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- Convenor:
-
Tanja Müller
(University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH104
- Start time:
- 1 July, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at urbanism focusing on contemporary dynamics and through historical lenses, as current contestation is often rooted in past struggles. We take the concept of insurgent citizenship as a frame to understand how new forms of urbanism interact with rights-based claims in urban spaces.
Long Abstract:
This panel looks at new forms of urbanism with a focus on contemporary dynamics as well as through a historical lens, as present-day contestation of political space is often rooted in past struggles. We take the concept of insurgent citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) as a lose framing in order to understand how new forms of urbanism interact with rights-based claims in urban spaces. Citizenship here is defined not as legal status but evolving from concrete practices that disrupt social-historical patterns and allow subjects to constitute themselves as citizens - or prevent them from doing so. This focus on insurgent citizenship allows us to analyse contestation of urban spaces in relation to actual encounters, performances and enactments. In a further step, it helps understand how people negotiated the political terrain of cities in the past, and what empirical and theoretical claims can be made about the present politics of urbanisation.
The panel will include for example papers on these dynamics in the context of a modernist-developmental state (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by Ezana Weldeghebrael); and in relation to citizenship claims by new African refugee populations in Tel Aviv (Tanja Müller).
The panel seeks further papers on the following themes:
• Migration to and from cities and its impact on political citizenship
• Social change in urban spaces
• Colonial and postcolonial claims of urban citizenship
• Impacts of conflict and crisis on urban political citizenship
• Urban revolutions
Accepted papers:
Session 1Victoria Bernal (University of California (UCI))
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores various representations of Asmara including those posted online by Eritreans and Eritreans in diaspora to reveal the ways the city of Asmara serves as a terrain for exploring and constructing Eritrean past and futures.
Paper long abstract:
Asmara is often viewed by Europeans through the lens of an aesthetic nostalgia that casts the city as a time capsule where exemplars of the architectural style of Italian fascism are preserved. To Eritreans, however, Asmara means something very different. This paper explores representations of Asmara posted online by Eritreans and Eritreans in diaspora. These images and texts reveal the ways the city of Asmara serves as a terrain for exploring and constructing Eritrean futures. The city comes to stand in for Eritrea, notably an Eritrea of potential and emergence rather than one set in stone. Asmara is much more than her buildings. Online the city is described in terms of a dynamic Eritrean culture, the construction of Eritrean cosmopolitanism, and the possibilities of new social formations and new kinds of belonging. The ambiguities of location that are present in diaspora and in cyberspace contribute to the construction of Asmara as a symbol of Eritrea and as a space of civic imaginary where possible Eritrean futures might be built.
Mohamed Bakhit (University of Khartoum)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to investigate the processes of citizenship changes for South Sudanese citizens who were formally considered as Sudanese citizens, and are still resident in Khartoum’s shantytowns since the independence of South Sudan in 2011.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to investigate the processes of citizenship changes for South Sudanese citizens who were formally considered as Sudanese citizens, and are still resident in Khartoum's shantytowns since the independence of South Sudan in 2011.
Very little attention has been paid by either scholars or policy practitioners to the relationships between identity, nationalism and citizenship in Sudan, apparently because South Sudan became independent recently, and it is the first time that a part of Sudan has become an independent state. Questions of a lack of South Sudanese national identification and commonality have escalated recently following the December 2013 political crisis and ensuing violent conflict in South Sudan. The estimated numbers of Southern Sudanese affected range between 500,000 and 700,000 individuals. These people now are facing the dilemma of lacking any recognized legal status in Sudan. They are living under the constant risk of being arrested and charged with violating the immigration laws, and the threat of expulsion to South Sudan.
The paper argues that there are dual types of citizenship for Southern Sudanese communities in Khartoum currently (i.e. legal citizenship and "community citizenship") which has allowed considerable numbers of people who do not enjoy legal citizenship to survive and sustain their social life by using community citizenship. But to what extent is this community citizenship giving the people what they need? And to what extent can it protect them? These are the questions this paper will try to answer.
Johanna Sarre (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS))
Paper short abstract:
Wedding processions staged by the Nubian inhabitants of Kibera, Kenya's biggest slum, are crystallization points of the Nubians' historical struggles and present-day claims to the urban space they call their 'ancestral home' and are analyzed as practices of (insurgent) citizenship in this paper.
