A work-in-progress politics of space:Activist projects and the negotiation of throwntogetherness within the hostile environment of Hungarian politics

For Doreen Massey, space is a challenge of multiplicity, encounter and relation: a ‘throwntogetherness’ that demands ongoing negotiation. Space, Massey argues, is open—it is capable of being made otherwise. Drawing on Massey’s ideas, this essay reflects on the everyday political work of community projects to open up space for new possibilities of living with difference within hostile political environments. Through a combination of ethnographic storytelling, photography and diagrammatic sketches, I follow ‘stories-so-far’ from the Auróra community centre in Budapest, Hungary and its members’ project to build a community garden. Rather than focus on prevailing discourses which frame Hungarian politics as a battle between an illiberal government and a liberal opposition, I shift attention to everyday experiences of this hostile political environment by examining projects as mundane and local techniques through which community groups describe, assemble, and work on their own better possible futures. In so doing, I also argue for a praxeological, rather than ontological reading of Massey’s work: rather than presuming a priori that all space is open, we should follow Massey in analysing the situated and ongoing ‘terms of engagement’ through which people open up—and close down—better possible spaces and better ways of living with difference

Working through our differences:Limits of ontology in the ordinary lives of critical geographical theory

You won’t get far in geographical theory today without bumping into one ontology or another. Metaphysical assertions about key spatial concepts – ‘space is open’, ‘community is exclusionary’, ‘the political is agonistic’ – guide empirical analysis. In this mode of theorising, the vocation of critical geography is to correct conceptual misunderstandings and thereby direct political action. Curiously perhaps, the geographer becomes one who – in the name of emancipatory projects – points people to their proper place. An alternative approach to critical theory might consider instead how people place themselves. Just such a concern animates the varied enterprises operating under the name of ordinary language philosophy. This article examines how philosophies of ordinary language might contribute to new avenues of geographical research by examining the relationship between Stanley Cavell's writings on the human voice as a site of embodied and passionate response and Clive Barnett's call for an action-theoretic approach to social inquiry as an alternative to ontological critique. Taken together, their work recommends a programme of inquiry into ordinary critical geographies: how people circumstantiate the meaning, worth and wisdom of their actions, and, in doing so, work to place themselves in the world

Finding space for shared futures:Exploring methods for co–evaluation in urban co–design projects

Reflecting on the challenges and experiences of delivering a public co-design project during the Covid-19 pandemic, we use this paper to make an argument for greater experimentation with and attention to the evaluation methods used to assess and justify co-design projects. Evaluation is often treated as a final, retrospective, and—too often—last-minute step in delivering a design project. In reality,  practices of evaluation characterise every step of participatory design. Formal evaluation processes often dismiss the practical techniques and criteria that participants use to decide whether a design is good for them or their community, however, relying instead on narrowly-defined methods and criteria established a priori by professional ‘experts’. The tensions that arise between participants’ lived practices of evaluation and formal accounts of evaluation can lead to differences of opinion and diverging decisions—and concerns about ‘inauthentic’ or ‘shallow’ co-design. Finding techniques to carry forward participants’ everyday evaluations into the formal methods and evaluations of project reports should therefore be treated as a crucial concern for participatory design. In this vein, we reflect on both the methodological experiments and challenges involved in our effort to find better possible, agreeable and shareable futures in our co-design project “Future of the High Street” by examining the spaces of evaluation created within co-design projects in order to spark further debate about the possibilities of co-evaluating the projects and spaces we share with others. Drawing on ethnomethodology, a sociological school of thought focused on the study of the everyday and mundane methods used by people to organise, make sense of and act in their social world, we argue that such spaces of evaluation are sites where designers and participants create and negotiate shared grammars of accountability and justification of their work together. Recording and sharing these exchanges is one way to better align the formal evaluation of co-design with the situated and shared evaluations through which participants decide whether and how participation in a project is worthwhile or empowering. This, however, requires a shift from treating ‘methods’ as means-to-an-end and toward an understanding of methods as experimental practices that designers and participants alike might use to occasion reflection on how to think, act and design together.

