Click here for the poster.

Bio: Luis Alfredo Briceño Gonzalez is a social-cultural anthropologist focusing on immigrant urban communities facing Chile's housing deficit. He has done his PhD research on a Self-built informal settlement on the outskirts of Santiago inhabited by immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Peru, and Colombia, researching how the common emerges in the practice of conviviality and local politics. 

Abstract: This presentation addresses the story of a self-built informal settlement of Santiago de Chile. In 2019, the "campamento" Jerusalem arose from a seizure in which Haitians and Venezuelans participated. Those immigrants were going through a set of precarity related to housing and their status as foreigners. The seizure was an opportunity to create a community and alleviate some of their burdens, but it brought many new challenges. This presentation explains how places like the campamentos suppose a new political space in the control of human mobility and the immigrant agency.   

Click here for the poster.

Abstract: 
Neoliberalism has shaped cities in varied ways, from rapid growth to disempowerment. This analysis explores how Eskişehir navigated disempowerment through leapfrogging strategies linked to the “spatial fix”. Far from passive in the face of neoliberal forces, Eskişehir's local elites leveraged political agency to counter and capitalize on constraints. The center-left opposition mayor employed multiscalar networking and symbolic revitalizations to overcome financial and political barriers. Framing the city as a hub of secularism and modernization, the “Eskişehir model” emerged as a counter-narrative to the ruling AKP's Islamist-nationalist vision, using ideological clashes as opportunities for urban repositioning. While these efforts helped reposition Eskişehir and consolidate political power, they also exposed and reinforced underlying inequalities. The celebrated Eskişehir model, though outwardly successful, masked persistent disparities, segregation, and structural inequities embedded within the city. Drawing on my previous research, I will discuss the impact of the uneven urban development on the urban poor and recently arrived refugees as well as increasing right-wing and far-right sentiments behind the celebrated “Eskişehir model”.

Bio:
Cansu Civelek graduated from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She received her master's and doctoral degrees from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
 

Click here for the poster & more information. 

Click here for the poster

Abstract:
The talk considers dredging operations in the Bay of Marseille to develop an anthropological approach to ocean sediments. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in France and using various styles of representation, it attempts an atmospheric dive into the sandy and muddy layers of the Mediterranean seafloor. Asking how the existence of sediments is historically produced and how sedimentary deposits and human design form Anthropocene “patches” (Tsing et al. 2024), "Stirring up Marseille" is an act of provoking new understandings of the urban seafloor. It invites you to consider the "feral" nature of sediments.

Bio:
Lukas Ley is an environmental and urban anthropologist working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in the Indian Ocean World. His research is broadly concerned with urban temporalities and material environments. Current research projects investigate the role of sand in protecting coastal commons and driving dispossession in Denpasar, Indonesia, and the afterlives of concrete in Marseille, France. Ley's first book, “Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang” published by University of Minnesota Press, was awarded the Social Science Prize by the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies.

Click here for the corresponding poster

Abstract

The government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) to offer citizenship to six non-Muslim communities (Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, and Parsis) who had fled Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to escape religious persecution and arrived in India before 31 December 2014. The act does not grant such eligibility to Muslims of the said countries. The exclusion of Muslims from the scope of citizenship criteria has led to massive protests nationwide at different times and spaces. In this process, Shaheen Bagh became the epicentre of the anti-CAA protest, which was mainly led by women, particularly Muslim women. Using the narrative interview, newspaper analysis, and theoretical analysis of public space, this talk aims to understand how Shaheen Bagh has emerged as creative imagined ‘public space’ during the entire protest. This will explore how Shaheen Bagh is constitutive of three dimensions: imagined, creative, and controlled, which makes it a public space. 

Bio

Deep Chand is a global encounters fellow at the Institute for Sociology, University of Tübingen, working with Prof. Bani Gill. He completed his PhD in sociology from Goethe University Frankfurt and an MA and M.Phil. from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. His broader research areas are the sociology of policing, urban citizenship and neighbourhood, social inequality, sociology of education, and ethnography.