Paper long abstract:
Based on the thick ethnographic description of Nubian wedding processions, the paper shows how a particular urban space ('ancestral home') is produced, negotiated and contested and how these festive events can be conceptualized as practices of (insurgent) citizenship.
Descendants of 'Sudanese' soldiers in the colonial army have lived in Kibera, Kenya's biggest informal settlement, for generations, their history being intimately tied to its development from army-barracks to multi-ethnic slum. These Nubians, as they call themselves nowadays, claim parts of Kibera as their 'ancestral home', evoking powerful imageries of ethnic homelands which mirror Kenyan discourses of citizenship and belonging. Behind their claim lies a historical struggle for the formalization of Nubians' land rights in Kibera (from colonial times on) and for their recognition as Kenyan citizens (from independence till recently).
At weddings, relatives, guests and musicians accompany the couple from their homes to the mosque, the celebratory venue, and back to their common residence in several processions meandering through Kibera, disrupting everyday life, demonstrating the Nubians' intimate tie to Kibera vis-à-vis slum dwellers of other ethnic origins. Through the lens of 'insurgent citizenship', these processions shall be re-read as performative practices of spatial belonging and hence, as enactments of the Nubians claim to Kenyan citizenship. I analyze the processions as crystallization points in which the historical struggles and present day claims to this particular urban space converge and become visible as they are being negotiated through practice rather than discourse.
Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
The paper critically analyses the spatial strategy of the Ethiopian state, which aspires to be a developmental state, in the on-going urban redevelopment in its capital city. It uses the Spatialized Strategic-Relational Theory to understand the intervention of the state on urban space critically.
Paper long abstract:
The Ethiopian state is experimenting East Asian model of state-led authoritarian development (Kelsall, 2014). This article will interrogate the process of state-led inner-city redevelopment by the authoritarian state, which aspires to build a "Developmental" States of Ethiopia, using Spatialised "Strategic-Relational Theory" of Jessop. More than 400 hectares Addis Ababa's inner-city slums are being erased since 2009 and is being replaced with middle to high-income developments. The redevelopment intervention is displacing inner-city residents to the periphery resulting in impoverishment and social disarticulation. The State is using the state-led inner-city redevelopment as one of its spatial strategies to facilitate wealth accumulation and as a hegemonic project to legitimise its authoritarian rule. As a hegemonic project, the state uses redevelopment of inner-city slums to reinforce its narrative as a "developmental"/"transformational" state and to make irregular inner-city slums more governable. The state also uses the state-led inner-city redevelopment in facilitating wealth accumulation in two ways. First, accumulation process materialises through "path-dependent and context-contingent" neoliberal urbanisation guided by the discourse of "Diplomatic Capital" and "Competitive City" to attract a particular group of people, such as diplomatic community, tourists and upscale developers. Second, the state uses inner-city redevelopment as an accumulation strategy through dispossessing its citizens using the public ownership of land and housing as an advantage to create artificial rent gap between current and potential land value. Therefore, this article concludes the Ethiopian authoritarian as well as aspiring "developmental" state, uses state-led redevelopment not only to facilitate accumulation but also to consolidate its power.
Laura Bisaillon (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
How do people living in Asmara make sense of, adapt to, connect with, and quietly contest features of the social organization of their lives? Drawing on recent observational work, I explore how people use photographs for what interpretations reveal about the social settings in which they are used.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on what people do both reveals the challenges and opportunities that shape everyday lives while diverting ideological accounts of the same. Stretching beyond the symbolic is a rhetorical strategy people in Asmara employ: not referring to particular political figures by name. This reveals and obscures features and functioning of their society, and their experiences as citizens. I posit that this practice, among others, speaks to the usefulness of innovating, methodologically and theoretically, to access and explore elided connections between past and present of lives lived in Eritrea. How we 'look at', talk about, and give meaning to photographs, through which we activate them as art, memorial, witness, testimonial, and so on, relies on interpretative practices. I draw from McCoy (1995) to explicate the "social organization in which individual acts of interpretation are possible and occur", and consider the effects of interpretations. Like Low (1996, 2003), who does not reify the city, I do not reify the photograph. Instead, it is in analyzing how people engage with it that "insights into the linkages of macro processes with the … fabric of human experience . . ." are made visible. This paper provides an important empirical basis and an analytic entry point for specific and broader considerations of questions relating to ethics, belonging, agency, citizenship, and claims making in Eritrea. I argue that this is a particularly germane, timely, and compelling way to explore and develop understandings about the continuities and discontinuities between the present and contemporary past in Eritrea.
