Two seminars in Bristol: Committed positioning and underground Bucharest

Committed positioning_Advocating for messiness

Tomorrow, 23 February 2016, I will deliver two seminars at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol (2pm and 4pm, Seminar room 1). The first will be a PhDs’ workshop on ‘committed positioning’ and ethnography at the urban margins (you can download the presentation here). The second will be a departmental talk around my recent ethnographic work with drug users and homeless people in the underground canals of Bucharest (details are here).

These talks are possible thanks to the generous support of the School of Geographical Sciences. Particular thanks go to Giuseppe Carta and Andrew Lapworth for the original invitation and the organisation of the event.

Approaching chronicity in mental health care – Workshop in Berlin

Screenshot from 2015-11-13 13:24:02

I have been kindly invited in Berlin, at Humboldt University, to comment upon an ethnographic research project titled “The Production of Chronicity in Mental Healthcare and Research in Berlin” (2010-2016, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG). The discussion will take place in a workshop organised by Milena Bister, Martina Klausner and Jörg Niewöhner, on the 20th of November, from 9.30 to 18, at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of Science and Technology, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-University of Berlin. More info can be found here.

I very much look forward to the workshop – the research that Milena and Martina have done is great and teaches us a lot about chronicity, institutionalisation and the production of subjectivity. All welcome!

 

AAG 2015 – Inertia creep

P1000271_1Great AAG this year in Chicago. Lots of people, stimulating talks and activities – all  settled in the Windy City, which indeed is quite windy, but most of all urban: of skyscraper, tiny alley, fat large American buses, rust & rails – because it’s the elevated train that delivers it all.

At the conference I had the pleasure to act as discussant in two sessions – one around assemblage and power, the other around homelessness – and to take part to a panel organised by Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford) on Micropolitics and the Minor (which included Cindi Katz, Kathryn Yusoff, Ben Anderson and Andrew Barry). Most importantly, I got the opportunity to present some provisional thoughts around the 8 months ethnography I undertook in Bucharest, Romania, around eviction and homelessness. The reason of this post if precisely to share that presentation – the PDF (which excludes videos) can be downloaded here. Below the title and abstract of my talk. A big thank you to Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane and Alexander Vasudevan for having organised two great sessions on Political Enactment!

Inertia creeps. Micro-politics of eviction, enactment, entanglement

The paper investigates the case of 100 Roma people evicted from their homes in early September 2014, near the centre of Bucharest, Romania. Soon after the eviction, a wide range of NGOs and grass-roots activists mobilised to support them. Their effort included assistance in building provisional shelters on the near-by side-walks, where families and individuals eventually started to dwell in order to demonstrate their dissent. Through the presentation of video-ethnographic material, the paper unfolds the micro-politics of three interwoven movements characterising this story. First, there is the molar afflatus of eviction, which violently deterritorialised the life of the evicted via acting in the name of the law. Second, NGOs and activists enacted a provisional social machinery of help, learning on a case-by-case basis how to deal with the unfolding of the protest. Third, while living on the street the evicted people entangled with the urban mechanosphere, being subjected to its materialities and atmospheres – a process that affected their bodily and affective performances. The paper pays particular attention at how desire, as a productive force articulating the micro-politics of the case, moulted in the assemblage of these movements. After the initial violent deterritorialisation and the outburst of protest, desire gradually entered into a phase of inertia, being codified under the spell of a ‘normalised’ status of emergency. The paper spells out the risks associated with such inertia showing its inherently reactionary nature, and argues for the importance of grass-roots activism in keeping desire away from its normalisation.

