scholarly journals Narrating the Racialization of Space in Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee

2015 ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Martha Norkunas

Narrating the Racialization of Space in Austin, Texas and Nashville, TennesseePeople of color in the United States have been obligated to move through public space in particular ways, dictated by law and social custom. Narrators create cognitive maps of movement in the city shaped by racial codes of behavior. The maps change over time as law and social custom changes. The fluidity of the maps is also influenced by status, gender, class, and skin tone. This paper examines a rich body of oral narratives co-created with African Americans from 2004 to 2014 focusing on how men and women narrate their concepts of racialized space. It moves from narratives about the larger landscape — the city — to smaller, more personal public places — the sidewalk and the store — to intimate sites of contact in the public sphere. Many of the narratives describe complex flows of controlled movement dictated by racial boundaries in the context of capitalism. The narratives form an urban ethnography of the power relations inscribed on the landscape by racializing movement in space. Narracje o urasowieniu przestrzeni w Austin (Teksas) i Nashville (Tennessee)Nie-Biali w Stanach Zjednoczonych byli zmuszeni do poruszania się w przestrzeni publicznej w szczególny sposób, określony przez prawo i zwyczaj społeczny. W swoich narracjach badani tworzą mapy kognitywne ruchu w mieście, kształtowane przez rasowe kody zachowania. Mapy te zmieniały się w czasie pod wpływem zmian prawnych i zwyczajowych. Na płynność tych map wpływały także status, płeć, klasa i odcień koloru skóry. W artykule przeanalizowano bogaty zbiór relacji ustnych tak zwanych Afroamerykanów, zbieranych w latach 2004-2014; uwaga skupia się na tym, jak mężczyźni i kobiety opowiadają o swoim widzeniu przestrzeni urasowionej. Omówiono narracje o szerszej przestrzeni miasta, jak i węższej, skoncentrowanej na bardziej osobistych miejscach publicznych, takich jak sklep. Wiele narracji opisuje złożone wiązki kontrolowanych ruchów, dyktowane przez granice rasowe w kontekście kapitalizmu. Narracje te tworzą etnografię miejskości o relacjach władzy wpisanych w krajobraz, opartych na urasowieniu ruchu w przestrzeni.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Jan Siegemund

AbstractLibel played an important and extraordinary role in early modern conflict culture. The article discusses their functions and the way they were assessed in court. The case study illustrates argumentative spaces and different levels of normative references in libel trials in 16th century electoral Saxony. In 1569, Andreas Langener – in consequence of a long stagnating private conflict – posted several libels against the nobleman Tham Pflugk in different public places in the city of Dresden. Consequently, he was arrested and charged with ‘libelling’. Depending on the reference to conflicting social and legal norms, he had therefore been either threatened with corporal punishment including his execution, or rewarded with laudations. In this case, the act of libelling could be seen as slander, but also as a service to the community, which Langener had informed about potentially harmful transgression of norms. While the common good was the highest maxim, different and sometimes conflicting legally protected interests had to be discussed. The situational decision depended on whether the articulated charges where true and relevant for the public, on the invective language, and especially on the quality and size of the public sphere reached by the libel.


2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Vaiou ◽  
A. Kalandides

Abstract. This paper deals with the concept of «public space». It works with the ambiguities embedded therein, contrasting material space/s – the streets, squares, parks, public buildings of the city – with the other spaces created through the functions and institutions of the «public sphere» as a site of public deliberation. Focussing on the ambiguities of the concept allow questions of access, interaction, participation, cultural and symbolic rights of passage to be posed. Public space is approached here as constituted through the practices of everyday life: it is produced and constantly contested, reflecting – among other things – relations of power. Differences in gender, ethnicity or sexuality often lead to binary thinking, such as inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, local/stranger. The way that such categories intertwine in everyday life, though, unsettle easy categorisations and force a questioning of strict lines of division. It is in this context that a proposal is made to discuss the city of «others», drawing from research examples which cross over such lines.


