Context and Consciousness in the Practice of Transnationality (original) (raw)
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Transnational urbanism revisited
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2005
This article revisits the research optic proposed in Transnational Urbanism to take stock of the field. Social relations 'from the middle' are conceived in two distinct ways in the field. Transnationalism 'from in-between' refers to actors who mediate between transnational actors 'from above' and 'from below'. 'Middling transnationalism' refers to the transnational practices of middle-class social actors. Both are useful and potentially complementary. Research on transnational urbanism is aware of the socially situated subjectivity of human agents while also providing a way to study spatially distanciated social relations. Research has begun to attend to the emplacement of mobile subjects and the embodiment of their everyday practices and mobilities. Future studies need to attend to the power-knowledge venues by which states, institutional channels and other actors broker mobile subjects' cross-border interconnectivity.
The Locality and Supralocality of Models of Urban Life – a Relational Perspective
In this article I propose to analyse models of urban life (especially in large cities) by treating them as an expression of the broader social changes defined as late modernity (Giddens 1991(Giddens , 2001. I assume that the city, understood as a socio-spatial whole, distinctly reflects the main characteristics of contemporary phenomena and social processes, and that analysing urban reality can comprise an important part of the discussion on unity/plurality of culture in social life suggested by the editors of this publication. For the purposes of this text, I understand culture as models of community life, rather than as a specific set of values, ideas and norms. In spite of this rather broad view, however, this understanding does not equate culture with social life as such, but rather focuses attention on the specificity and models of the relations between the elements that constitute a given community. This is close to the position taken by Marek Krajewski, who writes: "The culture of a specific community is a particular way of linking the elements that make up that community, a kind of constantly evolving recipe which determines the relations between these parts. In speaking of a recipe I am thinking not only of reflexivised and codified rules linking together the various components constituting a certain whole, but also the objectively existing properties of these links, how they are constructed, and which constituent parts are joined. (…) Culture understood as a property of a network of links creating a certain community defines its specific nature, and this decides what it is and why, what functions and roles it fulfils, what its particular characteristics are, what distinguishes it from other communities etc." (Krajewski 2013: 32-33) I approach this issue with the roots of urban sociology in mind. This was founded on premises about the existence of a specific mentality among city dwellers as well as ways of urban life, peculiar social relations and unique mechanisms of transformation. The output of urban sociology, which developed in the United States and Europe in the first half of the 20th century, came under heavy criticism in subsequent decades. This was delivered especially by 2 scholars proposing a critical urban sociology, both in the so-called macrostructural paradigm of "new" urban sociology (cf. Frysztacki 2004) and in urban studies which analysed the city in the context of the processes of globalisation (e.g. the concept of the global city). Critics pointed to the extremely limited possibilities afforded by the qualitative approach, which according to them did not fit the reality of the city determined above all by economic and political factors at the macro level (first state, then global). Today, however, not only are the "classic" conceptions and qualitative methodologies employed effectivelysuch as in case studies (of districts, specific areas or groups of inhabitants), but we can even speak of a revival of urban fieldwork and methodology that combines the sociological, anthropological and ethnological perspectives. The works of Simmel and de Certeau are being read "anew", and very interesting and promising research on cities is taking place in the paradigm of sociology of everyday life and visual sociology. 1 In my opinion, the return towards qualitative urban research is connected to the development of studies of globalisation and the associated theories (of space, community, local development), in which this phenomenon is perceived as a process rooted in localities and with various consequences for them.
