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Beyond Pain Narratives? Representing Loss and Practising Refusal at the Astoria Hotel
Abstract
Recent scholarship that contends with the ethical and political difficulty of representing loss has emphasized the importance of Indigenous, racialized, urban, and/or otherwise oppressed communities’ refusal to recite “pain narratives”. According to these formulations of refusal, there are some things about which the academy does not need to know. Not as much scholarship has considered that there may be some pain about which we do need to know. Drawing on archival records, nine months of ethnographic embeddedness in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), and conversations with two DTES organizers, this article responds to this question by arguing for representations of loss that cut against the spectacularity of pain narratives by rendering visible how loss manifests in the everyday. By way of example, this article contextualizes loss at a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel called the Astoria Hotel. Tracing the history of the Astoria from the early 1900s to the present-day, this article shows how ongoing death, loss, and incumbent remembrance at the Astoria was not—and is still not—inevitable. It shows how DTES organizers, including those connected with the DTES SRO Collaborative and the Tenant Overdose Response Organizers, are working against violent forces which threaten the neighbourhood and community. In doing so, this article brings together studies of urban history, ethnography, and public memory to take seriously the notion that some pain does matter, while at the same time, inviting critique and further discussion of what it means to subvert pain narratives and what constitutes the work of refusal.
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This paper documents court-imposed bail and sentencing conditions with spatial dimensions, such as red zones, no contact conditions, curfews and prohibitions to demonstrate, issued in the context of criminal proceedings. These conditional orders, which are growing in importance and have a significant impact on the lives of marginalized groups of people, have not received the attention they deserve in the literature. As opposed to better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, these conditional orders are a distinctive form of spatial tactic that rely on ancient and routinized rules of criminal procedure and the practices of the courts. In order to understand this spatial tactic, and its impact on marginalized people's rights and uses of spaces, we argue that it is necessary to pay attention to the legal rationalities, knowledge and practices that sustain them.
What does ethnographic theory look like in dialogue with historical anthropology? Or, what does that theory contribute to a discussion of Tibetan images of Mao Zedong? In this article, I present a renegade history told by a Tibetan in exile that disguises Mao in Tibetan dress as part of his journeys on the Long March in the 1930s. Beyond assessing its historical veracity, I consider the social truths, cultural logics, and political claims embedded in this history as examples of the productive excesses inherent in and generated by conceptual disjunctures.
Objective:
The health of people living in marginal housing is not well characterized, particularly from the perspective of multimorbid illness. The authors investigated this population in a community sample.
Method:
A prospective community sample (N=293) of adults living in single-room occupancy hotels was followed for a median of 23.7 months. Assessment included psychiatric and neurological evaluation, multimodal MRI, and viral testing.
Results:
Previous homelessness was described in 66.6% of participants. Fifteen deaths occurred during 552 person-years of follow-up. The standardized mortality ratio was 4.83 (95% CI=2.91-8.01). Substance dependence was ubiquitous (95.2%), with 61.7% injection drug use. Psychosis was the most common mental illness (47.4%). A neurological disorder was present in 45.8% of participants, with definite MRI findings in 28.0%. HIV serology was positive in 18.4% of participants, and hepatitis C virus serology in 70.3%. The median number of multimorbid illnesses (from a list of 12) was three. Burden of multimorbidity was significantly correlated with lower role functioning score. Comorbid addiction or physical illness significantly decreased the likelihood of treatment for psychosis but not the likelihood of treatment for opioid dependence or HIV disease. Participants who died during follow-up appeared to have profiles of multimorbidity similar to those of the overall sample.
Conclusions:
This marginally housed cohort had greater than expected mortality and high levels of multimorbidity with adverse associations with role function and likelihood of treatment for psychosis. These findings may guide the development of effective health care delivery in the setting of marginal housing.
Consoling Ghosts is a sustained contemplation of relationships with the dying and the dead as inspired by conversations with emigrants from Laos and Cambodia. Emigrants’ thoughts and stories often refer and defer to spirits, from the wandering souls of the seriously ill to the dangerous ghosts of those who died by violence, and from restless ancestors displaced from their homes to adjudicating spirits of Southeast Asian landscapes. Langford considers how and why such spirits become implicated in remembering and responding to violence, whether the bloody violence of war or the more structural violence of minoritization and poverty. What is at stake, she asks, when spirits break out of their usual semiotic confinement as symbolic figures for history, heritage, or trauma, in order to haunt the corridors of hospitals and funeral homes? Why does it seem that spirits are both those who most required to be consoled and those who offer the most powerful possibilities of consolation? Emigrants’ theories and stories of ghosts, Langford suggests, implicitly question the metaphorical status of spirits, challenging, in the process, both contemporary bioethics of dying and dominant styles of mourning. Emigrants’ perspectives expose the theological assumptions that underwrite both contemporary management of death and prevalent theories of biopolitics, foreclosing recognition of the social existence of ghosts. Ultimately, she suggests, an alternative ontology of ghosts enables different relationships to death and the dead.
