provisionality, albeit rooted in dissimilar sources of uncertainty, is a general and ordinary condition for using, living, and being in the city. For newcomers, provisionality configures Brussels as a site of spatial temporariness, in which the temporal, the spatial and the socio-relational strategies enacted allow to potentially exceed the normative representations of being newcomers, of becoming Brussels' dwellers, and of Brussels' becoming itself. Nevertheless, being the normative frameworks of arrival very differently codified for different types of newcomers, these alternative forms of representation are nor attainable to all.
Findings show that conventional categories do not correspond to actual differences in the ways newcomers envision strategies and recast narratives of arrival. Rather, categories of newcomers are produced within the making of arrival, through the differential opportunities or constraints that exist in the context for becoming new dwellers of Brussels. In fact, the differential mechanisms of migrants' reception allow for asymmetrical possibilities to enact these strategies and to aspire and attain the alternative forms of sociality that they enable, including the ones that do allow to rethink conventional citizenship
The affects of arrival processes: newcomers' learning the city of Brussels
No full textThe paper discusses urban arrival processes for how they can be approached with a focus on affects. It firstly argues for a conceptualisation of arrival as a relational space of becoming of both the newcomer subjects and the arrival context through the multiple affective dimensions emerging from their newly
experienced relationality. It then relates affects to the notion of learning, which in the case of arrival processes can be seen both as learning the city anew as a newcomer, and as learning about how the city is for newcomers. It finally gains from the author’s experience as a newcomer and as a researcher to Brussels to expose the challenges and potentialities of adopting a deep listening for of attuning to others' stories of arrival as a mean to keep open towards unimaginable forms of urban belonging
Apprendere una città. Uno sguardo sui processi di arrivo e sulle pratiche migranti nello spazio urbano
No full textQuesto articolo prende in esame il nesso tra migrazione e spazio urbano, con lo scopo di evidenziare le potenzialità di un approccio che guardi ai meccanismi di apprendimento insiti nei processi di arrivo in città. Esso analizza alcuni dei recenti dibattiti in letteratura che propongono alternative a uno studio statico e deterministico della popolazione migrante in contesti urbani e a partire da questi, argomenta in favore di un approccio di ricerca incentrato sul discernimento e la comprensione delle pratiche spaziali quotidiane di apprendimento che i migranti operano in un nuovo contesto d'arrivo
Beginners' queries: researchers' design and ethical questions when first approaching ethnography as methodology
No full textWhen first designing a research project and particularly when drawing the linkages between the theoretical, philosophical and empirical approaches on which the research will be grounded (Ward 2014), methodological questions often constitute the most compelling challenges for early-stage researchers and Ph.D. candidates. Qualitative methods and specially ethnographic investigations are gaining momentum and indeed recent situated inquiries in geography studies have distanced themselves from straightforward ethnographic narratives based on prefixed social categories. Instead, they adopt processual and in-becoming conceptualizations of the everyday agencies occurring in urban spaces, possibly to contest given social classifications. Nonetheless, the long-standing debates on the effectiveness and scientific legitimacy of ethnographic approaches are still animate. Concerns of power, ethics and positionality are particularly vivid for a researcher; issues of consistency, accuracy and accountability of narrative-making methods along with questions about the scientific rigor of the production of this type of knowledge often emerge and need to be confronted and worked out. Furthermore, there is usually a latent eagerness for producing transformative actions and generative alternatives that go beyond a purely descriptive sphere and instead demands to engage politically with the situated accounts that the researched contexts could open. This contribution aims to further explore the mentioned dilemmas. The objective is to address these basilar research and ethical questions in the light of approaches that could unravel them, such as the concepts of phronetic approach to social science (Flyvbjerg 2001, 2004) and of positive generative critique (Latour 2004, McFarlane 2011b)
A place for newcomers: inquiring arrival processes in the city of Brussels
No full textThis contribution investigates how newcomer subjectivities are (re)constructed in the process of settling (physically and affectively) in a new city, by scrutinising the spatial, temporal and power configurations that emerge in the urban places within which arrival is enacted and negotiated. By building on theoretical stances that make a plea for relational and processual approaches (Desmond, 2014; Glaeser, 2005; Lancione, 2016) to the manifoldness and complexity of urban social reality, the paper argues in favour of focussing on the unfolding emotional interactions among subjects and contexts, so as to grasp the embodied and situated features of newcomers' place apprenticeship and place making. In this sense, it considers the potentialities of these approaches in fostering non-static yet contextual reconsideration of notion of place.
The paper presents the empirical outcomes of a field enquiry based in the "cosmopolite" Brussels, carried on with migrants with very diverse mobility trajectories - forced movers, such as asylum seekers and free movers, such as expats (Favell, 2009) - to investigate with ethnographic attention to newcomers' lived experiences how human and non-human affective resources are found, made and reassembled to produce a sense of place in the new city (Massey, 1993). By promoting substantive disruptions of social and geographical determinism of migrants' categorisations, the aim is to shed light on the multiple operating mechanisms - and on their unequal functioning - that configure the processual dynamics between newcomers and their place of settlement
INTERPERSONAL SYNCHRONY DURING ONLINE ENCOUNTERS: EFFECTS ON SOCIO-COGNITIVE SKILLS, AFFILIATION, AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIORS
Get PDFWhen meanings change and monuments stay: reframing the narrative of the “Monument to the Fallen Miners”
No full textThe “Monument to the Fallen Miners” in the Kosovar city of Mitrovica was built in 1973 to a project by B. Bogdanović. It is one of a large number of memorials built in order to construct a unified narrative and to contribute to the nation building process of multiethnic Yugoslavia.
In this case, the monument was intended to recall a strike of miners during WWII against the occupying Nazi regime - it consists of two conical pillars with a mining cart atop. Being the miners of both Serbian and Albanian ethnicities, the conceived narrative was that these two ethnic groups (the two pillars) are unified in their battle against a mutual enemy. Since 2013, after years of warfare and ongoing crisis, Mitrovica is divided into two administrative units: the southern part of the city, inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians and the northern part, inhabited primarily by members of the Serbian ethnicity. The perpetuation of unitarian meanings is hardly imaginable under the current provisional social and political conditions. How are the leftovers of a narrative of unity and regional congregation reframed today? How do they attach to the materiality of this iconic monument that persists in its physical presence
DeCoSe. Designing Collaborative Services to boost social innovation in Smart Cities. &CO, Use Everything, Waste Nothing
No full textFinal publication of the Alta Scuola Politecnica project DeCoS
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