Click here for the G-TURN Poster

Abstract:
In the context of the Millennium Development Goals, several observers have noted a renaissance of mass housing programmes in the Global South. At the same time, there are concerns that such large-scale standardised housing and resettlement programmes would repeat past mistakes and miss their target groups. Unaffordable schemes and maintenance, underserviced sites at inappropriate, distant locations, and gentrification or downward-raiding would
provoke that much of the new, state-subsidized housing stock would actually not be occupied by those who policy stakeholders call the ‘intended beneficiaries’. These ‘missing people’ of state-subsidized housing and re-settlement programmes either have never inhabited their new housing units or vacated them after some time – but why do they leave and where do they go? Largely due to methodological challenges in finding resettled dwellers outside of resettlement sites, these questions have remained unanswered to date, hence provoking accusatory speculations and divergent assumptions. In my pre-sentation, I will shed light on the “missing people” of large-scale housing and resettlement programmes, conceptualizing departure from state-subsidized housing alongside a continuum of constraint and agency. Based on a qualitative, people-centred analysis of ‘housing pathways’ of the ‘missing people’, I argue that non-occupancy and secondary residential mobility can be understood as demand-driven practices of coping with and adapting to shortcomings of supply-driven housing policy, in terms of affordability, uniformity, and displacement. Whereas the extent of constraint and agency differs from forceful displacement to voluntary moving, the findings underline the contextual embeddedness of housing policy as well as the crucial significance of decent labour for people to sustain decent housing conditions – inside and outside state-subsidized housing.

Bio: 
Raffael Beier is an urban studies scholar and currently the acting head of the research group International Planning Studies (IPS) at TU Dortmund University. He holds a joint-PhD from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague and the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE) at Ruhr University Bochum. As a postdoc, he was part of the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) at Wits University in Johannesburg. Working mainly on North and Sub-Saharan Africa, his research has largely been concerned with people-centred perspectives on displacement, resettlement, and affordable housing. Together with two co-editors, he recently published the book "Urban Resettlements in the Global South" (Routledge, 2022).

Click here to download the poster

Prof. Dingxin Zhao will give a talk on "Patterns of Social Protests in Post-Mao China". 

This talk discusses the kind of political tensions that emerged during the process of China's reform, urban expansion, and rapid  economic  deve-lopment. It delineates a four-stage development of the nature of Chinese society in post-Mao China, highlighting the tensions between the state and society at each stage and the underlying logic of this developmental pattern. This discussion leads to an understanding of the rise of the new kind of the Chinese state and society as we see today.

Bio: Dingxin Zhao is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Humanities at Zhejiang University and Max Palevsky Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His research covers historical sociology, methodology, political sociology, social movements, social change and economic development. His current research project is on the epistemological and ontological aspects of social science methodologies. He is author of award-winning books The Power of Tiananmen (2001) and The Confucian-Legalist State (2015) in English, and several other books in Chinese including Social and Political Movement, Limits of Democracy, Politics of Legitimacy, and What is Sociology. His work also appears in
journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Forces, Mobilization, and Sociology.

Prof. Yanfei Sun (Zheijang University, China) will give a talk on "Popular Religion in Post-Mao China: The Urban-Rural Divide and Other Transformations". 

This presentation examines the situation of popular religion in post-Mao China, focusing on a major form of popular religion, the territorial cult. It shows that the urban and rural experiences in the resurgence of territorial cults have been hugely different. It also shows that the religion has undergone major transformations in the process of being revived. The presentation goes on to explain the structural forces driving these transformations. The talk ends with a discussion on the impact of the Chinese government's promotion of traditional Chinese culture on the religion in the past decade.

Bio: Yanfei Sun is currently associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University. She graduated from University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in sociology in 2010. She was a Mellon Research Fellow of Columbia University Society of Fellows (2010-2013), a visiting associate professor at Harvard University, and a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her research mainly concerns the intersection between religion and politics, particularly religious changes, religious toleration, secularism, and religious nationalism. From September 2023 to July 2024, she is a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

Organisiert und unter der Leitung von // Organized and under the direction of: ABED ABIDAT Fotograf - CLAIRE BULLEN Anthropologin und Soziologin - AMEL ZEROUROU Architektin und Historikerin

Deutsch-Französisches Kulturinstitut Tübingen e.V., Doblerstr. 25, 72074 Tübingen

Die Vernissage und Ausstellung findet auf Deutsch und Französisch statt // The event will be held in German and French.

