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New paper in Antipode: Inhabiting dispossession in the post-socialist city

My new paper in Antipode took years to write. Since the time in which I did the archival and ethnographic research underpinning it much life, death, pandemic, and international moving happened… but I hope I was finally able to give justice to that material.

The paper is open-access at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12821

It builds on my previous research around #race #class #housing #resistance in #Bucharest, and it expands on crucial Romanian scholarship to offer a trans-Atlantic dialogue around the (un)makings of #urban #racialised #dispossession.

I am thankful to my comrades Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire and CARUSEL, to my colleagues and friends Bogdan (Diana Bogdan), Robert and Alina Stoiculescu in Bucharest, to the anonymous reviewers and to the Antipode board.
I am also very much thankful to a number of Romanian scholars to which I am indebted for their friendship and writings, including Liviu Chelcea, Eniko Vincze, Marian Ursan, Veda Popovici, Ioana Florea, George Zamfir, Zamfi Irina, Catalin Berescu, and the quasi-Romanian like myself Erin MC ElRoy!

Thanks also to the Urban studies foundation for supporting part of the archival/ethnographic work and to the ERC for supporting additional research & writing.

Inhabiting Dispossession in the Post-Socialist City: Race, Class, and the Plan, in Bucharest, Romania
Abstract

The paper explores the racialised geography of a series of socialist blocs located in the southern periphery of Bucharest, labelled as a contemporary Romanian “ghetto”. Through extensive ethnographic and archival work, it expands on contemporary Western race-aware urban scholarship, advancing an expansive reading of the “plan” as a key element to account for the endurance of foundational dispossession in the context of Bucharest. The goal is to trace how the social segmentations of “class” and “race” have been diagrammed through discontinuous city-making in the last hundred years, refuting a reading of these complex processes as a matter of evolutionary stages between economic regimes, which ends up reproducing a stereotypical representation of the Eastern “other”. The paper contributes to a situated approach to racial urbanism, offering the basis for a trans-Atlantic dialogue around the makings and unmakings of urban dispossession.

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Keynote in Berlin on dispossession and minor activism

After a long time of no-travelling, and a very tough couple of years, I now have the privilege to travel to Berlin (by train!) to take part in a very interesting event put together by my good friend Piotr Goldstein titled Migrant and Minority Activism: Between protest movements and everyday engagement.

I am excited to deliver the keynote at the end of the first day, where I will try to link together years of research in Bucharest, Romania, around racialised dispossession, radical housing and activism. The title of my talk will be, Inhabiting dispossession in the post-socialist city: storylines, embodied struggles, and emplacement

The event is organised by ZOiS Berlinand the EASA Anthropology of Social Movements Network. More info on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/834122970514959/?active_tab=discussion