Author(s):  
Nerea Feliz Arrizabalaga ◽  

As the public sphere has intruded the privacy of the home, the semiotics of the domestic have migrated to workplaces and public squares. The entropic mixture of private and public environments is gradually altering the physiognomy of the city.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-106
Author(s):  
Débora Machado Visini

O presente artigo investiga as intervenções urbanas – pertencentes a um grupo composto por muitas manifestações artísticas realizadas no espaço público – que dialogam com a cidade. Compreendidas como práticas artísticas e socioespaciais, as intervenções urbanas do coletivo lesbiano Velcro Choque (Brasil) são analisadas a partir das potências que surgem com a ocupação das ruas da cidade e da esfera pública, já que tal ato coloca em cheque normas e narrativas históricas, que serão apontadas a partir do viés da crítica feminista da cultura. Conforme mostra a prática do coletivo, o artivismo associado aos feminismos e às dissidências sexuais e de gênero podem oportunizar a criação de subjetividades libertárias e formas de existência e resistência através das produções coletivas nas artes visuais.Palavras-chave: Cidade. Intervenção Urbana. Feminismos. Artivismo. AbstractThis paper investigates urban interventions – belonging to a group composed of many artistic manifestations carried out in the public space – that dialogue with the city. Understanding the urban interventions as an artistic and socio-spatial practice, the production of the lesbian collective Velcro Choque (Brazil) will be analyzed based on the potency that emerges with the occupation of the streets and the public sphere, since this act can put in check historical norms and narratives, which will be pointed out from the bias of the feminist critic of the culture. As the practice of the collective shows, artivism associated with feminism, sexual and gender dissidences can create opportunities for the creation of libertarian subjectivities and forms of existence and resistance through collective productions in the visual arts.Keywords: City. Urban Interventions. Feminisms. Artivism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-336
Author(s):  
Antonia Steger

Abstract Public space can be understood as a place where strangers encounter each other in certain ways. This has been the common conceptual understanding of the public sphere in sociology and urban studies since Georg Simmel (cf. works by Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Jan Gehl, Richard Sennett, and many more). However, this understanding of public space often centers around unclear notions of how these encounters are interactively structured. So far, research on this topic has mainly addressed what Goffman termed focused interactions, such as talks between strangers in public. His notion of unfocused interactions, for fleeting encounters, has yet to receive adequate academic attention. Thus, the aim of this article is to engage in an in-depth empirical study of fleeting encounters in public places by drawing on three examples of people passing each other along city streets. Based on video recordings, the multimodal interaction analysis shows that when people pass each other they engage in interactional processes expressed through bodily dimensions, which carry specific social implications. Gaze, along with other visually accessible bodily behaviors, is the most important interactive resource people use to make themselves accountable for passing strangers without making contact. The analysis suggests that through passing each other, strangers generate specific kinds of interactive relations that are typical within the public sphere. Fleeting encounters thus prove to be highly structured, interactively achieved processes through which strangers establish their situated relations in a way that allows them to remain as separate interactional units.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Dobson

Abstract:This article documents some of the forms of sociality engendered by the massive and growing presence of private security guards around Nairobi, Kenya. A focus on violence and the logic of an ideal of the use of violence in critical security studies literature obfuscates these networks in a similar way to idealizations of public space and the public sphere in anthropological literature on private security and residential enclaves. By looking at the close ties guards maintain with their homes in rural areas of Nairobi and the associations they make with people such as hawkers, it becomes clear that their presence in the city is creating new sets of valuations and obligations all the time. These forms of sociality are not galvanized by the threat of violence that the guards evoke; rather, they are engendered alongside and at cross-currents to the idealized, securitized landscape.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259
Author(s):  
Holly Maples

In this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dance craze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviour in the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts of resistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls. Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the public space of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dance was an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained and indecent physical behaviour by the nation's youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing's ‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancing that was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many of which featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour, as seen in the tango and the apache dance, or clumsy, un-gendered movement, popular in the animal dances of the day. Through ragtime dancing, women performed acts of rupture on their bodies and the urban cityscape, transforming social dancing into public statements of gendered resistance. Holly Maples is a lecturer in Drama at the University of East Anglia. Both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, she trained as an actress at Central School of Speech and Drama in London and completed her PhD in Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her book, Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre, has recently been published in the ‘Reimagining Ireland’ series by Peter Lang.


