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From familiarity to fragility: an autoethnographic exploration of an Italian city
Abstract
Space, and embodied movement through it, produces place meanings and senses of belonging as individual and environment act upon each other. This co-constitution, however, remains changeable over time with each new or repeated experience. Following an autoethnographic walk around an Italian city, this article charts how passage through and between different parts of the city can evoke often consistent yet sometimes challenging understandings of place and one’s position within it. In so doing, six “zones” of belonging are identified, each accompanied by various thoughts, feelings, and memories as they are navigated on foot. The importance of passage through place in building a knowledge of both place and self is therefore highlighted. Facilitated by reflections upon visual materials collected during the walk, this knowledge and associated feelings are shown to be changeable across neighboring spaces. Moreover, such change is experienceable even within the same space over time as previously hidden yet nonetheless existing entities become visible to the individual for the first or successive times. This tension between absence and presence may thereby result in disruptive shocks and fragility that alter everyday place interactions and belongingness. This can include decisions around how once familiar spaces are subsequently navigated or subject to recollection on the basis of shifting knowledges and expectations that result.
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This paper examines the impact of the 2012 London Summer Olympics on low-income and marginally housed young people living in the London borough of Newham – one of six east London ‘Olympic boroughs’. Drawing on photo-journals created by the youth the summer before the Olympic Games were scheduled to begin (July 2011), the research makes use of photo-elicitation techniques in order to explore such Olympic-related impacts as gentrification, displacement and the loss of a sense of place for local young residents.
This metadata relates to an electronic version of an article published in Visual studies, 2010, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 69-79. Visual studies is available online at informaworldTM at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713689928 Following Henri Lefebvre, this article investigates the distinct rhythms of walking and the ways that it intersects with diverse temporalities and spaces. Because walking is practised and experienced in innumerable contexts, generalisations are problematic. Nevertheless, this article identifies some of the ways in which walking produces time-space and the experience of place. I subsequently discuss how walking is inevitably conditioned by multiple forms of regulation but possesses peculiar characteristics that always make these orderings of space and body contingent, facilitating immanent, often unexpected experiences. I further examine how walking is surrounded by notions of style that reproduce particular rhythms. Walking is inevitably, therefore, suffused with contending notions about how and where to walk, by ideals and conventions laid down by the powerful and not-so-powerful. However, I pay attention to the multiple phases and moments of walking. Both the conventions of walking and its unfolding, sensual and contingent apprehension are difficult to elucidate in academic prose, and luckily there are several challenging walking artists whose work highlights these issues and the rhythmic dimensions of walking. Accordingly, I draw upon the 'textworks' of Richard Long, Francis Alys's series of walks entitled Railings, and Jeremy Deller's 2009 Procession to elicit some of the rhythms of walking.
The paper provides a comparison of political graffiti in Rome and Buenos Aires. It examines ten photographs in each city and explores their properties through a detailed and intensive process of descriptive coding. The comparative method reveals the specific, contextual elements essential for interpreting these graffiti. In a broader sense, these photographic images are seen not as signifying ‘disorder,’ but rather as an intrinsic part of the very ordering of the streets in contemporary metropolitan environments.
The scholarship on aesthetics and materiality has studied how objects help shape identity, social action and subjectivity. Objects, as 'equipment[s] for living' (Luhmann 2000), become the 'obligatory passage points humans have to contend with in order to pursue their projects (Latour 1991). They provide patterns to which bodies can unconsciously latch onto, or help human agents work towards particular states of being (DeNora 2000, 2003). Objects are central in the long term process of taste construction, as any attachment to an object is made out of a delicate equilibrium of mediators, bodies, situations and techniques (Hennion and his collaborators (Hennion and Fouquet 2001; Hennion and Gomart 1999). In all of these accounts objects are the end result of long-term processes of stabilization, in which the actual material object (a musical piece, a sculpture, an art installation, a glass of wine, the oeuvre of Bach as we know it) is both a result and yet a key co-producer of its own generation. Whereas the literature has been generous and detailed in exploring the processes of assembling and sustaining object-centered attachments, it has not sufficiently engaged with what happens when the aesthetic elements of cultural artifacts that have produced emotional resonance are transformed: what do these artifacts morph into? What explains the transition (or not) of different cultural objects? And relatedly, what happens to the key aesthetic qualities that were so central to how the objects had been defined, and to those who have emotionally attached to them? To answer these questions, this article uses as exemplars two different cases of attachment, predicated on the distinctive features of a cultural object - the transcendence of opera and the authenticity of a soccer jersey - that have undergone transformations.
