https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:29 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-newcomers-right-to-the-common-space-the-case-of-athens-during-the-refugee-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:29 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-newcomers-right-to-the-common-space-the-case-of-athens-during-the-refugee-crisis/ https://toarcheio.org/items/the-ecumenical-right-to-the-city-urban-commons-and-intersectional-enclosures-in-athens-and-istanbul/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:29 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-ecumenical-right-to-the-city-urban-commons-and-intersectional-enclosures-in-athens-and-istanbul/ The collective volume is an outcome of the international conference ‘Contested Borderscapes. Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe’ that took place in Mytilene (Lesvos), September 28 – October 1, 2017.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-refugee-crisis-from-athensto-lesvos-and-back-a-dialogical-account/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:53 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-refugee-crisis-from-athensto-lesvos-and-back-a-dialogical-account/ Continued]]> Our grandparents, refugees Our parents, immigrants We, racists? 1 The slogan that prefaces the paper provides the theoretical caveat for the tensions, limitations, and contradictions of academic discourses in conjuring the daily realities of the era of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. This paper has the form of a dialogue between a sociologist and photographer (Myrto) and a political theorist and activist (Anna) who investigate different forms of the ways the ‘refugee crisis’ is changing the socio-political landscapes in Greece. The multiple aspects of our identities provide valuable tools with which we unpack the multiple and contradictory narratives of researching, learning, and disseminating in the current milieu. In particular, we are interested in the ways we shape knowledge and the tension between the episte-mological and the ontological ways of knowing. In other words, by moving from theory to praxis and back, we are attempting to reconcile the problem of knowing and the problem of being part of a specific crisis milieu. For example, how can we use crisis as a research methodology? What can we learn from the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ in relation to issues of citizenship, belonging, and the future of the European project? Furthermore, the paper attempts to transcend discursive borders between social sciences and the humanities by analysing the deeply performative, situated and embodied practices of doing research in moments of crisis. For example, how to navigate multiple, and at times contradictory, aspects of one’s identity without returning to outmoded discourses of positivism and objectivity?

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/infrastructural-disorder-the-politics-of-disruption-contingency-and-normalcy-in-waste-infrastructures-in-athens-environment-and-planning/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:49 +0000 http://arc.local/items/infrastructural-disorder-the-politics-of-disruption-contingency-and-normalcy-in-waste-infrastructures-in-athens-environment-and-planning/ Continued]]> This paper considers infrastructure from the point of view of disorder. During the last few years, waste management controversies have proliferated in Greece, reflecting a generalized feeling of mistrust towards the authorities. In this context, and in relation to the socio-economic crisis that erupted there in 2010, a set of diverse and even antithetic practices, imaginations, and circulations of flows have (re)emerged around waste treatment processes. By looking at the intermingling of formal and informal practices around waste flows and landfill processes in Athens, the paper asks how uncertainty, contingency and instability shape the governance and everyday experience of waste infrastructures. Examining the ways in which the normalization of regular disruption and instability plays out in waste treatment in Athens, it makes the case for understanding disorder as inherent to infrastructure.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/contentious-spatialities-in-an-era-of-austerity-everyday-politics-and-struggle-communities-in-athens-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000 http://arc.local/items/contentious-spatialities-in-an-era-of-austerity-everyday-politics-and-struggle-communities-in-athens-greece/ Continued]]> Opposition to austerity politics manifested through mass mobilizations and the ‘squares’ movement’ in Athens over the past few years constitute key ‘moments’ in contemporary social movement debates. Nevertheless, the dispersal and grounding of an emergent bottom-up democratic politics in everyday life contexts and across neighbourhoods in the following period still remain analytically nascent. This paper addresses the key role of everyday politics in broader contestation and articulations of alternatives to austerity through the notion of ‘struggle communities’. First, it shifts the analysis of social movement, from ‘moment’ to ‘process’ and the quotidian, constructed at the neighbourhood level. Second, through a case study of a local campaign in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, it locates the spatiality of struggle communities and their processual, often contradictory, constitution. Third, it discusses the possibilities and limitations for an alternative community politics to emerge and potential links to broader struggles in an era of deepening austerity in Europe and beyond. The paper methodologically draws on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emergent-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emergent-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Continued]]> Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation ‘from below’. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of ‘urban solidarity spaces’, focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making ‘from below’, and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a ‘politics of fear’ and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the ‘Athens of crisis’, between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/governmentalities-of-urban-crises-in-inner-city-athens-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:42 +0000 http://arc.local/items/governmentalities-of-urban-crises-in-inner-city-athens-greece/ Continued]]> Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatialization-of-democratic-politics-insights-from-indignant-squares/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:41 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatialization-of-democratic-politics-insights-from-indignant-squares/ Continued]]> This article departs from accounts that either deify Indignant Squares as a model for 21st century political praxis or demonize them as apolitical/post-political crowd gatherings. By performing a closer ethnographic reading of the Indignants’ protests at Athens’ Syntagma Square, we depict the Indignant Squares as a consensual and deeply spatialized staging of dissent, which nevertheless harbours in its underbelly internally conflicting and often radically opposing political imaginaries. A closer reading of the organization, practice and discourses that evolved at Syntagma Square unearths the existence of not one, but two distinct Indignant Squares, both at Syntagma, each with its own topography (upper and lower square), and its own discursive and material practices. Although both squares staged dissent, they nevertheless generated different (opposing, even) political imaginaries. The ‘upper square’ often divulged nationalistic or xenophobic discourses; the ‘lower square’ centred around more organized efforts to stage inclusive politics of solidarity. The paper suggests that, rather than focusing on the homogenizing terms Indignants’ movement/Indignant Squares we should instead be trying to develop a more nuanced theoretical understanding and a more finely grained empirical analysis of the discursive and spatial choreographies of these events. This, we argue, would allow us to go beyond either celebrating them as new political imaginaries, or condemning them as expressions of a post-political era. Talking of ‘Indignant Squares’ in the plural helps one explore in more grounded ways both the limitations and the possibilities that these events offer for opening up (or closing down) democratic politics.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:38 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Continued]]> Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation ‘from below’. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of ‘urban solidarity spaces’, focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making ‘from below’, and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a ‘politics of fear’ and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the ‘Athens of crisis’, between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/socio-spatial-stigmatization-and-its-incorporation-in-the-centre-of-athens-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:34 +0000 http://arc.local/items/socio-spatial-stigmatization-and-its-incorporation-in-the-centre-of-athens-greece/ Continued]]> Considering stigmatization as a process ingrained into power relations, difference and contexts, this paper focuses on how socio-spatial stigmatization is deployed by specific social actors within a broader context of multiple stigmatization of social groups in the city of Athens, Greece. As such, it discusses imposed stigmatization, whereby stigma is attributed to a group and/or a place by external (to the group) actors and further explores what can be termed as ‘incorporated’ stigmatization whereby socio-spatial stigma becomes the central feature around which a group is formed and/or mobilized. Furthermore, in both cases, it explores the consequences of stigmatization, while raising further questions about (de)legitimization.

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