Suchergebnisse

This essay presents photos and words illustrating practices of care in homes shared by humans and plants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with plant carers, I highlight how humans (re)discovered plants as kin during forced social isolation. I reflect on how plants provided joy, hope, and reassurance during crisis, enabling strong affective bonds with their human carers. I read the creation/cementing of affective bonds between humans and plants for its political significance, and I interrogate the activity of making home/kin with plants as the emergence of interspecies solidarities, which challenge anthropocentric narratives of worldmaking and reinsert non-human beings as central to the making of more just and inclusive futures.

This article reflects on Trieste's representation as 'the ghost of its Habsburg past' (Hametz, M. 2014. 'Presnitz in the Piazza: Habsburg Nostalgia in Trieste.' Journal of Austrian Studies 47 (2): 131–154. doi:10.1353/oas.2014.0029., 136) – a city that laments the irreversibility of time – to explore instead the ways in which nostalgic attachments to the empire have come under suspicion. Drawing on interviews, literary texts, and atmospheric data (McCormack, D. 2014. 'Atmospheric things and circumstantial excursions.' Cultural Geographies 21 (4): 605–625. doi:10.1177/1474474014522930), I explore the narrative and performative strategies adopted to reframe the political and cultural relations with the empire. By discussing how events and places expected to celebrate the Habsburg legacy refuse to become nostalgic, I trace the emergence of contested feelings for the empire to explore how nostalgia becomes an ambivalent sentiment that is discursively and performatively re-appropriated and mobilized to attach and detach Trieste from the empire.

This article reflects on the meanings and possibilities of social change in Mostar, a city more often associated with the seeming impossibility of eradicating ethno-national divisions and corruption that paralyses it. It focuses on the under-researched politics of grassroots activism by drawing on Hardt's and Negri's work on the political potential of 'love' to shape and propel radical politics. Overall, the article reveals the lack of a cohesive agenda of grassroots politics in Mostar, and asks whether love (that creates and sustains political movement) can educate, patiently, to the revolution.

Abstract
This article examines how artistic interventions in public space become worlding practices that challenge established, global representations of cities. Focusing on Mostar, an ethnically divided city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the essay contrasts the global representation of the city as intolerant and uncooperative to the worlding practices of Abart, a collective whose art interventions make visible moments of solidarity among supposedly antagonistic actors. Through the mobilization of Lefebvre's core concepts of the production of space and heterotopia, this article explores how Abart navigates global funding streams through the re-appropriation of donors' vocabulary as a means of countering their dominant narratives that limit the very potentials of urban activism. Thus, Mostar's network of activists constitutes a significant example of grassroots actors critically intervening into the 'art of being global'.

Visual and arts-based methods are now widely used in the social sciences. In youth research they are considered to promote engagement and empowerment. This article contributes to debates on the challenges of using arts-based methods in research with young people. We discuss the experience of a multidisciplinary project investigating how young people imagine their futures – Imagine Sheppey – to critically consider the use of arts-based methods and the kinds of data produced through these practices. We make two sets of arguments. First, that the challenges of participation and collaboration are not overcome by using apparently 'youth-friendly' research tools. Second, that the nature of data produced through arts-based methods can leave researchers with significant problems of interpretation. We highlight these issues in relation to the focus of this project on researching the future.

In this conversation, we re-engage with the fieldwork we conducted in places that are usually associated with (post)war such as Mostar, Sarajevo and Pristina to discuss how we feel about these cities. We started from the intuition that the way we feel about these places matters because it encapsulates and synthesises our struggles to understand, to fit in, to search for home and to find meanings in the relationships we built in our fieldwork. We have experienced the boundaries of fieldwork as shifting, complex and multifarious through the (un)doing of friendships, emotional bonds and (mis)understandings that linger in beyond the ostensible field. For a long time, we have carried these affective experiences with us, unable to let them go but also not sure how to write them in (or how much). In making sense of emotional states and affective moments in our research encounters, we experienced the fundamental challenge of translating what is ephemeral and affective on the page. Taking our own stakes and attachments seriously has proved difficult in ways that perhaps we did not anticipate. It has unravelled a process of unlearning that dabbles with feelings, affective moments and sensations as intrinsic to our work and politics. Attending to the affective dimension of fieldwork encounters allows for alternative stories of what counts as research and knowledge to thrive.

In this introduction, we discuss the scope of the edited volume by outlining the position of Mostar within much broader academic debates on 'ethnically divided cities'. We question the representations of such contested cities as hopeless spaces of division, and suggest to explore instead the cracks that challenge overpowering logics of partition: the self-directed attempts at inter-ethnic solidarity, grassroots movements for social justice and dignity, and the inconsistent ways people in these cities inhabit and perform ethnic identities. We also introduce the themes of this Special Issue; Divided Cities as Complex Cities; Memories, Affect and Everyday Life; and Grassroots Politics.

The aim of this workshop is to implement and evaluate an approach to transdisciplinary interaction, designed to address spatial planning in an inclusive manner. We propose to engage participants from different fields in an exercise of walking, recording and mapping as one combined participatory design (PD) methodology. Specifically, we reflect on the possibilities of pluralizing approaches to heritage making, by looking at how PD methodologies could be applied in this field. The workshop takes form as a participatory walking and data-collecting exercise with the finality to reflect on how creative processes that feed into fields determined by expert discourses, such as heritage making policies, could be enriched with the tools and methodologies of PD. Discussions about heritage are increasingly crucial to contemporary politics of remembrance and memorialization, which often intersect with wider political discussions on urban inclusion and diversity. Accordingly, and considering the main theme of the PDC 2018 conference, the workshop aims to foster a critical dialogue on how PD methodologies can support the creation of more inclusive urban environments that celebrate diversity and facilitate the development of alternative approaches to the making of heritage. During the workshop, the multidisciplinary approach to challenge and break into dominant institutionalized discourses is tested, discussed and refined. Moreover, we establish how this methodology could be implemented in response to wider concerns of PD and spatial planning.Full text at ACM