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Papers by Anne-Lene Sand

Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 2019

In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to exp... more In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders’ skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: “kind” and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore.

Based on an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, this article analyzes alternative rhythms of yout... more Based on an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, this article analyzes alternative rhythms of youth culture. The aim is to illustrate how young people improvise and organize rhythms in the city as a part of their place-making. I develop the concept of a spatial jam session, which provides a framework suitable for analyzing spatial dimension of contemporary youth culture. Developing Henri Lefebvre's rhythm analysis through empirical material, a phenomenological understanding of place and jazz theory contributes an analytical framework that takes bodily, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of the place-making practices of young people into account. Using the concept of a spatial jam session, I argue that a central aspect of young people's place-making is being able to improvise through materiality, sociality, cultural norms and musical expression. I illustrate how young people create spatial and temporal obstructions in order to maintain a practice of improvising, which to these young people is a way of constructing meaning in everyday life.

Ephemeral social communities.

Focusing on the city, this article examines the relation between the specific (body and place) an... more Focusing on the city, this article examines
the relation between the specific (body and place) and more abstract (time and space), in order to understand
how people negotiate the affordances of materiality, space and time. Based on a two year anthropological multisited
fieldwork, 38 people have shown and told me how they organize themselves in the city through music and
dance. Focusing on the phenomenon self-organization as a special form of participation, the main argument
of the article stresses that people create their own use of the city by exploring and sensing the social spaces and
rhythms of the city. They improvise in their use of places that are not framed institutionally or pre-established in
advance. In order to understand how people transform the city into a space for self-organization, the analytical
framework of the article is the French neomarxist and urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis.
The rhythmanalysis enables us analyze the dialectical relationship between the body and the city. The first part of
the article analyzes three spatial elements of the self-organized practice: How spaces become exciting, the framing
of a space through sound and light and the embodied exploration of space. Secondly, the article combines
observations from a jam session with Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and specifies the main argument of the article:
self-organization is a practice of improvisation and is conceptualized as a way of “jamming with urban rhythms.”