Reflections on urbanity as an object of study and a critical epistemology
Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, 2010
In Growing Up Global• Economie Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives, Cindi Katz (2004) explores how children in Howa (Sudan) carne of age as their village was incorporated in the global economic agricultural system. At the same time, the book shows how children in New York City were involved in similar transformations of their everyday lives. Because of global economic interdependence, in New York City as muchas in Howa, growing up global means, to my view, growing up urban. This chapter is about urbanity, understood as a historically situated and geographically unevenly distributed condition, characterized by interdependencies, unpredictability, mobility, dijjèrences, speed, and intense ajjècts that are shaping sociopolitical relations and eve1yday lift. Urbanity, in other words, is a concept that cannot be restricted to what happens in cities. It is a mode of social relations that has developed with the transformation of the global economic system and the unfolding of modernity. In 1938, Louis Wirth wrote that urbanity (or urbanism in his words) is a set of sociological characteristics that are disseminating outside cities through the rapid development of means of transportation and communication. 1 Three decades later, Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) published La révolution urbaine, suggesting that the transformations of the mode of production have affected social relations. From a Marxist perspective, Lefebvre argues that we have reached a point where the industrial mode of production is becoming urban. By this he means that urban "sensations and perceptions, spaces and times, images and concepts, language and rationality, theories and social practices" are taking over the world (Lefebvre 2003 [1970], 28). In many ways, this is what Katz 55 56 Julie-Anne Boudreau shows through her study of children playing in Howa and New York City. Moreover, added sociologist Gérald Fortin in 1968, "this urban society is not distributed equally across ail parts of the city or across ail classes in the city. This urban society is not restricted to the physical space of the city. It can be detected at various degrees in the countryside" (Fortin 2004 [1968], 4, my translation). Urbanity, in this perspective, would be analytically eqcivalent to other umbrella concepts such as modernity or globalization. It covers processes of
The Transnationality of Cities – an Agenda for Interdisciplinary Research
2012
This article deals with the significance of transnational flows, networks and practices for the production of urban space. The formation of transnational urban spaces represents a relevant and challenging field of interdisciplinary research, which deserves much more debate and scholarly work in order to deepen our understanding of the production and restructuring of urban spaces under conditions of contemporary globalization processes. The article first discusses the notion of transnationalism and transnational spaces. On this basis we proceed to an account of different types or 'manifestations' of transnational urban spaces. The third part offers an outline of research perspectives on the transnationality of cities. Particularly relevant fields of research include the impact of global value chains on globalizing cities, and the formation of transnational socio-cultural spaces in cities that are related to migration, transnational social networks and 'diaspora-communities'. In conclusion we claim that research efforts adressing the interplay of economic and socio-cultural transnationalism and their specific articulations in urban space would advance our understanding of the transnationality of cities.
Urban theory and critical perspectives
Handbook of Urban Politics and Policy
Critical urban studies are very difficult to define, even if we restrict our understanding solely to English-speaking debates. It goes without saying that if we include in the conversation other intellectual worlds, the complexity of the field increases significantly. This is due to the diversity of understandings of what criticism should be. As a starting point, we can define criticism as the expression of a reflexive operation about urban reality. Any reflection also requires a (temporary) withdrawal from the relentless rhythm of everyday life. It requires a certain "distance"; even to momentarily extract oneself from the viscosity of the "real" and the material. But this cognitive (reflexive) operation is more convincing when it is also based on a sensitivity towards this "reality," i.e. on the capacity that our body has to feel, to perceive, to listen to the world. Criticism is thus not only an abstraction of reality, but also a sensitive gesture contributing to produce this reality. In short, in this chapter I argue that criticism can also be an immersive experience. But this is not the most common understanding of critical urban studies. Until the 1980s, critical social sciences have been marked by two opposite forms of thought: structural determinism influenced by Marx on the Left, and radical individualism influenced by Hayek on the Right. Both streams of thought sought to challenge and revolutionize mainstream social sciences that were developing in the twentieth century in order to consolidate the Keynesian and corporatist nation-state. They challenged the mainstream, but they remained based on scientific abstraction. As the hegemony of such modernist frame of thought and sociopolitical form of organization began to erode at the end of the 1960s with the rise of new social movements, colonial struggles, and profound global economic transformations, new critical voices made their way into social sciences under the label of postructuralism (including feminism, critical race studies, postcolonialism). After a review of the original strands of critical urban studies, this chapter delves into some of the contributions of feminist, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and decolonial and postcolonial approaches to urban studies. These perspectives push social scientists to explore the city differently. It involves theorizing objects that are often ignored in research on urban politics such as affective rationalities, ontological assumptions, or intimate interactions.
Relationality/territoriality: Toward a conceptualization of cities in the world
Geoforum, 2010
The paper will contribute to the conceptualization of cities in the world by first outlining the conceptual and empirical challenges of theorizing the urban/global nexus in both relational and territorial terms. It argues that the most useful and appropriate approach to understanding contemporary urban governance in global context is to develop a conceptualization that is equally sensitive to the role of relational and territorial geographies, of flow and fixity, of global contexts and place specificities, of structural imperatives and embodied practices, in the production of cities.
Global Networks, 2005
The societal practices, symbol systems and artefacts that form sociology's field of study are shifting in their spatial reach. Terms like internationalization, globalization, glocalization or transnationalization denote an (at least perceived) increase in the flow of information, commodities and capital across nation-state borders as well as an unprecedented ease of human spatial mobility. Situated in the wider research programme of transnationalism, in this article I present a typology of geographic-societal spatial configurations, of which transnationalism is one of several ideal types. Distinguishing explicitly between an absolutist and a relativist approach to space and applying this to geographic and societal spaces, the article puts forward a framework for discussing how shifts in the geographic reach of the societal are taking place. The case of General Motors provides an example of how such a typology could be applied. The article concludes by discussing some consequences for future empirical research.