The power of shared embodiment: Renegotiating non/belonging and in/exclusion in an ephemeral community of care

In this article, we explore the power of shared embodiment for the constitution of an affective community. More specifically, we examine how people afflicted by long-term, arduous experiences of war, migration, and discrimination sensually articulate and, at least temporarily, renegotiate feelings of non/belonging, care, and in/exclusion. Methodologically, we draw on emplaced ethnography and systematic phenomenological go-alongs with a group of elderly migrants, born and raised in different parts of Vietnam, who had arrived in Germany within different legal–political frameworks and who, during the time of our psychological–anthropological research, frequented the same psychotherapeutic clinic. We apply the notion of “affective communities” (Zink in Affective Societies: Key Concepts. Routledge, New York, 2019) to grasp how the group experienced a sensual place of mutual belonging outside the clinic when moving through different public spaces in Berlin as part of their therapy. Particular attention is paid to the participants’ embodied and emplaced memories that were reactivated during these excursions. Shared sensations and spatiality, we argue, made them feel they belonged to an ephemeral community of care that was otherwise hardly imaginable due to their distinct individual biographies, contrasting political attitudes, and ties to different social collectives. In analyzing this affective community, we highlight how significant spatio-sensorial modes of temporal solidification can be in eliciting embodied knowledge that positively contributes to therapeutic processes

Vietnamese Carescapes in the Making: Looking at Covid-19 Care Responses in Berlin through the Affective Lens of Face Masks

Face masks were undoubtedly one of the most visible and (at least in some countries of the Global North) most controversial markers of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contrary to the white-German majority society in Berlin, Vietnamese migrants in the city were aware of the essential role of wearing masks in public right from the beginning of this health crisis. In March 2020, when the German government agency for disease control was still advising the general public against donning masks, former Vietnamese contract workers were already producing thousands of fabric masks for donation to ill-prepared hospitals and care facilities. Vietnamese students in Berlin, as well as children of Vietnamese migrants born and/or raised in Germany, also initiated various mask-related campaigns to tackle the health crisis and supportlocal Vietnamese communities. Based on digital ethnography in the spring of 2020, as well as later offline ethnographic exploration, we tracked the emergence of Vietnamese care networks trying to cope with the then-evolving pandemic. Looking through the analytical lens of face masks, we aim to highlight people’s emic understandings of care as materialized in self-sewn masks. Besides showing the processual character of those care responses, we also aim to work out distinct differences between the migrant generation and post-migration actors regarding their motivations for organizing their respective campaigns. While our interlocutors from the latter group were much more vocal about anti-Asian racism and thus focused on community care projects, the Vietnamese migrants we talked to framed their care response in terms of a narrative of giving back to their second home country at a time of need. In addition, we will show how these care responses were differently shaped by media discourses from Vietnam and/or the global Vietnamese diaspora

The new Vietnamese Immigration. Perspectives from Berlin-Lichtenberg

Das vietnamesische Berlin war lange Zeit hauptsächlich durch zwei Zuwanderungsgruppen gekennzeichnet: die vornehmlich aus Südvietnam geflüchteten sogenannten „Boatpeople“, die Ende der 1970er von der BRD im Rahmen von Kontingentvereinbarungen aufgenommen wurden und die einstigen Vertragsarbeiter*innen, die in den 1980er Jahren in die DDR kamen und nach der Wiedervereinigung zu einem großen Teil in Deutschland blieben. Seitdem wird die Zuwanderung aus Vietnam heterogener, seit Beginn der 2010er Jahre hat sie sich deutlich verstärkt. Diese ‚neue Migration‘, über die bisher kaum etwas bekannt ist, steht im Mittelpunkt der vorliegenden sozialanthropologischen Studie. Mittels eines qualitativen und anwendungsbezogenen ethnografischen ‚multi-sited‘ Ansatzes wurden die dieser Zuwanderung zugrundliegenden Push und Pull-Faktoren und die zentralen Migrationsstrategien untersucht. Daneben wurden die empirisch evidenten Probleme und Belastungen aus der Sicht von Migrant*innen sowie von Fachkräften aus u.a. der Sozialen Arbeit und der Verwaltung analysiert, um ein umfassendes Bild über die Lebenssituation nach Ankunft in Berlin zu erhalten. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt auf den spezifischen Herausforderungen, denen sich (werdende) Mütter und ihre Kinder sowie Auszubildende gegenübersehen

Dissonant Heritage: Concepts, Critiques, Cases

This volume is the outcome of the Una Europa PhD Workshop “Dissonant Heritage: Concepts, Critiques, Cases,” which took place simultaneously at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna and at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in November 2021. The book explores dissonant heritage in relation to three primary cross-cutting themes: (1) unveiling the dissonance of scientific museums and collections, (2) designing the social sustainability of dissonant heritage, and (3) examining the role of art in addressing dissonance. As evidenced by the essays gathered in this book, eradicating dissonance from our pasts and presents can prove to be an insurmountable task. We can remove statues, abandon buildings, forget paintings, but the painful past will endure. Consequently, dissonant heritage necessitates interpretation that acknowledges the negative emotions experienced by those who lived the dissonance. At the same time, we must remember that narratives of dissonant heritage can be politically manipulated and may fuel revisionist, negationist tendencies. In order to mitigate these risks, interpretation must both expose the propaganda hidden within certain forms of dissonant heritage and uncover the ways in which art can be (ab)used in order to create illusory consensus or even to bolster anti-democratic, supremacist ideologies. In essence, dissonant heritage offers an invaluable opportunity for modern societies to reflect on their values and on their strategies to promote and defend them in a changing and globalized world