Click here to download the flyer

Links between ethnography and photography have existed since the invention of photography. The birth of photography as a technology, art-form and social practice is generally associated with urbanisation and industrialisation of the 19th and 20th century. Urban-scapes and urban lives continue to provide the backdrop or focus for photographers and social scientists alike. As diverse photographic genres (portraits, street, documentary, ‘found’ images) and methods now join the assimilation of other visual materials and methods within qualitative social research, the inclusion of photos within urban research can take various forms (Rose 2016 ; Roberts 2011; Becker 1974). This can take the form of quick shots of street life taken with mobile phones – backing up field notes scribbled down on the move. It can include the analysis of official images produced by city marketing agencies, pinpointing prevalent narratives about urban repositioning strategies. Methods such as photo-elicitation with family albums can help layer up thick descriptions about time, memory, changing social ties within urban neighbourhoods. Despite this diversity, surprising little attention has been given to the question of how making and/or working with photographs may offer particular insights into ethnographic explorations of urban transformations.

Over the years, the frontiers delimiting photography as a ‘discipline’ or ‘practice’ and social science research have become increasingly fuzzy, as visual ethnography and sociology has developed as sub-genres and as photographers become sociologists and anthropologists (and vice versa) and draw on scientific literature for inspiration in their image making. While a thriving literature exists on how photos may be interpreted, how relations between photographs and the field can be differently conceived, and the potential ‘agency’ of photos within social lives, the relations between the social sciences, art and photography remain under-unexplored (Cuny et al. 2020). Further, in much social science research, images continue to be relegated to a purely illustrative role and their analytical potential overlooked.

Taking the images we work with seriously, this day-long workshop will be the opportunity for researchers who differently engage with photographs to reflect upon the above and to think more deeply and critically about: (how) can photography help us better understand the urban?

Format:

• Held at the French-German Cultural Institute in Tübingen on the occasion of the presentation of the sociological and photographic project, Marseille: Au-delà des clichés (Abed Abid, Claire Bullen, Amel Zerourou), the day-long workshop will be open to a maximum of 12 participants.
• The workshop will be held in English.
• Each participant will introduce one or two photographs taken from their field-sites. These will serve as the basis for discussions of ethical, methodological or epistemological implications (consent, power-relations, representation, material conditions of image production, aesthetic choices, materials, etc., insights into urban social relations, urban changing forms, the urban ethnographic endeavor...)
• The day will be divided into three two hour blocks, during which a maximum of four people will present their images. No formal presentation is expected. The idea is to facilitate discussion and debate. This will be followed by a wrap up session, to collect together insights.
• During the day, there will an opportunity to visit the exposition: Marseille: Au-delà des clichés.
• Following the workshop, participants will be invited to contribute a 1000-word discussion piece, accompanied by images from their research, for an on-line academic journal. 

If you are interested in taking part, please send an email Claire Bullen (claire.bullen@uni-tuebingen.de) and Amandine Turri Hoelken (amandine.hoelken@gmail.com), setting out your motivations and suggestions of the photos that you would like to discuss. 

Some financial support is available for those without funds to cover travel and accomodation. Please mention in your mail if this is your case.

Click here to download the flyer 

Poster Talk Prof. Dr. Reinhard Johler 

Food banks have become an integral part of the supply options for poorer sections of the population in the countries of the Global North. In Germany, a type of food bank emerged in the early 1990s in the form of the Tafeln, whose work now seems almost indispensable to welfare work after 30 years. In fact, however, there is a great discrepancy between the very positive media coverage of the Tafeln and their critical examination in academic publications. The lecture traces the history of the Tafel and provides an insight into their organizational structures. This is followed by a critical reflection on the many non-intended effects associated with their work. At the end, a plea is made that it is imperative to find an exit strategy from the alms system that has been established by the Tafeln.

