Agata Lisiak’s research while affiliated with University of the Witwatersrand and other places

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Publications (19)


“A city coming into being”: Walking in Berlin with Franz Hessel and Marshall Berman
  • Article

January 2019

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88 Reads

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3 Citations

City

Agata Lisiak

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Reece Cox

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Flavia M. Tienes

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This collaborative essay applies experimental walking and writing methods to address the experience of modernity in contemporary Berlin. Engaging critically with Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and using Franz Hessel's Walking in Berlin as our guide, we explore the city's scenes and sounds. Our reflections—some captured through photography, some expressed in prose—give way to essential questions: How does walking help us interrogate the experience of modernity? Can it help us understand what it means for Berlin (or any other city) to be “a city coming into being”? How do we make it come into being? Even when walking the same route, each person is bound to experience the city differently, and so we find it makes little sense to try to impose a single reading of contemporary Berlin. We invite the reader to walk through the city with us, but we do not insist on holding hands. Our text quite literally reflects various points of view on the city and should be considered a series of occurrences, reflections, and impressions that work both in contrast and concert. Walking a city produces countless readings, and our text aims to reflect that multiplicity: the reader may read it straight through, randomly, or hopscotch-style. If parts of the essay appear to be “melting into air,” this elusiveness reflects the experience of modernity which Berman wrote about and which we tried to also capture here. We hope that the format—collaborative, experimental, engaged, and open—will yield new reflections on urban modernities and open up new perspectives on urban theory and methods. © 2019


Chapter 2: With a Little Help From My Colleagues: Notes on Emotional Support in a Qualitative Longitudinal Research Project
  • Chapter
  • Full-text available

August 2018

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228 Reads

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16 Citations

Purpose – This chapter explores the strategies and tactics employed by researchers when dealing with emotionally challenging situations, both in the field and in academia in general. Methodology/Approach – It draws on a qualitative longitudinal project investigating how recent Polish migrants from cities that are rather homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion make sense of, and come to terms with, the much greater diversity they encounter in German and British cities. The project adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes social network analysis, focus groups, creative methods and in-depth interviews. Findings – Moving beyond the inside–outsider binary in qualitative research, the authors reflect on their management of conflicting feelings about what happens in research situations. The authors discuss interview situations they found particularly emotionally challenging and the different ways they supported each other during and after fieldwork, for instance, when faced with situations in which research participants say things that are racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, classist or misogynist. They reflect on their use of electronic media, especially email and messenger applications, as tools which not only allow them to unpack the emotions that emerge in fieldwork, but also enable them to collaboratively reflect on their own positionalities in the field. Originality/Value – The chapter argues that face-to-face and virtual interactions with colleagues can create spaces of care, self-care and solidarity. These relational spaces can form integral support systems for researchers and help them to deal with both the emotionality of social-science research and the wider emotional labour of academic work.

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Other Mothers: Encountering In/Visible Femininities in Migration and Urban Contexts

November 2017

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34 Reads

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5 Citations

Feminist Review

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures.


Tacit differences, ethnicity and neoliberalism: Polish migrant mothers in German cities

June 2017

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107 Reads

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24 Citations

This article presents an inquiry into which tacit differences are relevant for how people make sense of encounters with others in urban settings, and how, if at all, they are translated into ethnic categories understood as ‘basic operators’ in everyday life. Drawing from our interviews with twenty Polish mothers living in Berlin and Munich, we argue that what our research participants distinguish as ‘typically Polish’ or ‘typically German’ is not necessarily connected to some ethnically specific ways of working or mothering, but, rather, significantly structured by locally specific forms of neoliberalism. By asking what kind of difference becomes understood as ethnic difference and how this process of demarcation occurs, this article adds to the strand of intersectional approaches that theorise the notion of difference, recognise heterogeneity of individual categories and render them suspect.


Mothering and othering in the city: Polish migrants in the UK

January 2017

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46 Reads

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7 Citations

Families Relationships and Societies

This article addresses the many complexities of migrant mothering by examining the unique ways in which it is performed, negotiated and made sense of by migrant mothers themselves. Drawing on interviews conducted with recent Polish migrant women who mother small children in British cities, I study how mothering is inscribed with value and how kinwork is done locally, among ‘people like us’ (Stack, 1974). I discuss how migrant mothers position themselves vis-à-vis the other mothers they encounter in their neighbourhoods, and how these positionings are gendered, classed and ethnicised. I propose that practising and displaying intensive mothering may serve as a form of cultural capital for migrant mothers, a means of positioning themselves favourably in a new neighbourhood or school. For recent migrants, intensive mothering may thus work to ‘elevate’ them beyond the migrant experience.