Author(s):  
Clifton C. Ellis ◽  
◽  
David J. Isern ◽  

Historically, the great cities of the world have built public spaces that have often been used as venues for spectacle, and displays of power and status. These public venues are part of the identity of these cities and have an importance and influence far beyond their physical dimensions or geometric shapes. They are all platforms that accommodate, both physically and metaphorically, the various expressions of a society. This paper will address historical events and their transcendency within the context of the city and their historical importance and effect in a larger global context. In addition, it will apply theoretical concepts about city space and the public sphere through an application of post-structuralist theory, critical theory, and social capital theory.1


Author(s):  
А.А. Трунов ◽  
И.В. Манышев

В статье представлен социологический анализ эффективности связей с общественностью в современном областном центре в условиях локализации анклавов глобальности и экспансии цифровых технологий. Используются идеи Г. Зиммеля, М. Вебера, Э. Бёрджесса, Р. Парка, Л. Вирта, Й. Тернборна и Д. Харви, заложивших научные основы урбанистики. Также привлекаются концепции производства социального пространства А. Лефевра и структурного изменения публичной сферы Ю. Хабермаса, компаративный анализ современных теорий города И.А. Вершининой, гипотеза о дополненной современности Д.В. Иванова, предложения по цифровизации общественного пространства сетевых городов С. Маккуайра и М. Сторпера, парадигма пиарологии И.П. Кужелевой-Саган. По мнению авторов данной работы, чтобы не оказаться на периферии трансформационных процессов и воспользоваться позитивными достижениями цифровизации, областные центры должны создавать разветвлённую инфраструктуру виртуальных сервисов и электронных платформ, позволяющую налаживать и поддерживать эффективные связи с общественностью. The article provides a sociological analysis of the effectiveness of public relations in the modern regional center in the context of localization of enclaves of globality and the expansion of digital technologies. The ideas of G. Simmel, M. Weber, E. Burgess, R. Park, L. Wirth, J. Turnbourne and D. Harvey, who laid the scientific foundations of urbanism, are used. The concepts of production of social space by A. Lefebvre and structural change of the public sphere by Yu. Habermas, comparative analysis of modern theories of the city by I.A. Vershinina, the hypothesis of augmented modernity by D.V. Ivanov, proposals for the digitalization of the public space of network cities by S. McQuire and M. Storper, the paradigm of PR studies by I.P. Kuzheleva-Sagan. According to the authors of this work, in order not to be on the periphery of transformational processes and to take advantage of the positive achievements of digitalization, regional centers should create an extensive infrastructure of virtual services and electronic platforms that allows them to establish and maintain effective public relations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Christiana Abraham

This paper discusses the recent backlash against public monuments spurred by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in North America and elsewhere following the killing by police of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man in the United States. Since this event, protestors have taken to the streets to bring attention to police brutality, systemic racism, and racial injustice faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and some European countries. In many of these protests, outraged citizens have torn down, toppled, or defaced monuments of well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism. Protestors have been demanding the removal of statues and monuments that symbolize slavery, colonial power, and systemic and historical racism. What makes these monuments problematic and what drives these deliberate and spectacular acts of defiance against these omnipresent monuments? Featuring an interview with art historian Charmaine A. Nelson, this article explores the meanings of these forceful, decolonial articulations at this moment. The interview addresses some complex questions related to monumentalization and the public sphere, symbolism and racial in/justice. In so doing, it suggests that monuments of the future need to be reimagined and redefined contemporaneously with shifting social knowledge and generational change.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document