Summary
This session brings together interpretations of everyday embodied
practices and forms of resistance in the city (de Certeau 1984), involving a
direct engagement with arguments of the visualities and materialities of the
public sphere. In different ways, the following authors have contested the
traditional notion of resistance as
an activity that opposes the dominant structure: performative systems of power
(Rose 2002), politics and poetics of walking (Pinder 2011), BMX riders in
London (Spinney 2010) and gardening (DeSilvey 2003). In relation, debates
surrounding the emotional and affective capacities of bodies (Pile 2010) and
the perception/experience of the (built) environment (Ingold 2000; Degen and
Rose 2012) open up for discussions of the post-human and the human (Simonsen
2013). This call for papers aims at engaging in discussions about
socio-material relations and methodological approaches towards the sensory,
mobile, and non-representational.
Key Words: embodied practices, the everyday, cities, beyond resistance,
affect, sensory, mobility, methods
Chairs: Casper Laing Ebbensgaard and Jan van Duppen
Papers
Thomas
Keating
1st year PhD Student, Human Geography,
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK
From ‘embodied affects’ to the
‘transindividual’: Simondon and the pre-individual affectivity of
human-technical becoming
The affective turn has resulted in
renewed focus on the shortcomings of analyses that figure the human
subject as the sole arbiter of agency and intended action. According
affect theorists, more needs to be done to theorise a more heterodox
politics of the body that is sensitive to the vitality and agency of
nonhuman matter. Whilst acknowledging the importance of affect
theories in short-circuiting the contemporary reliance of the
political capacities of the “sovereign subject”, this paper aims
to problematize the reliance of affect theories on thinking through
the body as the site of theorising new forms of political
resistance by applying Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of
individuation. For Simondon, a failure to “resist” represents a
failure of individuation between the ‘pre-individual reality’ and
the ‘affective milieu’. Focussing explicitly on his articulation
of pre-individual realities and relational events, I contribute to
new materialist debates about the location and passage of resistance.
Resistance is reposed as an event of negotiation of human and
technical being in a process of ontogenetic becoming. To conclude, I
outline some of the implications of thinking about the
transindividual spatialities of resistance in refiguring
human-technological relationships and habits.
Karol Kurnicki
5th
year PhD student, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University,
Kraków, Poland
Ideological
Practice. Towards a Social and Spatial Understanding of the Everyday
Henri Lefebvre’s reconceptualization
of space and everyday life is inspiring an array of research, yet
there still is a need to reconsider and refine the dialectical
relation between production of space and the quotidian.
My presentation will point towards
possible development of the theory of social production of space with
relation to the notion of ideological practice. Ideology here is
apprehended as an intermediary between society (which produces its
own specific space), and – reversely – as embedded in space and
influencing (re)production of society. This kind of ideology is also
enmeshed with practice as a concrete, material, bodily action of
material production and reproduction of space. The notion of practice
is understood, after Pierre Bourdieu, as a social activity resulting
from the constraints imposed by social structure but simultaneously
reproducing the same structure. To fully comprehend this process, it
has to be spatialized and materialized, i.e. practice must entail
objects as important elements of social reproduction. Therefore, it
has to be added that habituses (and thus practices) are created to a
large extent by material conditions of their production and in turn
they function as creators of space. To better explain this variegated
process I will also recall Luc Boltanski’s concept of regimes of
practice.
What can be called embodied practice in
the fullest sense is not necessarily strictly non-representational or
sensory, but it rather is a dialectical relation which entails both
social and material aspects. As such it should can serve as a
starting point towards the analysis of both socio-material
reproduction and its possible use in politics of resistance.
Jan van Duppen
2nd Year PhD student,
Geography, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Wasting Time, Digging Earth,
Shifting Grounds – How Urban Gardening
enacts the relation between Play and Work
Maria
Prieto
4th Year PhD student,
Architecture, University of Manchester, UK
Engaging Kinaesthetics to Re-imagine
Environmental Design
This paper explores different logics of
political engagement of the body in movement in relation to pleasure
and environmental design. This study departs from two assumptions.
First, instead of situating the body in a specific space and time or
a case-study, I centre on the study of the body-in-practice in the
‘space’ of environmental design practice. And secondly, instead
of framing the movements of the body as locus of ideological
expressions I trace the experiential expressions of pleasure of the
body in movement in connection with the surrounding environment.