Making sense of absence

November 2015

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53 Reads

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3 Citations

City

Based on Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic portrayals of cities, I argue for consideration and appreciation of artistic devices in our thinking and writing on cities. Specifically, I look into four types of absence the Taiwanese director engages with: absence of movement, absence of speech, absence of home and absence of infrastructure. Tsai depicts absence by extrapolating what seem to be inherent elements of an urban situation or an urban setting thus disrupting their taken-for-grantedness. Tsai's multi-layered preoccupation with the notion of absence and the visual language he develops to talk about it may be inspiring for urban researchers, especially those among us working with visual methods. After introducing his work and elaborating on its urban contexts, I will investigate Tsai Ming-liang's use of absence as a method of inquiring into various aspects of urban life, particularly those involving interactions with infrastructure. In the spirit of interdisciplinary and inclusive thinking promoted by City, I will conclude by reiterating the validity of cinema—among other arts—as a tool for critical reflection on cities.


Fieldwork and Fashion: Gendered and Classed Performances in Research Sites

May 2015

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107 Reads

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18 Citations

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung

Researchers' performances in the field are gendered, classed, and ethnicized. We are watched and judged by our respondents based on how we look, what we say, and how we say it. Our appearance in the field may increase or decrease our chances of creating rapport, it may encourage respondents to talk to us or discourage them entirely from taking part in our research. Whereas we have no absolute control over all the factors determining how we present ourselves in the field, we do have some power over our dress. Although the act of getting dressed for fieldwork may appear inconspicuous and mundane, I argue in this article that its implications are most relevant for our thinking about how we design and perform fieldwork. Particularly the assumptions regarding our respondents' and our own class, gender, and ethnicity that we make before entering the field are worthy of careful consideration as they display our thought processes and, as such, are part of academic analysis. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1502146


Navigating urban standstill

June 2014

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31 Reads

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6 Citations

City

This article is a response to Bob Catterall's call for urban studies ‘able to listen to, read and touch the sounds, sights and textures of the city’ (2004, 309) and a contribution to the debate on navigating urban space that has been recurring in CITY. I argue that an inclusion of places of urban standstill complements the analyses of navigating urban space that focus primarily on movement and that it allows for a more inclusive understanding of urban space in general. In his portrayals of urban life the Polish hip-hop artist Peja presents the most neglected streets of Jez˙yce, one of Poznań's inner-city neighbourhoods. His gaze pierces through backyards, gateways, and street corners, thus revealing an ‘other city’ behind the polished image of Poznań as communicated through municipal media and place marketing. The MC acknowledges the city caught in standstill and the people who inhabit the urban spaces behind the threshold of visibility. The sites of urban standstill dominating Peja's oeuvre are liminal not only because of their literal in-betweenness, but also because of their inherent potential for transition. An avid observer and chronicler of urban decay, social inequalities and paralyzing inertia, Peja holds unrelinquished faith in human endurance.


Citations (9)


... Las problemáticas de las ciudades del siglo XXI son amplias y han sido ampliamente estudiadas. Una de las conclusiones de estas investigaciones es que en los últimos 50 años aumentaron la incidencia y las responsabilidades hacia los espacios circundantes o periurbanos debido a los impactos locales o regionales de la globalización, tal es el caso de la Ciudad de México (Amin et al. 2023;Martínez 2019;Sassen 2013;Pérez-Campuzano 2011;Harvey 2010). En el periurbano de la capital mexicana se encuentran una entremezcla de problemáticas características que han aumentado en gravedad, extensión y complejidad (Espinosa 2015;Sánchez, Morales y Martínez 2020;Pérez-Campuzano 2016). ...

Reference:

El derecho a no ser parte de la ciudad: ruralidad y urbanización en Ciudad de México
Cities for the Many not the Few [Audio podcast episode]
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

The Sociological Review Magazine

Ash Amin

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[...]

