“We take responsibility!”: Governing the neighborhood—governing the self
This ethnographic study of a neighborhood association focuses on the process of organizing residents to collective action. Situated in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, New York, the Urban Community Collaborative (UCC) employs two main governing techniques: (1) “taking responsibility” and (2)“working collaboratively” that emphasizes the rationality of “active citizenship” and the formation of horizontally linked collaborative partnerships to address perceived urban social problems. Similar to previous studies, we view this political rationality as a discursive constitution that shapes the actions of the members of the UCC (Atkinson, 1999; Schofield, 20002). This political rationality invokes neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility, entrepreneurship, and community partnership in place of a dependency on the government. We find residents utilizing moral techniques of responsibilization which entails calling on their neighbors to “take responsibility” and to “work collaboratively” with one another and paradoxically, with the government itself in revitalization efforts.
Looking for Agency in Transnational Refugee Trajectories during the Second World War - Eric T. Jennings. Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. 308 pages. ISBN: 9780674983380, $36. - Megan Koreman. The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 410 pages. 9780190662271, $29,95. - Joanna Newman. Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 306 pages. 9781789206494, $29,95.
