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AAG Annual meeting 2013, in LA

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From tomorrow I will take part to the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Los Angeles. I will present in a session called “Geophilosophy and planes of urban experience” and I will be act as discussant in another session, called “Between the Punitive and the Supportive I: Urban Social Policy’s ‘Messy Middle Ground‘.

In the first I’ll be presenting a paper called “Walking the creative and diverse city”. The paper reflects around some initial founding of the investigation that I am undertaking on the “Goods Line” project in Sydney. The aim of this work is to critically confront the topic of the “creative city”, and to highlight issues of diversity related to it. Moreover, the paper introduces a particular take on the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of “abstract machine”, understood as analytical device able to grasp the subtle dynamics related to urban redevelopment projects such the one investigated.

In the second session I have been invited by Gordon MacLeod (University of Durham) and Geoff DeVerteuil (University of Southampton) to comment on the papers that will be presented. This intervention is related to my research on homelessness.

 

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Postcards from the city of the homeless subject @ Macquarie University

 

 

Tomorrow I will present my work on Homelessness at Macquarie University. Here you can download the flyer of the event, and below you can watch the full presentation (done with Prezi).

More on my research on homelessness, here.

“Postcards from the city of the homeless subject”

The presentation will begin showing some of the materials collected during a ten months ethnographic fieldwork with homeless people in Turin, Italy. These materials will be presented in forms of interconnected stills, or postcards, picturing the relational entanglements that take place between homeless people and the city. The main aim of the presentation is indeed to blur the canonical distinction between the subject and the city: homeless people are neither only subjects who performs the city (as the “performative” scholarships claim), nor only subjected to the policies of the city (as the “punitive approach” tells), but they constitute their complex and heterogeneous subjectivities with the wider urban environment to which they relate. Engaging with the work of Deleuze and Guattari as well as with critical assemblages thinking, the notion of subjectivity adopted in the research will be sketched and the meaning of the postcards unfolded. In this sense, and through the help of more ethnographic materials, three key-points will be highlighted. First, the role of urban objects in affecting homeless people projects and desires. Second, the role of normative policies in creating negative affective atmosphere for homeless people. Third, the importance of recognizing homeless people own capabilities. The research implications and the political consequences of the proposed approached will be sketched in the final phase of the presentation.

 

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Different living in difference: the micro-politics of diversity among homeless people

I will present at the “International Conference on Living with Difference” 12-13 September 2012, Marriott Hotel, Leeds, UK. The paper is titled “Different living in difference. The micro-politics and micro-engineering of diversity among homeless people”, and it is a development of my work on homeless people. You can download the PPT here.

Abstract

This work is based upon an ethnographic enquiry in Turin, North-West of Italy, where the author has investigated homelessness as a subjective condition that emerges from the entanglements between the individual and the city. Taking into account both Italian and migrant homeless subjects, this paper investigates the daily encounter between them, while considering that the two heterogeneous groups are already framed as “different” by mainstream societal discourses. In this sense, the two groups share a stigmatized “common land” (Amin, 2012), where their diversity is constantly re-produced, negotiated and challenged. In order to offer a grounded understanding of these latter processes, the paper takes two paths. The first relates to a description of the practices through which different homeless people perform their common land. Presenting original ethnographic material, the paper shows the relational patterns that emerge in the daily lives of these street people, highlighting how conflicts and alliances depend more on contextual dynamics than personal or group differences. This point is then further explored in the second half of the paper, where the urban, contextual machineries that frame homeless people’s lives are excavated. By showing how mainstream discourses on the poor and the migrants translate into public and private services, the paper argues that it is within these micro-engineered frameworks that a normative kind of difference emerges and becomes an issue. In the end, suggesting a grounded and relational take on difference, this paper concludes by proposing sketches of a politics of care able to tackle the production of normative others, in order to foster the positive negotiation of difference that already exists among homeless people.

Amin, A. 2012. Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity press.

 

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I senza dimora a Torino. Una appendice di campo.

Il mio romanzo sui senza fissa dimora (o meglio, con i senza fissa dimora) di Torino, Il Numero 1, conteneva una appendice rivolta esplicitamente a chi coi senza fissa dimora lavora. Visto che il libro e’ piaciuto e molti hanno trovato questa appendice in qualche modo interessante, ora la rendo disponibile al download gratuito su questo sito – qui.

Chi volesse contattarmi per continuare questo dialogo, puo’ scrivermi qui.

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Schizoanalysis of the homeless subject – AAG 2012

 

Association of the American Geographers Annual Meeting, Feb.2012 – New York

Schizoanalysis of the homeless subject
Keywords: Homeless people, chance of space, Guattari, abstract machine, subjectivity Type: Paper

This work is based upon a ten months ethnographic enquiry in Turin, North-West of Italy, to interrogate homelessness as a subjective condition that emerges from the entanglements of the individual and the city. The theoretical framework adopted in the work relies on two main points. Firstly, on a “more- than-topological” understanding of space, able to acknowledge the chances that actually reside beyond the curtain of the codified context where homelessness take place in the city. Concerning this point, the paper relies on Guattari’s notion of abstract machine, as devices that concretely “extract” something codifying it into something different. Secondly, the paper investigate homelessness through Guattari’s notion of the subject, arguing that interrogating homelessness in a more-than-human fashion a world of multiples subjects emerges, with various attitudes, capabilities, relational and affective characterizations. The presentation will be tight and filled up with many exemplifications taken from the fieldwork. Its relevance for this particular session should not be seen in its major engagement with Guattari’s work, but in the tentative to translate few Guattari’s ideas into valuable research tools to investigate the contemporary urban and its issues.

More on my work on homelessness, here.

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Una tesi per tutti. Senza dimora, km, e parole.

Rimettere mano alla propria tesi di dottorato. Rendersi conto di quanti km sono passati. Ricordarsi gli odori della mensa, della strada. Delle persone con cui ho fumato alla stazione, sotto i portici, al parco. Di quel caffè con Daniel, Piazza Solferino. Della fabbrica. Le immagini della mensa e l’odore di latte caldo e di piscio, i tavolini piccoli, gli uomini con le giacche larghe. Carte per terra. Bidoni dell’immondizia. Il freddo di Torino, il Palazzo d’Inverno, la Pellerina e i container, i bicchieri col te’ caldo che scioglie la plastica. Un momento, solo un momento di distrazione nel ridere di fronte all’arco grande della stazione perché un culo così proprio non l’avevamo mai visto, noi, e poi i parcheggi abusivi, i cartoni, e le mani che ti guardano peggio degli occhi, le mani. Il male ai gomiti per scrivere la tesi in un appartamento con i soffitti alti: il coltellino, l’incazzatura di C., i curriculum corretti. Volantini con su scritto: si eseguono lavori di muratura a basso costo. Dopo un lungo weekend in questo ufficio in Oceania minore – cercare di dare un altro senso a tutte quelle parole.

Quella tesi, per quel che vale, e’ disponibile a tutti (qui trovate l’abstract, e contattandomi potete leggerne una copia). Tutto il resto è solo il tempo sfuggito di mano, uno spazio che non controlla le lancette perché non sa cosa sono.

ps: The abstract of PhD thesis on homelessness, is here (if you want to read the full work, contact me).