The Role of Actors for Processes of Spatialization

Ursula Rao (SFB 1199 & Leipzig U), Arne Harms, Katharina Döring & Jens Herpolsheimer (SFB 1199)

Information

The workshop addresses the intersection of two dialectical processes. First, we trace the way people’s practices and imaginations shape spaces. Second, we consider the relationship between individuals and collectives. During the workshop, we will discuss how these dynamics of making space and making collectives are interlinked. In order to realize this agenda, we critically engage the following assumptions:

  1. Actors shape social spaces and, while doing so, promote or undermine specific spatial formats (Raumformate). At the same time, the particularities of existing spaces impact actors’ practices, orientations, choices, and ideas. As sediments of past practices, durable spatial orderings affect the way actors experience, think about, and shape space. They restrain social action or provoke the desire for change.
  2. These actions of space-making are generally the outcome of collective action, achieved by people acting in unison as members of specific groups, thereby contributing not just to processes of spatialization, but also to the re-making of bodies that function as ‘collective actors’. This involves an irreducible tension: collectives frame the ways individuals “do” space, while persons might transform and shift collective frameworks impacting processes of spatialization.

Thinking of the practice of “doing” space along these two trajectories will help us to better understand the role actors play in making, changing, and applying spatial formats (Raumformate).

We will start each day with a 45-minute lecture presented by the two keynote speakers, respectively, and subsequent Q&A. We will then spend the remainder of the day discussing research papers written by workshop participants. Discussion papers will be circulated beforehand. In addition, one session will be devoted to the exploration of texts that are key for our understanding of processes of spatialization.

Colleagues interested in joining the workshop are asked to inform the organizers via sfb1199@uni-leipzig.de.

Programme

Friday, 13 July 2018
Venue: SFB 1199, Strohsackpassage, Nikolaistraße 6–10, 5th floor

Registration

9–9.30 am Welcome and Introduction

9:30–11.00 am Keynote I

  • Marc Maguire (Maynooth U): Counterterrorism, from the perspective of an anthropologist as architect

11:00–11:30 pm Coffee

11:30 am–1 pm Session 1

  • Discussant: Ursula Rao
  • Chiara Ruffa (SDU Stockholm): Barefoot soldiers and skiing nations: Incoherence and coping strategies in the UN Mission in Mali
  • Antje Dietze (Leipzig U): Revisiting Transnational Actors from a Spatial Perspective
  • Katharina Döring & Jens Herpolsheimer (Leipzig U): Identifying actorness in African regional organizations

1–2:30 pm Lunch

2:30–3:30 pm Session 2

  • Discussant: Jens Herpolsheimer
  • Heba Raouf (Ibn Haldun U): Cairo as palimpsest: Reflections on agency as anchor of identity under urban militarism
  • Marlon Edgardo Carranza Zelaya (Leipzig U): The Role of Central American gangs (Maras) in the processes of space creation

3:30–4:00 pm Coffee

4:00–5:30 pm Session 3

  • Discussant: Arne Harms
  • Tripta Chandola (IIHS Bangalore): The Orbits of the Peripheral Body: Interrogating Spatial Agency (Via SKYPE)
  • Sri Balasubramaniam (Leipzig U): Paisas, Parchis and Portals: Imagining spaces through collective actions in Delhi’s kiosk remittance services
  • Katharina Wischer (Leipzig U): Collective insights on different aspects of India’s banking landscape: untangling spatial agency, arrangements, and imaginations

7 pm Dinner

Saturday, 14 July 2018
Venue: SFB 1199, Strohsackpassage, Nikolaistraße 6–10, 5th floor

9:30–11.00 am Keynote II

  • Jason Cons (U Texas at Austin): Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the Sundarbans

11–11:30 am Coffee

11:30 am–1 pm Session 4

  • Discussant: Katharina Döring
  • Jens Zickgraf (LMU Munich): There’s good money rolling around the village: Social Space, Movement and the Flow of Money in South Indian Badaga Settlements
  • Arne Harms (Leipzig U): Crafting a User Group: Incentives, Exclusion and Territorialisation in Indian Carbon Forestry
  • Diana Ayeh (Leipzig U): The (un)making of heterotopic extractivism: Individual and collective mobility strategies among sex workers in Burkina Faso

1–2:30 pm Lunch

2:30–4 pm Final Discussion

  • Discussant: Ursula Rao