Thesis Chapters by Anne-Lene Sand

Title of my PhD-dissertation: "Unregulated spaces: a study of self-organized ways to use the cit... more Title of my PhD-dissertation:
"Unregulated spaces: a study of self-organized ways to use the city·"
The dissertation examines how people make use of the city, with a focus on the practices people use to organize themselves in unregulated spaces. Based on a two-year, anthropological, multi-sited fieldwork in the two Danish cities, Horsens and Aarhus, I have examined 38 peoples’ ways of thinking about, using and experiencing the city. Their different stories, actions, photographs, and ways of using different urban spaces provides insight into what gives the city potential for self-organized practices. The dissertation does not analyze one embodied practice, such as street football or urban phenomenon like parkour and roofing, but develops an analytical approach that makes it possible to analyze multiple places and informants in order to explore various degrees of being self-organized and hereby conceptualize self-organization as an urban phenomenon.
Not all of the informants that where studied know each other and the places they made use of where all different. Their perspectives on the city are selected because they provide important insight into the ways in which some urban spaces can be heavily predetermined while others are less regulated and, therefore create opportunities for reinterpretation and alternative use. The informants all searched for places that were not fixed and established in advance, but where instead characterized by unpredictability, fewer social obligations and less responsibility. These spaces are defined in the dissertation as unregulated space / matrikelløse rum and they are characteristic by the fact that people can organize time, space, body and the social relations themselves. Self-organization is the analytical research optic applied to explore how the city is used.
The informants’ self-organized use of the city is not based on criminal, political, reactive or countercultural intentions, but is rooted in a curiosity and desire to redefine established meanings and the trivial rhythms that shape everyday life in the city. Their use of the city, moreover, is not radically different from other urban users, but they search far more explicitly for playful ways to use the city and push the boundaries of how the city can be conceptualized. They consciously maintain a balance between what is legal and illegal.
The dissertation is based on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and its primarily theoretical approach is an integrated reading of the French philosopher Michel de Certeau's (1984) concept of practice and the French neomarxist Henri Lefebvre's (1991) theory of the dialectic of space and everyday life. A central argument of the dissertation is that informants `play ball against´ everyday spaces that are structured and create self-organizing tactics by negotiating the interplay between: the organized and informal, the predictable and unpredictable, and pre-established and unregulated spaces.
The self-organized use of the city is analyzed through four separate chapters that can be divided into four analytical themes: place and materiality, body and rhythms, social mobile relations and the organization of time and space. The first chapter, Characteristics and the potentials of place, examines place as form and materiality, as well as place in relation to the urban surroundings. The narratives of the informants illustrate how the value of a place is not just material, but that the social dimensions of the place influence the potential and limitations of the place (Gibson 1977). The chapter also discusses how the informants create a playful framing of the city, insofar as they play with the logics of the planned environmental and implement them in new structures of meaning (Bateson 1972).
The second chapter, Doing city, describes the physical ways in which places are used. Henri Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis is used as a theoretical framework because it provides a nuanced way of examining how the embodied use of the city is about a sensory experience of the city as well as its temporal structures, practices, everyday routines, sounds, lights, etc. In order to grasp the unpredictable nature of the city, the informants improvise as a part of their self-organized practices. By combining observations of a musical jamsession with the city's unpredictable spatiality I argue that informants improvise and jam with rhythms of the city. They create new representations of the city by letting the rhythms of the city and its materiality play together in new formations.
The third chapter, Mobile social relations, examines the type of relations that are formed when people do not meet because of an institution, an age group or a one specific leisure activity. The Danish anthropologist Henrik Vigh’s (2006) concept of social navigation is used in order to understand how people navigate socially in everyday spaces that are constantly moving and mobile. In these types of mobile social relationships, likeminded individuals have in common that, in their everyday life, they have similar social orientations and seek similar social spaces in the city - particular spaces - where they define their own social connections and boundaries. Likeminded individuals therefore actively search for unpredictability, which marks a contrast to the social categorizations that a large part of everyday life and the institutionalized spaces that typically forms its basis.
The theoretical framework of the fourth chapter, The city - a space for self-organization?, is the dialectic of everyday life rooted in Henri Lefebvre’s critique of modernization as well as in Danish and German pedagogical discussions of the segregation of everyday life. The aim of the chapter is to explore what dimensions of the city and everyday life the informants experience as supportive or limiting for their self-organized use of the city.
The informants experiences unregulated spaces / matrikelløse rum in different ways to negotiate norms, values, temporal structures and social framings. The practice stands in contrast to regulated and institutionalized spaces, such as the youth club, school, the formalized city and the established music scene. The contrast between spaces can be found in the degree to which people can take ownership and define: when, where and with whom. Not all people are able to manage the unpredictable nature of the city and therefore some people seek spaces that are more regulated. The dissertation stresses the importance of having social spaces with varying degrees of self-organized and formalized framework phrases, in everyday life.
The dissertation is about self-organized use of the city. The dissertation contributes to knowledge about how self-organized practices are a form of organization that arises with and in the city. In unregulated spaces/matrikelløse rum people can question the formalized framing of the city and negotiate dimensions of everyday life that, in principle, are not negotiable. The dissertation develops and presents concepts of gray oases, unregulated spaces/matrikelløse rum, likeminded individuals and spatial jamsession. The concepts provide insight into creative forces that may be more widespread than we know of and helps to raise a question of what good urban spaces are and who defines when a space is good. The dissertation contributes to a discussion on how society and pedagogical institutions create concepts of leisure, social space, social relations and participation.

Papers/ In Journals by Anne-Lene Sand

Improvisasjon - byliv mellom plan og planløshet, 2021

De seneste årtier er et stigende antal danskere begyndt at organisere sig selv i byen og bruge by... more De seneste årtier er et stigende antal danskere begyndt at organisere sig selv i byen og bruge byens rum til bl.a. koncerter (Sand 2014, 2017), leg (Petersen 2014), performancekunst (Samson 2018) og forskelligartede former for gadeidræt (Sand 2019, Bäckström og Sand 2019, Larsen 2014, Larsen et al. 2017, Laub og Pilgaard 2013). Tendenserne har skabt en nysgerrighed og behov blandt landets byplanlæggere, kommuner, fonde og foreninger med hensyn til, hvordan de imødekommer de børn, unge og voksne, som i langt højere grad indtager byens steder på præmisser, de i overvejende grad selv ønsker at definere. Samtidig konfronteres førnævnte interessenter med spørgsmålet om, hvordan de skaber deltagelsesrum i byen for mennesker, som på den ene side ønsker at organisere sig selv og på den anden side ønsker at indgå i dialog og modtage støtte: Hvordan kan en optik på improvisation være med til at udvikle organisatoriske rum, som understøtter mennesker og projekter, som har DIY-karakter?

Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk, 2020

De senere år har der i Danmark været en udbredt debat om «ghetto»-områder, hvor bestemte boligkva... more De senere år har der i Danmark været en udbredt debat om «ghetto»-områder, hvor bestemte boligkvarterer er blevet gjort til genstand for negativ opmærksomhed politisk og i medierne. På baggrund af et casestudie af NGO’en GAME, der bygger på interviews med unge, der er engageret i organisationens arbejde med gadeidræt i områderne, GAMEs hjemmeside samt policydokumenter repræsenterede den danske politiske diskurs om «ghetto»-områder argumenteres i denne artikel for, hvordan lokale og sociale stedskvaliteter kan medtænkes i den offentlige debat og den bysociologiske
og ungdomspædagogiske forskning. Ved hjælp af et stedssensitivt perspektiv, der inddrager socialsemiotisk teori, og en sondring mellem taktik og strategi hentet hos de Certeau, vises i den empiriske analyse, hvordan GAMEs løse semiorganiserede tilgang til gadeidræt giver unge mennesker i «ghetto»-områder mulighed for at praktisere selvudtryk gennem bestemte stedslige taktikker. Desuden diskuteres, hvordan GAME i sit ungdomskulturelle udtryk tilsyneladende formår at undslippe territorial stigmatisering på måder, der kan bidrage til nye, produktive sammenhænge mellem steder og identitetsudvikling.

Dansk Sociologi, 2019

Artiklen indskriver sig som en nutidig og kritisk refleksion over en mangeårig tradition for at e... more Artiklen indskriver sig som en nutidig og kritisk refleksion over en mangeårig tradition for at etablere fritidsrum for unge i Danmark, som i høj grad har været betonet af, at voksne har defineret unges fritidsrum. De seneste årtier er alternativt organiserede fritidsformer imidlertid begyndt at finde uformelt og formelt fodfæste i Danmark. Artiklen omhandler fænomenet semiorganiseret gadeidræt. På baggrund af et etnografisk feltarbejde analyserer artiklen, hvordan unge gadeidrætsudøverne ikke blot ønsker at praktisere en bevægelsespraksis, som skateboarding eller klatring, men at etablere fundamentet for den. Gennem begrebet institutionslogikker viser artiklens analyse, hvordan semiorganiseret gadeidræt beror på institutionslogikker, som differentierer sig fra hidtil etablerede fritidsorganiseringer i Danmark. Disse fritidsrum er sensitive over for gadeidrætspraksisser, som opstår in situ, og hvor unge kan være med til at definere deltagelsesformen, bl.a. ved at udforske og lege med stedslige, materielle og sociale potentialer. I denne proces er de unge ikke afvisende overfor dialog med eksterne parter som kommune, fonde og andre interessenter, men efterspørger et samarbejde, såfremt det ikke er på bekostning af centrale institutionslogikker, som de organiserer sig på baggrund af. Artiklen diskuterer fritidsorganisatoriske potentialer mellem planlægning og planløshed og rejser nogle aktuelle spørgsmål, som angår kriterier for samarbejde og bevillinger fra eksterne institutioner og fonde.

6, 2020

ABSTRACT From «ghetto» to GAME zone – territorial stigmatization and local tactics of self-expres... more ABSTRACT
From «ghetto» to GAME zone – territorial stigmatization and local tactics of self-expression among young Danes
In recent years, there has been a widespread debate in Denmark about «ghetto» areas, subjecting certain residential areas to negative attention politically and in the media. Based on a case study of the non-governmental organization (NGO) GAME, consisting of interviews with young people involved in the organization’s street sports activities in the area, the GAME website, and policy documents representing the Danish political discourse on «ghetto» areas, it is argued that local and social qualities of place should be included in the public debate and in research on urban sociology and youth pedagogy. Using a place sensitive perspective involving theory of social semiotics, as well as a distinction between tactics and strategy obtained from de Certeau, the empirical analysis shows how GAME’s loose and semi-organized approach to street sports allows young people in «ghetto» areas to practice self-expression through specific local tactics. In addition, it is discussed how GAME, in its youth cultural expression, seems to be able to escape territorial stigmatiza- tion in ways that can contribute to new and productive relationships between places and identity development.

This article analyses how young people get together in the spatial, temporal and social complexit... more This article analyses how young people get together in the spatial, temporal and social complexity of urban space. We suggest the term ephemeral urban socialities to understand how young people construct alternative socialities that are not embedded within an institutional mode of thinking or a formalised social setting. Based on anthropological fieldwork and empirical material generated in the Danish cities of Aarhus and Horsens by Anne-Lene Sand, we frame the analysis in a context where the development of urban space minimises social places that young people can define by and for themselves. This article investigates how young people come together socially in a context that seems to be highly regulated and planned, but that from another perspective is uncertain and open to ludic interpretation. The material is discussed through the lens of the Danish anthropologist Henrik Vigh’s concept of social navigation (2006, 2009) to understand young people’s mobile and changing social formations in the urban context. This article contributes with knowledge about modern urban socialities in medium-sized northern European cities that, in the case of youth formations, cannot be described as groups or as territorial, but that are constructed through the desire to meet with “like-minded individuals”.