Romania: Lucrului bine facut? (Some thoughts on the Vulturilor case)

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Vulturilor’s tents (2014/10/25 – ML)

I am in Bucuresti since one month and a half. I live in a very depressing block, in the souther periphery of the city, full of cockroaches and with water available at random times. But I like it: there is a 24h Covrigarie not far, a 24h magazin (where I buy beers and cigarettes), and a nice market called ‘Piata Agroalimentara Progresului’. That market is the reason why I have decided to live in this area. I keep on telling myself that the reason for such a choice was related to my research, which is supposedly taking place not far from here, in Ferentari. But the true is that I liked that market too much, the first time I saw it. It is about progress. It is about food. It is about concrete and potatoes and varza and beer – it has its own aesthetics, which I love.
Speaking of love, I decided to come back to Romania for research because 10 years ago, when I did my Erasmus in Bucuresti, I encountered poverty. Real poverty. People living underground. Kids and Aurolac. Students living in blocks without current water, random electricity. People eating once a day to save money, despite what one could say about cultural differences. Orphanages of which I do not want to speak. And so on.

Underground, 2003 (ML)
Underground, 2003 (ML)

So I came back. And I found expensive cars in the city centre, a ‘centrul vechi’ full of bars and pubs and stuff, no more kids in the streets, and some general improvements in the infrastructure of the city. But it did not take much time for Bucuresti to show me its real face. A face made of people working – in the social sector – for free, of people without work, of people that still eat once a day (still not for cultural reasons). But one could say that I am exasperating things, that I am prone to describe more the half part of the glass than the full one, that Romania, and Bucuresti in particular, are not so bad. Of course they are not. Romania, as one of the candidate for the next presidential election states, is Lucruilui bine facut (a job well done). Perhaps.

...

Let’s focus.
I am turning my body to a place where I have been for the first time 5 weeks ago. This is close to the city centre, close to Piata Unirii and the Palace of People. It’s a street, called Vulturilor. Here since 5 weeks there are 20 families, which sum up to more than 70 people, living on the side-walks in front of what was used to be their house. These people have been evicted – legally so – and are now protesting since more than one month in order to get a place where to stay. (A full account of the story can be found, in English, here). Besides the technicalities of the process, what is interesting to me is precisely this word: eviction. Eviction comes from evice, to overcome, to conquer. Its violence is astonishing. It is about ripping off. It is about opening: bodies and walls. Histories and souls. Postcards, fridges, shoes, hats, underpants, pictures, tables and matresses: all expelled from the home, the relational home, the loved home, the space-cum-memories-cum-afflatus of joy and tears-cum-copii – from the home, to the street. It is about eradicating weeds from the field, where the field obliviously is the one you know – private accumulation. So people have been evicted. But these are not common people. These are angry Roma people. The reasons why they should be angry by default encompass what I could possibly grasp and write in a life, and it does not matter here. What matters is that they were (and are) angry, and that they were joined in their protest by some other people, a strange cohort of beings that do not fit in the aforementioned field as well. There is Carusel, a penniless NGO that does so many amazing things that I have not the strength (and enough Palinka) to enumerate now. It suffices to say that in Vulturilor they keep people going on, for good. They built tents, they provide food (with the help of another cohort of amazing volunteers), they bring clothes, medical help, but most of all they provide moral support, constantly, day by day, night by night. Praise to them – later on it will become clearer why. Besides them, there is the Frontul comun pentru dreptul la locuire – a name, a revolution. Another bunch of amazing people. They take care, with others, of the legal framework and try to find all sorts of alternative solutions to the street – always putting the wishes and the needs of the people first. One of them does this particularly well. She goes there every night. Talk to people. Listen to people. Gets angry with people. Amazing stuff.

Vulturilor, mid September 2014 (ML)
Vulturilor, mid September 2014 (ML)

So… All good, one could say. People protest. Other people help. All good. It could be so if one forgets about the most important element of the equation, a thing ceaselessly diminished by the current neo-liberal machine. Namely: the public. The public in this story has three facets. First, there is the idea that an eviction can be legal. What is legal and what is not – it should be clear – it is defined by the public and it’s public matter. So, if an eviction could be legal – and I use a language appropriate for a Cambridge’s scholar here – the public is fucked up. (Why? Eviction, from evice, to overcome, to conquer, to police, to beat, to throw everything you have out. A public that accept such violence is, by definition, not public any more). Second. Public is the space these people now occupy – both at the level of the street and at the level of media portrait. On the street, they do what Roma people do. They are noisy and loud and stuff, and I like this. Moreover, their are gradually becoming homeless, a process of subject-formation that passes through the cold substance of the rained pavement, the lack of sanitary facilities, the exposure to elements and to the rusty identity of the street. This is the public space – in the literal sense – of a trauma that the media are ignoring. So at the level of the media portrait the public discourse is reproducing the same old narrative, which serve the apparatuses of control: they are wrong, they are dirty, different, bad, lazy, and so on and so forth. Both at the level of the street and at the level of the media we have therefore two public issues: one is the trauma of bodies displaced like things, the other is the the waste of public money, time, and resources given to journalist that cannot tell the difference between a story and a reproduction of a pitiful paradigm.

