Dancing in the Streets - a design case study

How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark? This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it. People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the street

Towards a new theory of practice for community health psychology

The article sets out the value of theorizing collective action from a social science perspective that engages with the messy actuality of practice. It argues that community health psychology relies on an abstract version of Paulo Freire’s earlier writing, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which provides scholar-activists with a ‘map’ approach to collective action. The article revisits Freire’s later work, the Pedagogy of Hope, and argues for the importance of developing a ‘journey’ approach to collective action. Theories of practice are discussed for their value in theorizing such journeys, and in bringing maps (intentions) and journeys (actuality) closer together

The tactical mimicry of social enterprise strategies: acting ‘as if’ in the everyday life of third sector organizations

Using England as a paradigmatic case of the „enterprising up ‟ of the third sector through social enterprise policies and programs, this article sheds light on resistance as enacted through dramaturgical identification with government strategies. Drawing from a longitudinal qualitative research study, which is interpreted via Michel de Certeau‟s theory of the everyday, we present the case study of Teak, a charitable regeneration company, to illustrate how its Chief Executive Liam „acted as ‟ a social entrepreneur in order to gain access to important resources. We establish „tactical mimicry ‟ as a sensitizing concept to suggest that third sector practitioners ‟ identification with the normative premises of „social enterprise ‟ is part of a parasitical prosaics geared toward appropriating public money. While tactical mimicry conforms to strategies only in order to exploit them, its ultimate aim is to increase potentials of collective agency outside the direct influence of power. The contribution we make is threefold: first, we extend the recent debate on productive resistance by highlighting how „playing the game ‟ without changing existing relations of power can nevertheless produce largely favorable outcomes. Second, we suggest that recognition of the productive potential of tactical mimicry requires methodologies which pay attention to the spatial and temporal dynamics of resistance. And third, we argue that explaining „social enterprise‟ without consideration of the non-discursive, mainly financial resources made available to those who identify with it, necessarily risks overlooking a crucial element of the dramaturgical dynamic of discourse

Displaying desire and distinction in housing

The article discusses the significance of cultural capital for the understanding of the field of housing in contemporary Britain. It explores the relationship between housing and the position of individuals in social space mapped out by means of a multiple correspondence analysis. It considers the material aspects of housing and the changing contexts that are linked to the creation and display of desire for social position and distinction expressed in talk about home decoration as personal expression and individuals' ideas of a `dream house'. It is based on an empirical investigation of taste and lifestyle using nationally representative survey data and qualitative interviews. The article shows both that personal resources and the imagination of home are linked to levels of cultural capital, and that rich methods of investigation are required to grasp the significance of these normally invisible assets to broaden the academic understanding of the field of housing in contemporary culture

Structure and play: rethinking regulation in the higher education sector

This paper explores possible tactics for academics working within a context of increasing regulation and constraint. One suggested tactic is to move outside of a creativity-conformity binary. Rather than understanding creativity and conformity as separable, where one is seen as excluding the other, the authors consider the potential of examining the relationships between them. The theme of 'structure and play' illustrates the argument. In the first part of the paper, using various examples from art and design - fields generally associated with creativity - the authors explore the interrelatedness of creativity and conformity. For example, how might design styles, which are generally understood as creative outcomes, constrain creativity and lead to conformity within the design field? Is fashion producing creativity or conformity? Conversely, the ways in which conformity provides the conditions for creativity are also examined. For example, the conformity imposed by the state on artists in the former communist bloc contributed to a thriving underground arts movement which challenged conformity and state regulation. Continuing the theme of 'structure and play', the authors recount a story from an Australian university which foregrounds the ongoing renegotiation of power relations in the academy. This account illustrates how programmatic government in a university, with its aim of regulating conduct, can contribute to unanticipated outcomes. The authors propose that a Foucauldian view of distributed power is useful for academics operating in a context of increasing regulation, as it brings into view sites where power might begin to be renegotiated

At close quarters: combatting Facebook design, features and temporalities in social research

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data ‘at close quarters’. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research – which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities – they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research – which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour

Transcultural body spaces: re-inventing and performing headwrap practice among young Congolese women in London

This article examines embodied representation of race, ethnicity, and gender, questioning ideas of cultural appropriation. Using the London-based Congolese transnational fashion brand Kiyana Wraps as a case study, the article addresses how young Congolese designers re-invent their cultural heritage to conceive the label stylisation and construct meanings of Blackness/Africanness. The article also explores the brand’s social spaces, where the headwrap ritual is used by different actors to perform hybrid identities. In addition, wearing the headwrap reveals symbolic metaphors of empowerment, through which intertwined ‘feminist’ and ‘feminine’ identities are evoked. The paper examines how Congolese women are creatively taking inspiration from the environment of London to produce innovative fashion trajectories as lived socio-cultural experiences. It argues how the headwrap ritual signifies an aesthetic and material process through which specific racial and ethnic boundaries are transcended, fabricating transcultural body spaces which encompass individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds

Queue-munity engagement: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Antiques Roadshow in Kent

Using Collaborative Event Ethnography as a research method, a team of 21 researchers conducted fieldwork at the Antiques Roadshow in Ightham Mote, Kent. This article reflects on the experience of queuing at the event and how it was experienced and discussed by researchers and participants. Drawing upon Mol, the article approaches the practice of queuing as involving an inherent multiplicity of often contradictory experiences through which idealised, Second World War-related understandings of British queuing practice are simultaneously confirmed and challenged. Through multiple participants viewing the queue from within and outside we were able to capture the processes of community-building, curation, management, rule-maintenance and rule-bending within the social life of the queue. In demonstrating this multiplicity Collaborative Event Ethnography is shown to be an excellent research tool for capturing short-term, large-scale events while also highlighting the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of social interactions and social norms within queues

Exploring young people's and youth workers' experiences of spaces for ‘youth development’: creating cultures of participation

The paper focuses on the emergence of ‘positive youth development’ and its impact on older, more established practices of working with young people, such as youth work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in England between 2004 and 2006, in particular young people's and youth workers' accounts of participating in youth work, the analysis engages with the social spaces in which youth work takes place and asks key questions about why young people might participate in youth spaces, what they get out of participating and how such spaces can promote cultures of participation. The analysis shows that such spaces provide young people and their communities with biographical continuity and time becomes a key component for sustaining such spaces. The argument is made for a more nuanced understanding of what young people get out of their participation in youth spaces, and for an epistemological approach to youth praxis that embraces the messiness and inequalities of lived experience

An unfolding signifier: London's Baltic Exchange in Tallinn

In the summer of 2007 an unusual cargo arrived at Muuga and Paldiski harbors outside Tallinn. It consisted of nearly 50 containers holding over 1,000 tons of building material ranging from marble columns, staircases and fireplaces, to sculpted allegorical figures, wooden paneling and old-fashioned telephone booths. They were once part of the Baltic Exchange in the City of London. Soon they will become facets of the landscape of Tallinn. The following article charts this remarkable story and deploys this fragmented monument to analyze three issues relating to the Estonian capital: the relocation of the ‘Bronze Soldier’, the demolition of the Sakala Culture Center, and Tallinn’s future role as European Cultural Capital in 2011