Everyday Engagements Research Articles

State Categories and Their Afterlives: The Politics of “Tribalisation” in Eastern India

This article examines the afterlives of state classificatory categories in everyday engagements between state and society. It examines how a community of cultivators in eastern and central India, the Kudmi-Mahatos, have reshaped their group identity through categories of the state. They have oscillated between not wanting to be labelled as “tribal” by the colonial state to seeking to be recognised as “Scheduled Tribes” by the post-colonial state. Using ethnographic and historical methods, this article investigates the shifting claims of the Kudmi-Mahatos with respect to “tribal” status. It argues: (i) that communities use state categories of classification to remake their identities vis-à-vis both the state and other communities they live with; and (ii) tribalisation as a strategy of claiming recognition reworks the tribe-caste continuum in India. The article builds on historical and anthropological scholarship that looks at political contestations over classification in modern states.

The materiality of lived citizenship: mobilising against infrastructural neglect in Egypt’s Nile Delta

ABSTRACT In September 2012, the village of al-Tahseen in the Nile Delta governorate of al-Daqahliyyah launched a civil disobedience movement, announcing ‘administrative independence’ from the local municipal government. The leaders of the village movement cited decades of state neglect in providing basic infrastructural services, primarily a three-kilometre road from the village to the closest regional road. Community members held the government accountable for the harmful consequences of the absence of a viable road, including numerous accidents and deaths. This demand for infrastructure is at the heart of this article. Through a lived citizenship framework, this article argues that people’s everyday interactions and engagements with the state, as well as their understanding of their place as citizens in return, emerge from their engagements, constructions, and demands for infrastructure provision. The article equally sheds light on a case study of rural mobilisation, when most scholarly productions of Egypt’s 25 January 2011 Revolution and its reverberations have focused on urban-based mobilisation experiences.

Água negra (black water) and overwhelming details: For more-than-nexus approaches to global water–energy–food challenges

This paper advances multidisciplinary research, policy, education and activisms which cohere around the concept of the ‘water–energy–food (W–E–F) nexus’ via an evidence-led critique of normative forms of nexus-thinking which draws upon research with 3705 diverse young people's (aged 10–24 years) W–E–F experiences in SE Brazil. We consider how the neat, cool, ostensibly authoritative buzzword style of W–E–F nexus-thinking is radically unsettled – and sometimes conceptually-critically overwhelmed – via encounters with social scientific data in practice. In particular, the paper presents two interlinked analyses of data relating to young people's everyday engagements with water resources. First, we present a quantitative analysis of young people's everyday participation with/in water resources, highlighting diversities and inequities in relation to age, gender, ethnicity and social class, among other modes of social–cultural heterogeneity and intersectionality. Second, we present a qualitative narration of young people's water-related anxieties, evidencing their intimate everyday interrelations with watery materialities and insecurities – ‘black water’, ‘muddy water’, ‘shit water’ and all. In so doing, we advance an argument for what we term more-than-nexus-thinking: i.e., forms of research, theory and practice which value the apparent conceptual-ethical clarity and interoperability of nexus-thinking, whilst actively thinking-with complexities and deeply-affecting lived experiences of W–E–F in everyday spaces.

Addressing the Black Box of AI-A Model and Research Agenda on the Co-constitution of Aging and Artificial Intelligence.

Algorithmic technologies and (large) data infrastructures, often referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI), have received increasing attention from gerontological research in the last decade. Although there is much literature that dissects and explores the development, application, and evaluation of AI relevant to gerontology, this study makes a novel contribution by critically engaging with the theorizing in this growing field of research. We observe that gerontology's engagement with AI is shaped by an interventionist logic that situates AI as a black box for gerontological research. We demonstrate how this black box logic has neglected many aspects of AI as a research topic for gerontology and discuss three classical concepts in gerontology to show how they can be used to open various black boxes of aging and AI in the areas: (a) the datafication of aging, (b) the political economy of AI and aging, and (c) everyday engagements and embodiments of AI in later life. In the final chapter, we propose a model of the co-constitution of aging and AI that makes theoretical propositions to study the relational terrain between aging and AI and hence aims to open the black box of AI in gerontology beyond interventionist logic.

Re-learning culture in cities beyond the West

Urban scholars have long engaged with the role of culture in cities. Tracing this debate, this article outlines the evolutions of culture as an object of study in inquiries on the urban and wishes to trouble two persisting trends in this literature. The first is a geographical and theoretical Eurocentric vision of culture, often framing cities beyond the West as exceptions or needing validation through a comparison with a Western case or theoretical model; the second is an economistic vision of culture under neoliberalism, neglecting the political and ideological dimensions of culture. As a step in overcoming these limitations, this article builds around the notion of ‘re-learning’, to re-insert memory, informality and conflicting heritage into the debate on culture in cities. Drawing on an ethnography of the street ‘Avenida 26’ in Bogotá, Colombia, the article shows that informal cultural practices in the middle of segregation and urban violence can hardly be grasped through the current framing of culture in cities. Yet, they invite an opening up of such a framing to include different ways to cohabit and navigate space through everyday minor engagements. These multifaceted cultural realities urge us to ‘re-learn’ culture in cities anywhere and advance theorisation on culture that takes non-Western urban spaces seriously.

Affective Landscapes, Scenes, and Arrangements

This article discusses the affective dynamics of two interwoven spheres of musical life: on the one hand, the sphere of local musical engagements, often connected to the notion of scene; on the other, the sphere of digital music promotion and distribution via social media and streaming platforms. The almost omnipresent importance of the latter raises questions about motivational investments in local music-making in digital times. The discussion takes off from three conceptions of affect in the context of digital media and music: first, the idea of ‘affective landscapes’ (Bucher 2018), which designates the experience of media environments as a locus of micropolitical contestation; second, the concept of ‘affective scenes’ (Bennett 2013), which identifies shared feelings and knowledge, and the intensity of being part of something that is alive, as integral to scene participation; third, the notion of ‘affective arrangements’ (Slaby 2019), which concerns the affordance of specific affects by constellations of, for example, commercial and techno-scientific terms. Although affective scenes may be considered a type of affective arrangement, the latter seems especially relevant to contemplating the impact of platform logics on everyday musical engagements. This is done from the perspective of a small group of Brisbane-based record labels. Specifically, it is claimed, intensive dynamics in local involvement are to some extent pressured by digital opportunities and obligations. This amounts to a striating of the affective scene and an adverse affective landscape surrounding the experience of digital platforms, a landscape marked by micropolitical tensions in addition to socio-technological circumstances.

Teaching Dalit Bahujan Utopias: Notes from the Classroom

The production of knowledge in India operates within a rarefied domain enclosed within the structures of caste, class, ethnicity and gender. This has enabled the unabashed peddling of one-dimensional epistemology of glorifying the past, justifying the prevalent social hierarchies and manufacturing consent for the existing social order. Periodically, the status quo was interrogated and the resultant debates are secreted within the pages of history. Rarely if ever, these contestations become a part of the pedagogy thereby igniting a quest for a more emancipatory social apparatus. This is not surprising as the reproduction of the symbolic power needs to be closely guarded. The ancient world considered land as the paramount resource and wars were waged to capture more territories. For the industrialized societies, capital was the source of sustenance but in the modern era, privilege and power based on knowledge is the magic mantra, the currency of socio-economic relations. This article revolves around the attempts made by the researcher to introduce a full-fledged course on Dalit Bahujan Political Thought1 at the Masters level in Delhi University. This intervention was opposed by the entrenched academia hailing from the privileged castes who wished to perpetuate their Brahmanicalweltanschaung. The texts/readings prescribed for the course were sought to be banned by the higher authorities. The pantheon of thinkers who advocated an Indian version of liberation theology was never engaged with at an ideological level. The everyday engagements with the students who joined the course and their interactions in the classrooms provide a multi-layered understanding of negotiating utopias. This article is based on discussions with various stakeholders—academic committees who decide on pedagogy, feedback from students and classroom engagements for more than five years.

Reflections on Bordering, Micropolitics and Everyday Life in Peacebuilding Processes: Revisiting the Lingering Legacy of the 1949 Armistice Agreements

This article analyzes the United Nations mediated 1949 Armistice Agreements that initially drew the borders of the state of Israel and continue to be at the center of contentions concerning those boundaries. We highlight the potential of a micropolitics of peace that engages with the material effects of conflict and bordering in everyday life. We argue that while such interventions alone may not be sufficient to address the complex dimensions of an ongoing conflict comprehensively, they are a tool for challenging the manifestations of state power continuously reinforcing identities sustaining discord, especially around borders, and a necessary step for building peace. We review the diplomatic process that led to the 1949 Agreements to acknowledge their abiding significance as well as their limits. We employ the contributions of the local turn in peacebuilding scholarship and the borderlands and borderscapes literature to explore how strategies of peace-making may occur through everyday engagements. We focus particularly on how autoethnography has explored such encounters along conflict borders in East Jerusalem. We conclude by highlighting emerging quantum social science scholarship and Massumi’s affect theory to underscore the abiding political relevance of micro-practices of emotional recognition and narrative shifting for building peace (Barad 2007; brown 2017; Massumi 2002; Zanotti 2018).