There is an emerging 'aesthetic turn' within sociology which currently lacks clear focus. This paper reviews the different issues feeding into this interest and contributes to its development. Previous renderings of this relationship have set the aesthetic up against sociology, as an emphasis which 'troubles' conventional understandings of sociality and offers no ready way of reconciling the aesthetic with the social. Reflecting on the contributions of recent social theorists, from figures including Bourdieu, Born, Rancière, Deleuze, and Martin, we argue instead for the value of a social aesthetic which critiques instrumentalist and reductive understandings of the social itself. In explicating what form this might take, the latter parts of the paper take issue with classical modernist conceptions of the aesthetic which continue to dominate popular and sociological understandings of the aesthetic, and uses the motif of 'walking' to show how the aesthetic can be rendered in terms of 'the mundane search' and how this search spans everyday experience and cultural re-production. We offer a provisional definition of social aesthetics as the embedded and embodied process of meaning making which, by acknowledging the physical/corporeal boundaries and qualities of the inhabited world, also allows imagination to travel across other spaces and times. It is hoped that this approach can be a useful platform for further inquiry.
This article draws on analysis of data generated by way of an ethnography of fell running in the English Lake District and suggests that participants who have lived and run in the area for many years experience a particular mode of aesthetic. The Lake District has long been valued for its outstanding scenery represented in the aesthetic of the picturesque comprising relatively static landscapes that should be conserved. Established fell runners who have run in the area for many decades apprehend and appreciate the landscape in more complex, rooted and situated ways. The anthropologist Ingold, distinguishes between landscape and landsceppan, and this insight is instructive for grasping the way in which the runners do not simply scope scenery but work with the land: they shape it and are shaped by it. Fell runners are elements within the living environment and along with walls, sheep, becks, sun, rain - what Ingold evocatively calls the 'weather-world' - are mobile. Movement is central to their aesthetic, they enjoy not so much the scenic but rather a fellsceppan and do so through their fast eye-gait-footwork and their lively, variable occupation with the terrain. The fells infiltrate and interpenetrate the runners and movement through the fells generates a somatic aesthetic. The pleasure in turn breeds existential capital an embodied gratification that serves as an attractor that binds those who appreciate feelings of being alive with and in the fells.
This paper tells the story of a single day's walking, alone, along the South West Coast Path in North Devon, England. Forms of narrative and descriptive writing are used here as creative and critical means of discussing the varied affinities and distanciations of self and landscape emergent within the affective and performative milieu of coastal walking. Discussion of these further enables critical engagement with current conceptualizations of self–landscape and subject–world relations within cultural geography and spatial-cultural theory more generally. Through attending to a sequence of incidents and experiences, the paper focuses upon the distinctive ways in which coast walking patterns into refracting orderings of subjectivity and spatiality – into for example, sensations of anxiety and immensity, haptic enfolding and attenuation, encounters with others and with the elements, and moments of visual exhilaration and epiphany.
The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize sense of place through the examination, re-analysis and theorization of two case studies, one of an ex-urban community in England, the other a Himalayan farming and herding community. The paper begins by examining the traditional locus of sense of place research in humanistic geography with extensions to political geography and interpretive anthropology. Identifying three core components—social, ideological and ecological—of senses of place, the paper goes on to reconceptualize these elements using Habermas's theory of communicative action and Ingold's work on environmental psychology. It then applies this reconceptualization to the case studies of Towcester and Shimshal. The paper concludes by emphasizing the ways these cases enrich our understanding of sense of place, by stressing the theoretical contributions of conceiving sense of place as rooted in theories of social organization and society, and as being variably and contingently ecologically emplaced.
The ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Back Yard) concept is commonly used to explain public opposition to new developments near homes and communities, particularly arising from energy technologies such as wind farms or electricity pylons. Despite its common use, the concept has been extensively critiqued by social scientists as a useful concept for research and practice. Given European policy goals to increase sustainable energy supply by 2020, deepening understanding of local opposition is of both conceptual and practical importance. This paper reviews NIMBY literature and proposes an alternative framework to explain local opposition, drawing upon social and environmental psychological theory on place. Local opposition is conceived as a form of place-protective action, which arises when new developments disrupt pre-existing emotional attachments and threaten place-related identity processes. Adopting a social constructivist perspective and drawing on social representation theory, a framework of place change is proposed encompassing stages of becoming aware, interpreting, evaluating, coping and acting, with each stage conceived at multiple levels of analysis, from intrapersonal to socio-cultural. Directions for future research and potential implications of the place-based approach for public engagement by energy policy-makers and practitioners are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
- John Wylie
John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007).
A Single Day's Walking
- Sidaway
Sidaway, "Shadows"; Wylie, "A Single Day's Walking."
A Single Day's Walking
- Wylie
Wylie, "A Single Day's Walking," 245.
Rethinking NIMBYism"; Kennelly and Watt
- Devine-Wright
Devine-Wright, "Rethinking NIMBYism"; Kennelly and Watt, "Seeing Olympic Effects."
44. Olcese and Savage, "Notes Towards a 'Social Aesthetic.'"
Seeing Olympic Effects
- Watt Kennelly
Kennelly and Watt, "Seeing Olympic Effects."
Walking in Rhythms"; Nettleton
- Edensor
Edensor, "Walking in Rhythms"; Nettleton, "Fell Runners."
Reconceptualizing"; Edensor
- Eyles Butz
Butz and Eyles, "Reconceptualizing"; Edensor, "Walking in Rhythms."
Restabilizing Attachment
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Benzecry, "Restabilizing Attachment," 780.