In this introduction, coeditors Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang discuss critically productive tensions that serve as the foundation for this issue's theme of “what justice wants.” Tuck and Yang consider how justice operates as a catalytic concept in conversations like critical ethnic studies and among activists and organizers. The article addresses the limits and possibilities for justice, as a redress discourse, as a form of action, and through the State. Highlighting the varying and sometimes contradictory meanings of justice, the authors then consider the “elsewheres” beyond justice. This introduction also provides short descriptions of the articles that make up this issue and approach their own perspectives on what justice wants.
The notion of encounter has been used widely within work on urban diversity and socio-cultural difference, yet it remains under-theorized. This paper argues that ‘encounter’ is a conceptually charged construct that is worthy of sustained and critical attention. Drawing on a wide range of geographical interests, including animal geographies, urban diversity, postcolonialism, mobile geographies, and the more-than-human, it offers the first examination of how ‘encounter’ has been deployed across the discipline. By further tracing the historical links between geography and encounter, the paper contends that encounters are distinct genres of contact, and demonstrates why this matters for geographical thought, and how we think about bodies, borders, and difference.
Between 1886 and 1950, marginal housing in Vancouver ran the gamut from home to homelessness: in the spectrum of housing conditions, it could be anything between a resist. ill a lodging house in a respectable suburb and a tea box in a depression-era jungle. Many residents had strong emotional ties to their homes, whatever the quality of housing conditions. Foremost among the reasons for this attachment was a variety of attitudes, concerns, and relationships, including the expectations about adequate housing of those who had lived and worked in British Columbia's resource communities. Examples of these powerful ties, and of the resistance to change that they prompted, suggest that housing bureaucrats and activists should think carefully about the justness and the effectiveness of interventions such as eviction and relocation.
This article explores ideas of home and place making that bear on the narrated realities of 14 women who are drug users living with HIV in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. ‘Taming Space’ refers to the negotiations, transgressions and accommodations they make within particular spatial regimes. As residents of a ‘skid row’ district, research participants work to reconcile personal identities within representations of stigmatized space. As the subjects of epidemiological enquiry, clients of public health services and recipients of harm reduction initiatives, women both resist and acquiesce to the parameters of medicalized space. Housing and social service policies further demarcate spatial orders, especially framing women's options for mobility and homemaking. Finally, as street-involved persons they are subject to the often contradictory socio-spatial codes of street drug sociality. Drawing on the concept of turning points, I analyze the diverse narratives of these women as they flesh out particular dynamics of space and identity within broader structural contexts of colonialism, public health and poverty.
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver is the subject of considerable research due to high rates of drug use, poverty, crime, infectious disease, and mental illness. This paper first presents a brief background to the DTES and then presents a survey of literature addressing the issues in this area from 2001 to 2011. The literature surveyed includes a range of publications such as those from peer-reviewed journals and the grey literature of reports and dissertations. This survey investigates the themes and outcomes of the extant literature and highlights the notable lack of research on mental health in the DTES.
I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live-in caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben’s claim that the generalized suspension of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben’s theory a concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to ‘bare life’. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit-concepts that Agamben offers as a means to re-envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation-state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsibility.
See also Amber Dean, “Space, Temporality, History: Encountering Hauntings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
- Frank Leonard
Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside” (report
- See Amber Dean
- Toronto
Town Tall: Fourth of July Event Squeaked in Ahead of France’s Bastille Day
- Malcom Perry
They thought I was going to back down and leave”: DTES Tenant’s Court Case Shines Light on Practices of Sahota Landlords
- John Colebourn
Gender, Ethnicity, and Hybrid Forms of Community-based Urban Activism in Vancouver
- See Martin
Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside” (guide
- See Louise Boilevin
Balmoral, Regent Hotel Owners Fight City’s $1 Expropriation in Court
- Jen St
- Denis
On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity
- Audra Simpson
Obvious but Invisible: Ways of Knowing Health, Environment, and Colonialism in a West Coast Indigenous Community
- See Nicholas Blomley
R-Words,” 244; Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal
- Yang Tuck