Tanja Müller (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Tel Aviv and media reports in Germany, this paper interrogates whether new forms of sustained solidarity have emerged in reaction to the contemporary refugee crisis or whether we predominately experience a deepening of the white-saviour complex.
Paper long abstract:
A number of years before the contemporary 'refugee crisis' in Europe, a country on the continent's imagined fringes, Israel, perceived by many then refugees as 'the Europe we can walk to', experienced an unprecedented movement of non-Jewish refugees from Eritrea and Sudan. In fact, in terms of media and public representations, and political responses, the whole scale of the contemporary European response, from Budapest to Berlin, could be observed in sharp focus in the reaction of different sections of Israeli society, from hostile rejection to warm welcome.
This paper interrogates both dynamics based on fieldwork in Tel Aviv and subsequent analysis of media representations in Germany. It argues that while indeed new forms of solidarity have emerged, the majority of responses across the whole spectrum has been shaped by similar perceptions of the 'stranger' as a projection of either people's hate and fear, or an urge to 'do good' that in essence represents a version of the white-saviour-complex. The latter easily turns to the former once the 'deserving stranger' acts in ways that contradict certain normative settings. New forms of sustained solidarity have emerged mainly in spaces where professional expertise guided engagement with refugees and migrants, or where people literally welcomed refugees into their homes and lives, and it is here that new conceptions of citizenship that transcend a global order that enforces divisions between 'them' and 'us' has come to the fore. These dynamics raise some important questions about volunteering and its impact on public perceptions and welcoming cultures.
Hlengiwe Ndhlovu (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how community members and local officials create and deploy certain identities to justify the discrepancies between service delivery policies and what they implement on the ground drawing from the experience of Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape Province.
Paper long abstract:
The struggle against and subsequent demise of colonialism and apartheid was embedded with expectations over citizenship and liberty in the new dispensation. However, this has been constrained by the expansion of neoliberalism which has undermined citizens' access to basic rights through privatisation of basic services. This has propelled various forms of protests confronting the local state and some calling for resignation of local officials. This subject has attracted significant scholarship. However, most focus on unpacking discrepancies between policy and implementation as local authorities use public goods for clientelism whilst almost paying lip service to struggles and contestations over the manifestation of these discrepancies on the ground as fellow community members fight over the distribution of state resources resources. This paper examines how community members and local officials create and deploy certain identities to justify the discrepancies between service delivery policies and what they implement on the ground drawing from the experience of Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape Province. Informed by empirical evidence drawn from an ethnographic study, the paper argues that patronage politics and clientelism creates descrepancies between service delivery policies and implementation. This produces a fractured citizenship characterised by contestations over the scarce resources and the forging of and contestations over (new) identities like inzalelwane (born and bred) and abantu bokufika (newcomers) deployed to justify unequal distribution of state resources. Furthermore, these identities inform how state resources are allocated.
Tekle Woldemikael (Chapman University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper aspires to rethink and reevaluate the attention Asmara has been getting lately. It attempts to rethink this newfound fame of postliberation Asmara as a form of colonial nostalgia and argues this desire reflects the ambiguity the local people feel to this revisionist, nostalgic view of Asmara.
Paper long abstract:
Recently, a number of books on Modernist Asmara have appeared in academic and popular circles. In these books, the city of Asmara is presented as a representative of the finest product of European imagination, creativity and civilization in Africa. In the pages of these books, the lived experiences of the people who call Asmara as their home are dearly missing. The people are almost invisible in the wonderful stories of the modernist Asmara. Why are the stories of the local people who live and worked in the city often missing? Why is Asmara described as an almost ghost city, with only relicts of the past looming large, but with vague mention of the human beings, colonizers and colonized, living in it? The irony is that the voiceless, but grateful natives are portrait as the loyal keepers of these sacred European wonders, even under stressful and the difficult times of war and revolution. In these narratives, the local people are placed on the background as silent inheritors/observers/benefactors of the modernist city's amenities. They are also in some ways complicit in collaborating to this glorification of fascist architecture and Italian rule in Africa, even proud of their association to it. My paper aspires to rethink and reevaluate the attention Asmara has been getting lately. It attempts to rethink this newfound fame of postliberation/independence Asmara as a form of colonial nostalgia and argues this desire reflects the ambiguity the local people feel to this revisionist, nostalgic view of Asmara.