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Anna Richter

... A focus on the sonic can help uncover small (seemingly insignificant) details of verbal and non-verbal interactions mediated through public spaces, culture and technology, that help us understand power relations in cities. Symbolic meanings of sound are central to how sonic practices distinguish identity and senses of belonging at the urban social scale, or sonic identity at the scale of the city as a whole (Amphoux, 2003). Authors have been concerned with the contested nature of sound in processes of nation-building, nationalist cultural projects, and in the performance and assertions of regional, ethnic and religious identities, as well as in processes of othering (e.g., Birdsall, 2012;Hirschkind, 2006;Lisiak et al., 2021;Stoever, 2016;Sykes, 2015). In this work, sound has been shown to demarcate and reinforce social stratification through the creation of sonic autonomy and segregation (Born, 2013: 27). ...

Urban multiculture and xenophonophobia in London and Berlin
  • Citing Article
  • December 2019

European Journal of Cultural Studies

... The authors are conscious of the fact that people experience the city differently, even if they take the same route and thus confidently "invite the reader to walk the city with us, but [. . .] do not insist on holding hands" (Lisiak et al. 2018). Offering reflections of modernity in Berlin in late 2017 informed by critical readings of Hessel and Berman, the seminar and resulting visual essay brings their western-centric perspectives into conversation with and relates them to decolonoial, postcolonial, feminist and queer approaches to and experiences of modernity. ...

“A city coming into being”: Walking in Berlin with Franz Hessel and Marshall Berman
  • Citing Article
  • January 2019

City

... In our professional roles, homeworking was not conducive to the most appropriate or helpful system of support for either us or the research participants. Whilst others have successfully used virtual peer support systems (Lisiak & Krzyżowski, 2018), for us, face-to-face and ad-hoc interactions (as and when allowed at a later stage) were more useful. Also, homeworking created a blurring of boundaries and tensions between home and workspaces, or back and front stages and thus, divisions here were not as absolute or simplistic as Goffman (1959) suggests. ...

Chapter 2: With a Little Help From My Colleagues: Notes on Emotional Support in a Qualitative Longitudinal Research Project

... The study of Woramon Sinsuwan (2017) among Thai women in Berlin, for example, demonstrates that these women, despite having higher education and long-term professional experience, are perceived through the lens of a stereotype of Asian workers in Europe and offered jobs related to domestic care or beauty; in turn, they face the choice of unemployment or deskilling. Such racialised and gendered role expectations are mirrored in migrants' ideas on femininity of the self and others (Lisiak 2017(Lisiak , 2018. As home-space is the externalisation of the self (Jacobs and Malpas 2013), the idea of femininity shaped by migrants' socialisation correspond with their home-keeping practices. ...

Other Mothers: Encountering In/Visible Femininities in Migration and Urban Contexts
  • Citing Article
  • November 2017

Feminist Review

... This approach allows one to explore the experience of diversity with regard to daily interaction in different environments, both positive and that which is accompanied by tension and conflict. The challenges of living with diversity exhibit specific features depending on different contextsplaygrounds, schools, local areas, and other spaces of encounter (Ho, 2011;Lisiak, 2018;Wilson, 2013;Wise & Velayutham, 2014). ...

Mothering and othering in the city: Polish migrants in the UK
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

Families Relationships and Societies

... Wessendorf, 2018;Yeoh & Khoo, 1998). Class inequality is studied mainly in relation to gender (Collins et al., 2008;Lisiak & Nowicka, 2017;Orum et al., 2009), religion (Fields, 2010, ethnicity/race linked to institutional power of majority (Lidz, 2010) and in terms of ethnic or racials manifestations in public spaces (Grzegorczyk, 2012;Ho et al., 2015;Orum et al., 2009;van Gent & Musterd, 2016). ...

Tacit differences, ethnicity and neoliberalism: Polish migrant mothers in German cities

... My choice of clothing was also a "covert subversion of the male-dominated world", both in Pakistan and in Euro-America (Talwar Oldenburg 1990: 261), because I consciously chose to block the male gaze (ibid.: 273) rather than feel uneasy in an attempt to "represent" so-called "Western" values via my body and my choice of clothing. While many situations were beyond my control, the way I dressed was the one thing I could determine (Lisiak 2015). Moreover, all choice of clothing in all circumstances is conditioned by external circumstances. ...

Fieldwork and Fashion: Gendered and Classed Performances in Research Sites

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung