Abstract
This article engages with the notion of ‘break-down’ as a way of going beyond claims to recover the discarded or practice repair. It experiments with ethnographic cross-pollination, setting vignettes from seemingly disparate field-sites alongside one another, to meditate on singular unfinished moments that together reflect wider dynamics of invisibility, negation, stigma and suspension at the urban interstices. From the peripheral neighbourhoods of Zaria, Nairobi, Paris, Berlin and London, these vignettes evoke shifting relationships to labour in precarious urban environments, where fleeting but situated codes, logics and deals have emerged out of seemingly broken urban worlds. Engaging with Stephen Jackson's notion of ‘broken world thinking’ and Donna Haraway's invitation to ‘stay with the trouble’, this article argues for staying with the breakdown.
Highlights
It’s not OKThis article is situated within a moment of profound reckoning – when reflecting on allyship and vulnerability cuts across personal relationships, teaching practice, research methods and modes of writing up ‘the field’ (Behar, 1996; Nagar, 2019)
It takes up the invitation to engage in a kind of ‘re-description in order to understand what might be going on while keeping an eye on clarifying resonant propositions’ (Simone and Pieterse, 2017: xiii), presenting a set of fragment-like vignettes of different material and human labour set in broken urban worlds
As a kaleidoscopic ethnographic arrangement, these multi-situated vignettes have each played with different registers of the imagination – threatening the end of imagination, pushing to stretch the imagination, and exposing the impossibility of imagining a whole
Summary
It’s not OKThis article is situated within a moment of profound reckoning – when reflecting on allyship and vulnerability cuts across personal relationships, teaching practice, research methods and modes of writing up ‘the field’ (Behar, 1996; Nagar, 2019). The empirical vignettes that follow focus on short ethnographic stories of fragmented predicaments in different field-sites, which each reflect wider (and in some ways shared) forms of breakdown.
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