Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage ...with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?
While modern heritage is often discussed as a critical resource for sustainable urban and social development, the future of such housing is often limited not by technical but rather by cultural, ...historical, or socio-economic constraints. In cities with a socialist past, mass housing provided individual apartments for a number of Soviet families and tended to create particular spatial qualities. However, with the collapse of the socialist system, attitudes towards such housing began to transform. This paper is a reflection on the range of perceptions of this heritage, attitudes towards it, and difficulties in shaping contextually informed renewal policy approaches. To what extent do traumatic experiences of the past and the rational use of resources in the present mutually influence each other? This article introduces the controversial debate based on the cases of three former socialist countries: Moldova, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. On the one hand, the ubiquity of mass housing in post-socialist countries fostered tolerance for such a typology. On the other hand, large housing estates are a constant reminder of the traumatic experience of the socialist experiment. This essay discusses the present and the future of large residential estates based on reports, policies, media, and collected expert interviews on approaches to working with mass housing areas. Together, the three contributions and joint reflections attempt to add to the debate about the past, present, and future of middle-class mass housing in various social, cultural, and political conditions.
Summary
The solitary reader, sitting quietly surrounded by her thoughts, is a powerful image. But reading is also a deeply social practice. From learning to read to deciding what to read next, a ...significant amount of literate activity takes place within specific social relationships. Drawing from ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2018, this essay shows how the act of co‐reading has contributed to the emergence of a new literary community based in Tirana, Albania. The broader intention of the essay is to demonstrate the application of the general approach to literary anthropology I call reading nearby.
In this article, I trace the elective affinity between planetary suburbanization and emergent forms of radical religiosity. I show how the centuries‐long spatial hegemony of the Catholic Church in ...Poland has recently been undermined by the ‘fundamentalist' broadcaster Radio Maryja—the bellwether of the Polish right‐wing nationalist resurgence. I describe the twentieth‐century suburbanization of both the state and Catholicism in Poland, supported by an analysis of a village‐cum‐suburb in one of Poland's largest agglomerations. I show how the latest wave of suburbanization, triggered by Poland's opening up to global flows of capital in 2004, ran parallel to the emergence of a ‘post‐secular', ‘individual' and ‘intellectual' strain of faith. I tie these in with the life stories and changes in gender and labour regimes of two key informants. I also show that the surge of right‐wing nationalism should not be understood as a backlash against neoliberalization, but that it represents instead a project of regime change and new elite formation.
In this article I consider what sense it makes to speak of a hybrid automobile ontology in contexts where its constitutive elements – driver, car and traffic system – are ruins. Then, on the basis of ...passenger‐seat ethnography conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I explore the consequences of the oxymoronic quality of these ruins, which as ‘remains’ both endure and decay, for experiences and senses of being among drivers living under conditions of post‐socialist transition.
Des êtres ruinés: l’ontologie dans la conduite post‐socialiste
Dans cet article, j’examine le sens qu’il y a à parler d’une ontologie de l’automobile hybride dans des contextes où ses éléments constitutifs – conducteur, voiture et système de circulation – sont des ruines. Ensuite, sur la base d’une ethnographie des sièges passagers réalisée en Bosnie‐Herzégovine, j’explore les conséquences de la qualité oxymoronique de ces ruines, qui en tant que « vestiges » sont à la fois durables et en déclin, sur les expériences et les sensations des conducteurs qui vivent dans des conditions de transition post‐socialiste.
It Did Not Affect Me Lorek, Melanie
Symbolic interaction,
05/2018, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
How do individuals make sense of events that are associated with major social-systemic changes? The paper explores the relationship between “German reunification” and processes of meaning making and ...identity formation by former citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Analyzing twenty-six in-depth, life-history interviews of East Germans born in two different generational cohorts, I examine the various narrative strategies employed that allow these East Germans to embed the experience of the German reunification through means of narrative emplotment. Diverting from a notion that it is historical events that shape our autobiographical memories, I argue that historical events are selected from a historical tool kit which provides individuals with narrative resources from which narrative identity can be formulated. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/d69JXE0Ryqw.
On Silence and History Topouzova, Lilia
The American historical review,
06/2021, Letnik:
126, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
How to write a silenced history is the broad question that frames this essay. It explores the methodological challenges of working with a purged archive and fragmented oral histories while ...telling the little-known story of the Bulgarian gulag and its aftermath. Weaving together the personal and the historical, the essay unfolds the silences that constitute the experience of state repression during the Communist era and the trauma that lingers to this day in the lives of survivors and society. To write a history of the Communist camp past in the capitalist present requires scholars to overcome intellectual frameworks deeply mired in triumphalist Cold War rhetoric. The historical methodology laid out here suggests that doing so demands of us to embrace the imperfect evidence that we have at our disposal: disjointed testimonies and purged documents. Instead of trying to make them cohere into a linear historical narrative, the essay proposes that we leave the gaps open and let the silences speak. In grappling with the limit of the archival record and faded memories, the essay also reflects on the multiplicity of the lived experience of twentieth-century Eastern European Communism and its contradicting realities, emancipatory and repressive at once.
On the 27th and the 28th of October (2022), the 11th Edition of the International Colloquium of Social Sciences and Communication (ACUM 2022) and the Romanian Sociologists’ Society National ...Conference took place in Brașov. The event was jointly organized by the Faculty of Sociology and Communication at the Transylvania University of Braşov together with the Romanian Sociologists’ Society. Thus, two biennial scientific events were merged: the 11th edition of the international conference in social sciences and the national congress of the Romanian Sociologists Society. Over 110 papers were presented during the conference.
PDF