The last forgotten public bit of this story is politics. I want to be clear here. These people have been evicted in September 2014. The property was sold to the foreign ‘investor’ in 2009. Where was the public-as-politic in-between? The public knew, or should have known, that the eviction was coming. If evictions, in our deranged society, are legal, it should not be legal to do not provide a solution for the evicted people – to do not find anything (social housing, substantial renting help, monetary compensation, etc) in five years! Where was the public-politic in-between? I want Ponta, the current Prime Minister running for presidency under the slogan ‘Presedintele care uneste’ to reply (and if he will reply, I ask him to do not plagiarize his answer from someone else). I want the major of this city to reply. The major of the sector. I want the media to report and reply. (But I do not expect Iohannis, the candidate running for presidency with the idiot slogan I grabbed for this post, to even understand these questions). Of course, nobody will ever reply. But the good news is: the people are still out there. Protesting, posing questions, demanding answers.

This is why the Vulturilor protest is a public matter: it is an awakening slap on each one’s face. And I insist so much on this terminology, the public, because this is what I have learned in the past five weeks on the street: the protest is affirmative micro-politics, the only afflatus that could bring our minoritatian mode-of-being to the fore, to the re-appropriation of shared means, resources, and knowledge. The public, again. What the Vulturilor’s families are doing is great. Because it speaks truth to power: it tells us, all of us, that being marginalised is not a pathology. It is just normality under abnormal conditions. A condition that can change – also in this hard, snowy, lazy, and a little bit bitchy, Bucuresti.

Vulturilor, mid-Sept 2014 (ML)
Vulturilor, mid-Sept 2014 (ML)

 

New Paper: The Spectacle of the Poor

Figure 1Social and Cultural Geography has just published a paper of mine, on homelessness, Facebook, and the relation between social media, affects, and poverty. It is called ‘The Spectacle of the Poor’ and it can be downloaded here. The paper is based on the image above – read the abstract below to know more.

Lancione, M. 2014. “The Spectacle of the Poor. Or: ‘Wow!! Awesome. Nice to Know That People Care!’” Social & Cultural Geography. doi:10.1080/14649365.2014.916742.

On the night of 14 November 2012, a police officer of the New York Police Department encountered a homeless person while performing his duties around Times Square. He gave him a pair of boots and while doing so, he was photographed by a tourist. The photo was posted on Facebook, receiving in a few days more than 1.6 million visits. The paper unfolds the reasons why this particular image and story have gone, as the media has put it, ‘viral’. The paper investigates the spaces that have emerged in the media elongation of DePrimo’s practice of care and, introducing the notion of ‘spectacle of the poor’, it argues that this specific case simplifies the dominant western framings around matter of ‘caring
for the poor’. The political and cultural consequences of these framings are investigated, and reflections on how to tackle them provided.

 

New paper in City on Homelessness and Public institutions

The 'Emergenza Freddo' camp in Turin, 2010 (Photo ML)
The ‘Emergenza Freddo’ camp in Turin, 2010 (Photo ML)

City has recently published one of my paper on homelessness, from my 2010 fieldwork in Turin, Italy. The paper can be downloaded here, below is the abstract.

