The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation: Young People's Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics by Stuart C. Aitkin

Abstract

Book Reviews 169 an in-depth, honest, and reflexive discussion that strives to push through current clichés and capture a more authentic view on the Australian country girl. Review by Angela Kreutz Angela Kreutz received her postgraduate degree in Architecture from the Aboriginal Environments Research Center at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is currently a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) postdoctoral fellow at the Community, Design, Research (CEDaR) Resource Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her research focuses on Australian Indigenous childhood experiences, child-friendly environments, and architectural anthropology. The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation: Young People’s Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics Stuart C. Aitkin (2014). Surrey, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 218 pages. $109.95 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1-4094-2251-8. The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation: Young People’s Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics creatively weaves together post-structural and feminist theories as a way to counter dominant notions of young people’s participation and, more importantly, instill hope that substantive change can occur through activism and everyday actions. Starting with the notion that spaces are events and events inspire change, Aitken takes us on a journey through a series of his previous research sites and participants set in close and far spaces, including the body, borders, homes, and institutions, as well as his own epistemology on top of a “raft” of theorists including: de Certeau, Deleuze, Massey, Agamben, Ranciere, Zizek and Grosz (and others!). What is unique about this work is the extent to which the author is able to make complex theories accessible through the effective use of data from different sites in each chapter. His use of ethnopoetics as a method and way of representing participants’ affect is particularly compelling. In chapter 1 Aitken reflects on his own desires and purpose as a researcher through a mapping project with young people and their families in a homeless shelter in San Diego. Contemplating issues of representing young people through research without othering them, he moves to thinking through how young people become the same through institutional structures and how the disinvestment in social support has shaped his young participants’ life conditions and living quarters. Becoming other, on the other hand, requires dislocation (Laclau) and surprise (de Certeau) and represents a politics of hope. Chapter 2 describes ethnopoetics, a method Aitken uses to get away from rigid social science measures, which he likens to governmental structures that control and systematize life. Ethnopoetics, he argues, cuts through this, allowing for Book Reviews 170 freedom, dislocation, and surprise. Aitken creates poetry from interviews as a way to distill participants’ voices while transmitting their affect and displays these poems along with maps and photographs, assembling collages of participants’ words, emotions, and spatial contexts. Chapter 3 looks at how individuals with cerebral palsy navigate the close space of the body, the health care system, and their neighborhoods. Aitken uses Grosz’s freedom to rather than freedom from and Deleuze’s desire as a positive force, as a means of understanding how people with disabilities navigate the healthcare system. He identifies that moving away from a capital-o-centric model, which identifies capitalism as the problematic big Other (Gibson-Graham 2006), allows for envisioning a new paradigm for health care that is centered on care. Chapter 4 moves to Fanjinghan National Nature Reserve (FNNR), an area in rural China where the government is building roads and tourist attractions and displacing families from their homes. Drawing on Grosz’s conceptualization of geo-power and Escobar’s figured worlds, Aitken explores the context of displacement in FNNR through working with displaced families to create what he calls deep ethical maps that use GIS to identify routes commonly taken to schools and places of work. These identify not only routes to places, but also their significance to individuals and families in a re-configured world. Unearthing complex relationships between change from the top down, people, place, and opportunity, Aitken does not find radical ethical acts, but identifies some people’s satisfaction in the opportunities afforded by the new roads and tourism in the area, supporting Deleuze’s assertion that desire arises from within one’s context. In Chapter 5...