23 research outputs found
Weird exoskeletons: propositional politics and the making of home in underground Bucharest
The article explores the politics of life underground in Bucharest, Romania. It focuses on a tunnel passing under Bucharest's central train station, where a community of drug users and soâcalled âhomelessâ have made a longâstanding home, using a space that many others considered uninhabitable. Relying on extensive ethnographic observations and interviews undertaken within the tunnels, the article traces and illustrates the socioâmaterial entanglements characterizing life underground. It frames this assemblage of bodies, veins, syringes, substances and various relationships of power and affect, as a âpropositional politicsâ of home and life at the margins. Such a politics speaks of drug addiction and extreme marginalization, but also of a sense of belonging, reciprocal trust and care. In tracing such a politics, the article does not aim to romanticize the status of home in the underground or to treat it as the marginal antithesis of normative homeliness, but to reveal the ways in which an affirmative, selfâgrounding politics of home emerges from the immanence of tunnel life within the fabric of the city. As such, the article contributes to debates around homing practices in conditions of uninhabitability and proposes a radical approach to the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban
The geographies of food banks in the meantime
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support
given by the British Academy for this research (grant
no. SG131950). The âEmergency Food Provision in
the UKâ research includes: over eighteen months of
ethnographic research in a Trussell Trust Foodbank;
a national survey of the Trussell Trust Network and
Independent food banks (and other food aid providers);
and in-depth interviews with food bank managers,
volunteers and service-users in London,
Bristol, Leicestershire, South Wales, Devon, and
Cornwall