Inspired by the Body Weather practice, the expressions of pleasure of
the body-in-practice (delight, play, wit, humour, playfulness, fun,
bliss, flight) may have their own distinctiveness but also mutual
synergies in relation to both spatial design and choreography
practices at play in interchange with a specific environment. Each
bodily pleasure becomes a dynamic playground for careful scrutiny to
assess and articulate the co-presence and multiple interactions of
entities which play off their own ontology against each other in
varying scales and registers of political engagement. In an attempt
to draw an argument of pleasure in the making, I address the issue of
bodily pleasure through the analytical lens of pragmatist
studies of architectural design. This paper pursues a
twofold aim: to account the situations in which the multiple makings
of bodily pleasure become visible and released architecturally, and,
in turn, to show how new strategies of bodily pleasure agency are
dynamically constituted through the relational threads among
multidimensional environmental design processes.
Pedram Dibazar
2nd year
Phd Candidate, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis),
University of Amsterdam
The everyday
Practices of the Rooftop
This paper, in contrast to major
theories of the everyday life, sets forth an understanding of the
rooftop that accords with the quotidian. The mentioned discord is the
point of departure for De Certeau’s (1984) spectator, who, in order
to attend to practices of the everyday, finds it necessary to descend
from the top of the world trade center in New York – a position
that provides total visibility – to the ground level of the street,
where the story begins on footsteps. (93-97). By presenting the
street as the loci of the everyday practices, this account isolates
the rooftop as ordinarily inaccessible, therefore alienating it from
the lived experience of the everyday. Endorsing this notion are
descriptions that find in the rooftop possibilities for ‘escape’,
‘retreat’, and ‘a way out’ of the ordinary.
This paper sets out to associate,
rather than dissociate, the rooftop with the quotidian by focusing on
Iranian cities. The analysis centers on the practices of chanting
political slogans from the rooftops, most notably practiced during
the political unrests following the contested presidential elections
of 2009 in Iran. A number of concepts touched upon in this regard
are: the rooftop’s ambiguous spatial condition stemming from its
legal and architectural configuration as a leftover space; the
condition of non-visibility, yet audibility, provided by it; its
potentiality in challenging the soundscape of the city; and the
rhythmic and embodied practices of resistance inherent to its
performativity.
Ignacia Ossul
2nd
year PhD Candidate Development and Planning Unit, UCL, UK
The politics of
home-making practices: Opening space in the city for social justice
through the everyday life.
The
notion of home has been increasingly incorporated in housing studies
in order to complement the hegemonic notion of low-income housing in
physical terms. Research and practice usually take into account
housing needs and exclude the subjective experience of home that
allows understanding resident’s housing aspirations. Through the
study of everyday practices, this paper seeks to challenge the way in
which needs of residents have been address. It will argue that the
embodied practices of slum dwellers are not only routines of
subsistence but can be silent ways of resistance (Bayat, 1997)
Home-making practices are the intertwined process of generating
meaning through the arrangement of space to facilitate these
activities (Young, 2000). This paper aims to analyze home-making
practices in low-income housing, in order to examine up to what
extend everyday practices of residents (can
be or) are political acts of
contestation to the mode of production of the city. In doing so, this
work seeks to contribute to the multidisciplinary debate of the role
of housing (as a process and product), specifically to examine
housing aspirations providing a critical understanding of ´spatial
politics of home´ (Blunt, 2005). It will be illustrated in a case of
a pilot project for slum upgrading in Viña del Mar, Chile.
Hanna Baumann
PhD
Candidate (2nd year), Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, Department
of Architecture, University of Cambridge
Bodies
on the Line: Geographical Imaginaries and Material Risks on the
Margins of Jerusalem
Using
the film 'Infiltrators' by Khaled Jarrar (2013) as well as interviews
conducted during fieldwork in and around Jerusalem as a starting
point, I will discuss the practices of Palestinians crossing into the
city 'illegally', avoiding detection by the Israeli security and
surveillance apparatus. I argue that these acts of 'infiltration' can
be seen as an embodiment of psychogeographical notions of the
homeland, as they refuse to pay heed to legal and physical obstacles
imposed by the Israeli occupation. Bearing a significant level of
personal risk, these acts, I argue, literally and metaphorically
undermine the geography of the occupation and thus create - if only
temporarily - an alternate spatial reality.
I
juxtapose these notions with the currently ongoing debates on
embodiment in Urban Exploration (UrbEx). Mott and Roberts (2013)
argue that academic discussions of UrbEx have failed to interrogate
the privileged nature of this leisure activity, not accounting for
the incapability of 'other' bodies to engage in such practices. While
the physical acts involved in first-world UrbEx and Palestinian
'infiltration' are similar (scaling walls, cutting through fences,
wading through sewers, evading security services), the motivations
of, and risks taken by, the two groups are quite different. By
discussing the differences, as well as the surprising similarities,
between the two practices, I will expand the discussion on privilege
and embodiment in UrbEx in the hope that engaging with the practices
of 'other' explorers will help us rethink UrbEx as practiced in the
cities of the global North.
Pooya Ghoddousi
Global
Nomads or Temporary Citizens: Transnational mobility of middling
Iranians