Lancione, M. (2014), Assemblages of care and the analysis of public policies on homelessness in Turin, Italy, City, 18:1, 25-40

This paper investigates the ways urban policies on homelessness are discursively framed and practically enacted in Turin, Italy. The notion of ‘assemblages of care’ is introduced to show how these policies contribute to the constitution of different experiences of homelessness, by means of their discursive blueprints and practical enactments. Relying on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper questions four policies. Three of these interventions are found to have negative impacts on homeless people’s emotions and ways of life; the remaining policy, I argue, holds the potential to produce alternative assemblages and more positive engagement with the individuals encountered. The conclusion provides more general critical reflections on urban policy and homelessness.

New paper on the European Journal of Homelessness

The European Journal of Homelessness published a reworked version of what I wrote for the Nervemeter (a street-based magazine in London). It is a paper about re-thinking homelessness. The piece can be downloaded here: Lancione, M. (2013). How is Homelessness? European Journal of Homelessness, 7(2), 237–248.

The European Journal of Homelessness is a publication of FEANTSA – the European Federation of European Organisations Working with the Homeless. More info here.

 

 

New Paper: Entanglement of Faith (on Urban Studies)

A new paper of mine is available on Urban Studies (online first). The paper is entitled ‘Entanglements of faith: Discourses, practices of care and homeless people in an Italian City of Saints‘. It is about Faith-Base Organisations in Turin, and the work they do with homeless people. I am particularly fond of this paper: it summarises an important part of the research I did in Turin in 2010. Here is the link to download: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/01/08/0042098013514620.abstract

If you can’t access Urban Studies, contact me and I’ll send it to you.

Abstract:

This paper investigates how Catholic-inspired services for homeless people are delivered in Turin, Italy. The purpose is to critically interrogate particular faith-based organisations’ moral discourses on homelessness, and to show how they are enacted through practices of care directed at the homeless subject. The paper contributes to the geographical literature on faith-based organisations addressing its shortcomings – namely the lack of critical and contextual focus on faith-based organisations’ ‘love for the poor’. To address this point, the paper takes a vitalist perspective on the urban and introduces the notion of the ‘entanglements of faith’, which allows an integrated and grounded perspective on faith-based organisations’ interventions. The outcomes of the work suggest that these faith-based organisations propose standardised services that, producing particular assemblages and affective atmospheres, have deep emotional and relational effects on their recipients. Further lines of research are sketched in the conclusions.

New paper: Homeless People and City of Abstract Machines, in Area

area

Area has just published one of my paper on homelessness, which is an expanded version of the theoretical argument I was making in my PhD thesis. You can have a look at the paper here. Below you can find the abstract.

“Homeless people and the city of abstract machines. Assemblage thinking and the performative approach to homelessness”

The paper focuses on one central point of the ‘performative’ approach to homelessness that is still inadequately explored by the current literature: the conceptualisation of the relational entanglements between homeless people and the city. The argument is that only through a critical attention to these fluid and more-than-human details will we be able to re-imagine a different politics of homelessness. The paper, engaging with the work of Deleuze and Guattari as well as with critical assemblages thinking, proposes two concepts that are considered to be fundamental in this sense. First, assemblage, as a concept able to render the hybrid constituency of the individual within the city; and second, abstract machines, as a way to take into account the fluidity of power in affecting one’s own experience of homelessness. The approach proposed in the paper is illustrated through the presentations of original ethnographic material derived from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turin, Italy. The paper concludes by suggesting that the abstract machine of homelessness can be tackled in at least two ways. First, re-working the institutional assemblages of care that produce stigmatising discourses and deep emotional effects. Second, liberating homeless people’s capacities and resources, which are currently poorly accounted by canonical literature and policies.

How is homelessness? My piece for the Nervemeter

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Dear all, I am very happy to share this piece of writing I produced for the Nervemeter. The Nervemeter is a non-profit, underground magazine, created by artists and sold on the streets of London by homeless people. All the money of the initiative goes to them, and the content of the magazine is related to street life (not like The Big Issue!). My piece tries to translate my own theoretical and empirical research on homelessness in non-academic prose, and it has been published in the fourth issue of the magazine, which is out now. Here you can download my contribution. Support the Nervemeter, follow them on Twitter!