Speculating with glitches:Keeping the future moving

This paper explores the glitch as a generative problem which is capable of introducing unanticipated possibilities and futures into situations. We understand the glitch as a sociomaterial encounter rather than merely a technical error, and argue that it calls for (re)consideration of here-and-now possible futures through practices of response and repair. Exploring the ways that people seek to respond to glitches, we consider two case studies in which unexpected problems provoke those involved to speculate playfully and practically about new possibilities. In the first case, a malfunctioning ‘Teacherbot’ incites new challenges and pedagogical opportunities in an online learning environment. In the second, Hungarian activists creatively use infrastructural and political problems to make new spaces of protest and to press the government to respond to their concerns. Considering these empirical cases allows us to observe how playful and disruptive dispositions have worked to question the terms of possible futures in the real world, and to unsettle the seemingly given terms of power-relations. Glitches are not a panacea, but they can provide an impetus to act from within situations that are uncertain, and can therefore point to new trajectories and possible futures

Finding Space for Shared Futures

Reflecting on the challenges and experiences of delivering a public co-design project during the Covid-19 pandemic, we use this paper to make an argument for greater experimentation with and attention to the evaluation methods used to assess and justify co-design projects. Evaluation is often treated as a final, retrospective, and—too often—last-minute step in delivering a design project. In reality,  practices of evaluation characterise every step of participatory design. Formal evaluation processes often dismiss the practical techniques and criteria that participants use to decide whether a design is good for them or their community, however, relying instead on narrowly-defined methods and criteria established a priori by professional ‘experts’. The tensions that arise between participants’ lived practices of evaluation and formal accounts of evaluation can lead to differences of opinion and diverging decisions—and concerns about ‘inauthentic’ or ‘shallow’ co-design. Finding techniques to carry forward participants’ everyday evaluations into the formal methods and evaluations of project reports should therefore be treated as a crucial concern for participatory design. In this vein, we reflect on both the methodological experiments and challenges involved in our effort to find better possible, agreeable and shareable futures in our co-design project “Future of the High Street” by examining the spaces of evaluation created within co-design projects in order to spark further debate about the possibilities of co-evaluating the projects and spaces we share with others. Drawing on ethnomethodology, a sociological school of thought focused on the study of the everyday and mundane methods used by people to organise, make sense of and act in their social world, we argue that such spaces of evaluation are sites where designers and participants create and negotiate shared grammars of accountability and justification of their work together. Recording and sharing these exchanges is one way to better align the formal evaluation of co-design with the situated and shared evaluations through which participants decide whether and how participation in a project is worthwhile or empowering. This, however, requires a shift from treating ‘methods’ as means-to-an-end and toward an understanding of methods as experimental practices that designers and participants alike might use to occasion reflection on how to think, act and design together.

Wintering Together: A Toolkit for Building Your Own Wintering Well Community

No abstract available

Winter Worries: Understanding Experiences of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the UK through the 2022 'Big SAD Survey'

This is a summary report of key findings from the ‘Big SAD Survey’ conducted between February and April 2022 as part of the ESRC-AHRC funded project ‘Living with SAD: practicing cultures of seasonality to 'feel light' differently’. The project aims to develop a greater understanding of people’s experience of self-ascribed and clinically confirmed ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder (‘SAD’ hereafter) and ‘seasonal affect’ and ‘lowered winter mood’ in particular, in order to develop new public resources for the diverse publics living with disruptive seasonal feelings. It also serves as an intervention into public discourses and media that have sometimes discredited people’s experience of SAD in recent years

The public lives of pigeon passengers: how pigeons and humans share space on a train

As so-called ‘rats with wings’, pigeons are a favourite target of cultural theorists interested in interspecies relationship and conflict: pigeon spikes, anti-feeding campaigns, and attempts at extermination are taken as evidence of humans’ intolerance for ‘wild’ and ‘disorderly’ nature enacted through spatial exclusion. This chapter challenges this prevalent account by examining video data of actual encounters between pigeons and humans on commuter trains, exploring the situated and negotiated techniques they use to share space. Through an ethnomethodological analysis of interaction as everyday ‘sociological reasoning’, it shows that such encounters are important sites of public reasoning where both pigeons and humans negotiate how to manage life in and travel through a multispecies city. The analysis contributes to recent critiques of ‘ontologies of entanglement’ by demonstrating the importance of a contextual, praxeological perspective for recognising the ways pigeons learn to live in a human world—and humans learn to live in a world of birds

Lviv’s uncertain destination: a city and its train terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev

Lviv’s uncertain destination: a city and its train terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev, by Andriy Zayarnyuk, Toronto, Canada, Buffalo, USA, London, UK, University of Toronto Press, 2020, 392 pp., $66.00 (Cloth) ISBN 9781487505196;$66.00 (ePub) ISBN 9781487531737; $66.00 (PDF) ISBN 9781487531720