scholarly journals Coffeehouses (Re)Appropriated: Counterpublics and Cultural Resistance in Tabriz, Iran

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-192
Author(s):  
Laleh Foroughanfar
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Local History ◽  
State Monitoring ◽  
Linguistic Identity ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Everyday Ethics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Iranian State ◽  
The City

Over the last decade, traditional coffeehouses have attracted increasing interest in the city of Tabriz, Iran, in the context of consistent state monitoring and restriction of public life—particularly so among non-Persian ethnolinguistic populations. Relying on a combination of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, and visual documentation), this article explores the everyday life of two coffeehouses in Tabriz through a theoretical lens of third place, counterpublics, and everyday ethics of resistance. Coffeehouses are currently retaining functions as third places; cross-generational venues for preserving cultural, artistic, and linguistic identity as well as institutions of social defiance, resting on elaborate ethical codes and tacit social agreements. Through mechanisms of everyday ethics and cultural practices re-connecting to local history, cultural creativity, and language, insiders are distinguished from outsiders, serving to build trust, security, and solidarity in the context of Iranian state monitoring and restricted social space.

scholarly journals Racism in multicultural neighbourhoods in Chile: Housing precarity and coexistence in a migratory context

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Macarena Bonhomme
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Interaction ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

Chile is one of the countries with major destination flows from Latin America. In such a context, new distinctions and racial formations have emerged, establishing different forms of social exclusion and racism that are performed in the everyday interaction and socio-cultural practices that take place in residential neighbourhoods. This research is based on one of the most multicultural boroughs in Santiago, Recoleta, historically located in a territory called ‘La Chimba.’ The aim is to examine the intercultural coexistence in increasingly multicultural neighbourhoods in the context of South-South migration, in order to discuss the emerging social conflict, understanding how housing policies and limited access to decent housing by migrants reproduce everyday racism. Drawing on a larger research project that consisted in a 17-month ethnography, 70 in-depth interviews and two focus groups with migrants and Chileans between 2015 and 2018, this article shows and discusses how public spaces are racialised through social practices and interactions, and how the making of ‘race’ in urban spaces have an impact on the way in which migrants inhabit and navigate urban spaces and negotiate their ‘right to the city’ in the everyday.

scholarly journals CHANGING EVERYDAY PRACTICES IN SUBURBAN SPACES: A METHODOLOGY TO INVESTIGATE LOCAL TRENDS

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia PROVOTAR ◽  
Anatolii MELNYCHUK ◽  
Oleksiy GNATIUK ◽  
Olena DENYSENKO
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Remote Sensing Data ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Field Trips ◽  
Model Cities ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Science ◽  
The City

Urban and suburban spaces are social and multidimensional. The city and its suburbia constitute an arena of diverse and conflicting social processes. Their social differentiation is manifested, first of all, in housing segregation and diversity of various types and forms of life activity. Social interactions and relationships between individuals and social groups take place in the social space of the city and the suburbia. Their behavioural practices lie at the intersection of economic, social, cultural, environmental, and urban planning domains of urban functioning and manifest themselves in everyday practices. The concepts addressing the research of everyday practices were designed and tested in the fields of sociology, history, and economy. The goal of this article is to develop a methodology for the study of local trends of changing everyday practices in suburban spaces of cities with different functions on the bases of human geography and urban science. The authors propose to study everyday social practices using actor-network theory, making possible to consider the variability of everyday practices of suburban residents as a network of interaction between actors (people, non-people, and ideas) that create, act and change. The initial phase of the research involves a general analysis of the processes and paradigms of suburban development of model cities by analysing scientific literature, field trips to selected suburban areas, use of remote sensing data and local media screening. Based on this analysis, the cases (test areas) are determined. The analytical stage of the study tries to identify characteristics, factors and trends of the temporal changes in the everyday practices of the population of selected areas, focusing on the everyday practices of leisure and self-organization. This stage of the study involves comparative historical and comparative geographical analysis, mapping, in-depth interviews, as well as field observations. The ending stage aims at identification of current trends and peculiarities of changing everyday practices in ambiguous suburban spaces and developing recommendations for local governments and planning agencies.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

Cultures in Motion

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Modern China ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Surprising Effect ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Labor Networks

This book offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, the book follows a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. The book challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The chapters offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing—dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks—remains stationary.

scholarly journals Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802612110144
Author(s):  
Riie Heikkilä ◽  
Anu Katainen
Keyword(s):  
Focus Group ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Focus Group Interviews ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Popular Classes ◽  
Group Interviews ◽  
Symbolic Boundary

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.

Some Reflections on Making Popular Culture in Urban Africa

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdouMaliq Simone
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Africa ◽  
The City ◽  
Ways Of Being

Abstract:In contemporary urban Africa, the turbulence of the city requires incessant innovation that is capable of generating new ways of being. Rather than treating popular culture as some distinctive sector, this article attempts to investigate the popular as methods of bringing together activities and actors that on the surface would not seem compatible, and as experimental forms of generating value in the everyday life of urban residents. This investigation, sited largely in Douala, Cameroon, looks at how youth from varying neighborhoods attempt to get by, and at the unexpected forms of contestation that can ensue.

Goods and States: The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The City ◽  
State Socialist

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).

Everyday agency and transformation: Place, body and story in the divided city

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic
Keyword(s):  
Coping Mechanisms ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Generative Capacity ◽  
Peace And Conflict ◽  
Analytical Work ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. ‘Place’ encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; ‘body’ takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and ‘story’ refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.

scholarly journals The Spaces of Nostalgia(s) and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 218-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Koziura
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Second World War ◽  
City Center ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. This article explores ways in which Habsburg nostalgia has become an important factor in contemporary place-making strategies in the city of Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine. Through the analysis of diasporic homecomings, city center revitalization, and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the politics of monuments, I explore hybrid and diverse ways in which Habsburg nostalgia operates in a given setting. Rather than a static and homogenous form of place attachment, in Chernivtsi different cultural practices associated with Habsburg nostalgia coexist with each other and depending on the political context as well as the social position of the “nostalgic agents” manifest themselves differently. Drawing from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that in order to fully understand individuals’ attachment to space, it is necessary to grasp both the subtle emotional ways in which the city is experienced by individuals as well as problematize the role of the built environment in the visualization of collective memory and emotions of particular groups. The focus on changing manifestations of the Habsburg nostalgia can bring then a better understanding of the range and scope of the city’s symbolic resources that might be mobilized for various purposes.

Age and gentrification in Berlin: urban ageing policy and the experiences of disadvantaged older people

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Dale ◽  
Josefine Heusinger ◽  
Birgit Wolter
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Socially Disadvantaged ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Chapter 5 examines the impact of gentrification processes in Berlin, Germany, on the distribution of older people across the city as well as the everyday experiences of ageing in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The chapter concludes with an overview of developments in the context of political processes, where urban transformation driven by economic interests generates growing conflict and contradiction with the needs of an ageing and increasingly less affluent population.

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