Poster Download

1. Racial desegregation of residential areas. The key driver of racial desegregation has been the deracialisation of middle and upper income occupation types (Crankshaw 2022). The fact that once-‘white’ parts of cities are now among the most racially mixed neighbourhoods can be interpreted as transformation insofar as white people no longer monopolise these advantageous neighbourhoods. And given that apartheid argued that people of different races could not share living environments because they would descend into conflict, the largely peaceful and normalised racial integration of middle and upper class suburbs does indeed stand as a remarkable transformation. Yet many, if not most, urban residents do not live in racially integrated neighbourhoods because they cannot afford to do so. The extent of racial desegregation is therefore governed by the unequal occupation and income structure of urban residents and uneven house prices.
2. Class desegregation of residential areas. While the racial desegregation of once racially exclusive neighbourhoods has been extensive, they remain relatively segregated by income (Ballard and Hamann 2021). Middle and upper class suburbs may be somewhat racially desegregated but the main housing stock is not accessible to anyone other than salaried professionals. Therefore while it might be said that white people no longer have a monopoly over advantageous neighbourhoods, middle and upper income earners do. In 2019, the City of Johannesburg implemented an inclusionary housing policy that obliges developers to include a component of more affordable units in their developments. The fact that this has not happened across the country and much earlier is a missed opportunity for those who argue that greater proximity between different incomes is desirable. State housing projects projects are premised on the desire to incorporate different income levels but only integrate welfare, semi-subsidized and entry level bonded houses. Some informal land occupations have reduced the proximity between rich and poor, although this has not produced integrated neighbourhoods per se, it has reduced the scale of segregation.
3. Densification. Spatial transformation has – in some policies – taken on the goal of densification. The Corridors of Freedom initiative in Johannesburg sought to densify along transit corridors. This initiative invoked dimensions 1 and 2, expressing a vision that rich and poor, black and white would live side by side (Ballard, Dittgen, Harrison and Todes 2017). It also invoked a broader desire to avoid the inefficiencies of urban sprawl. Densification-based strategies argue that more intensive use of land optimises bulk infrastructure, transport, and the opportunities generated through agglomeration effects. Mechanisms for containing urban sprawl include urban boundaries, although these are not always supported politically or enforced bureaucratically.
4. Investment in working class spaces. The fourth and fifth dimensions of spatial transformation do not – in themselves – prioritise the rearrangement of people across the urban scale (to create race or class integration or a densified core). They accept that the urban structure is path dependent and cannot easily be undone. The fourth dimension of spatial transformation is the investment in working class spaces where they are in order to ensure that they function better as living environments for those who live in them. The creation of ‘unicities’ (integrated municipalities) during the demarcation process of the 1990s allowed for revenue collected in wealthy areas to be invested in more deprived sections of the city. As a result townships such as Soweto have transformed markedly. The provision of new housing for working class occupants often alongside historical townships is a further form of investment. Working class residents have themselves invested extensively in their own accommodation and infrastructure. A key limit of this investment has been the extent of unemployment in working class neighbourhoods. The Gauteng Provincial Government has embarked on a drive to support township economies, for example by procuring goods and services in townships, in order to reduce the ‘spatial mismatch’ (between where people live and economic centres). However this this does not create new economic demand. Perhaps the most profound unravelling of investments in working class spaces is the collapse of electricity and water provision which deeply compromises the ability of these neighbourhoods to function as sites of social reproduction and economic production.
5. Connectivity. The priority for the fifth dimension of spatial transformation is to recreate improved connectivity so that any resident of the city may be able to get around it easily, cheaply and safely in order to look for jobs, go to work, or indeed go to school. It offers to bridge the spatial mismatch by opening up the greater city to all who live in it (in contrast to dimension four which seeks to localise opportunity in working class spaces). Extensive investment has occurred in bus rapid transit, metropolitan and regional bus services, rapid rail, passenger rail and taxi recapitalisation. Yet Gauteng has yet to achieve an integrated ticketing system and many transport systems are limping along at best. Freedom of movement is also hampered by the enclosure of neighbourhoods and entire suburbs through fortification.

Each of these dimensions of spatial transformation can contribute in specific ways to the achievement of spatial justice. However there is a limit to the extent to which spatial transformations can achieve spatial justice, and there is a limit to how much can be achieved under each of these five dimensions in the context of persistent acute income inequality. 

References

Crankshaw, Owen (2022) Urban Inequality: Theory Evidence and Method in Johannesburg. London: Zed.

Ballard, Richard, Romain Dittgen, Philip Harrison and Alison Todes (2017) ‘Megaprojects and Urban Visions: Johannesburg’s Corridors of Freedom and Modderfontein’ Transformation 75.

Richard Ballard and Christian Hamann (2021) ‘Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality in the City of Johannesburg’ In Maarten van Ham, Tiit Tammaru, Ruta Ubarevičienė and Heleen Janssen (eds) Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp 91-109.

Global Tübingen Urbanities Research Network Annual Lecture Series 2023-24

Program Poster