Contested Spaces (Anthropology of space)

Music, youth, and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland

by Lesley Pruitt

“Music, Youth and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland.” 2011. Global Change, Peace & Security 23(2): 207-222.

This article presents a preliminary analysis from a case study conducted in Northern Ireland. Participant observation... more This article presents a preliminary analysis from a case study conducted in Northern Ireland. Participant observation and semi-structured interviewing were used to learn whether music might serve as a useful tool for engaging Northern Irish youth in peacebuilding. Obstacles and limitations certainly exist, but the data suggests that music can be used to engage youth in peacebuilding in three key ways: (1) music can be useful in bringing youth together to share meaning, and as such is an alternative way to engage in dialogue for building peace; (2) music-making can help youth gain self-esteem and reconsider their view of others in a way that can help to destabilize conflict identities; and (3) by taking part in musical programs, violence by, against, and between youth may be reduced or prevented by changing the way youth experience the spaces they inhabit and/or by providing alternative activities to rioting.

Visibility and invisibility of migrant faith in the city: diaspora religion and the politics of emplacement of Afro-Christian churches (forthcoming in: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies)

by David GARBIN

forthcoming in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS)

In today’s post-industrial city, migrants and ethnic minorities are forming, through their religious practices,... more In today’s post-industrial city, migrants and ethnic minorities are forming, through their religious practices, particular spaces of alterity, often at the ‘margin’ of the urban experience, for instance in converting anonymous warehouses into places of worship. This paper examines diverse facets of the religious spatiality of Afro-Christian diasporic churches - from local emplacement to more visible public parade of faith in the urban landscape. One of the aims is to explore to what extent particular spatial configurations and locations constitute ‘objective expression’ of social status and symbolic positionalities in the post-migration secular environment of the ‘host societies’. Without denying the impact of urban marginality, the paper shows how religious groups such as African Pentecostal and Prophetic churches are also engaged, in their own terms, in a transformative project of spatial appropriation, regeneration and re-enchantment of the urban landscape. The case study of the Congolese Kimbanguist church in London and Atlanta also demonstrates the need to examine the articulation of local, transnational and global practices and imaginaries to understand how religious and ethnic identities are renegotiated in newly ‘localised’ diasporic settings.


Keywords:
Diaspora religion - African churches - Urban space – Pentecostalism - Kimbanguism

From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest

by Peter Lugosi

Co-authored with Peter Erdelyi. Published as Chapter 24 in (2009) Marketing Innovations for Sustainable Destinations. Ed. by Alan Fyall, Metin Kozak, Luisa Andreu, Juergen Gnoth, Sonja Sibila. Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers, pp. 298-310. Winner of Best Paper Award at Advances in Tourism Marketing Conference 2009.

In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the... more In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the insights of the social study of markets in economic sociology as a promising avenue for revitalising the classical concepts of marketing. Drawing on the research programme launched by Michel Callon’s 1998 volume, The Laws of the Markets, they suggest that one traditional disciplinary distinction be abandoned in particular: “Although convenient, a distinction between market-making practices – defined as activities that shape the overall market structure – and marketing practices – defined as firm-based activities aimed at developing an actor’s position within a structure – is misleading” (Araujo et al., 2008: 8).

    In this paper, we take up Araujo et al.’s (2008) call to deploy such a constructivist economic sociology perspective in the study of an empirical case. The case study concerns the emergence of the so-called romkert (meaning ‘ruin garden’) or romkocsma (‘ruin pub’) phenomenon in Budapest between 1999 and 2008 (see Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). A ruin or rom bar, terms we use interchangeably in this paper, is a hospitality venue that incorporates its ruinous surroundings (such as dilapidated courtyards and other distressed material goods) as part of its service concept and the consumer experience. We re-describe this case using the actor-network theory (ANT) perspective of Callon and colleagues.

Appropriated Landscapes: The intrusion of technology and equipment into the homes and lives of families with a child with complex needs

by Andrew Moore

Public Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2011. Public Space as emancipation: meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 43 (2), 525-562.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article... more In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.