Adaptive governance as bricolage

Abstract. Adaptive governance is proposed as an analytical framework for understanding water distributions in the Anthropocene and for fostering transformative interventions. In this contribution, we demonstrate the usefulness of bricolage thinking for a more grounded and power-sensitive analysis of adaptive water governance. More specifically, we employ the notions of institutional bricolage and extend them to socio-technical tinkering to argue for an understanding of adaptive governance as an experimental practice. To develop our arguments, we draw from research on municipal water supply governance in Accra, Ghana, and in Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany – two regions where the modern ideal of a centrally managed large-scale infrastructure is in growing tension with more modest imaginaries. We demonstrate how residents and water providers adapt to local historical–geographical contexts and unexpected disruptions by using novel and existing multi-purpose institutional and infrastructural arrangements across multiple scales. Through the notion of water bricolage, we show how modest imaginaries and realities of municipal water supply infrastructure and governance emerge. In concluding, we suggest everyday engagements with rules, people and materials as a lens to further understand adaptive governance and identify spaces for transformative interventions.

Caring for Blue-Green Solutions (BGS) in Everyday Life: An Investigation of Recreational Use, Neighborhood Preferences and Willingness to Pay in Augustenborg, Malmö

In this article, we explore the production of socio-cultural values around blue-green solutions (BGS) through the perspective of care. We explore how values and preferences are formed through the complexity of everyday life engagements in a BGS environment. The data come from a questionnaire answered by 328 households in the neighborhood of Augustenborg in Malmö, Sweden. The questionnaire collects detailed information about inhabitants’ possible recreational use (through Likert scale questions) and willingness to pay (WTP) (estimated through contingent valuation). The study evaluates if and how people care to use, care to live with, and care to pay for BGS. The result shows that people in Augustenborg relate in different and sometimes contradictory ways to BGS. A well-used BGS environment does not per se make the environment successful or result in people preferring a BGS environment in the future. In addition, recreational use and building awareness about BGS flood mitigation seem to increase the willingness to pay, whereas living longer in the area seems to decrease it. The study reveals a landscape of care that is constantly being formed and transformed. This suggests that both planning and research needs to focus more on the relation between BGS and social use over time.

On Canaries, Icebergs and the public sphere: The pragmatic compromise of religious pluralism

The return of religion in western society has resulted in the expression of what is often termed post-secular socio-politics, closely linked to increasingly pluralistic societies that result from globalization. While the public sphere has, in the West, tended to follow a ‘WASP’- derived model of post-Westphalian secular public sphere and the privatization of religion, this model is increasingly under critique and complaint. How might pluralism and the expression of religion be re-thought and re-encountered? This paper, engaging with the work of Ulrich Beck (2004) on “realistic cosmopolitanism” argues for a more localised, urbanised approach and understanding. The public sphere is actually a series of everyday pragmatic engagements and experiences that require a more nuanced evaluation. Critiquing the utopian agendas of much cosmopolitan theory, this paper asks two questions: Firstly, what can the return of religion tell us about late modern society? Secondly, what changes may be necessary to re-engage (with) pluralistic public spheres – and societies? Arising in response to the increasing discussion and debate as how societies can seek to engage with growing religious pluralism, using the central metaphors of ‘the iceberg’ and ‘the canary’ as hermeneutic tools, undertaken within a wider Taubesean hermeneutical reading, it argues for a rethought, pragmatic cosmopolitics that is intermestic; that is, both international and domestic in focus and response.

‘I partied my way to [my] Hungary’: The agency-driven engagements of Hungarian-Australians to shape feelings of place and belonging outside their diaspora tourism programme

ABSTRACT The Balassi Institute is Hungary’s cultural diplomacy organisation. The Institute’s 10-month ‘Balassi program’ invites Hungarians from the diaspora to participate in a culturally immersive and educational experience in Hungary. This paper draws on interviews with 17 Hungarian-Australians who attended the programme between 2001 and 2018. Bourdieu’s Habitus, capital and ‘field of possibles’ are used to analyse their experiences of belonging during their time in Hungary, particularly everyday engagements where they partied, danced, and formed friendships in nightclubs, folk bars, and community groups. The paper highlights that while the Balassi programme’s curriculum aims to habituate national consciousness, the defining elements of belonging were agency-driven. By manoeuvring their capital and prioritising everyday social engagements, participants constructed ‘relationships with the nation’, while maintaining a minimum commitment to the programme. Thus, when exploring the aims of State-led diaspora tourism programmes, participant choices outside these programmes must be considered a prominent force in shaping belonging.

From Play to Language: Infants’ Actions on Objects Cascade to Word Learning

AbstractInfants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants’ active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home‐based study extends laboratory‐based theories to identify real‐world processes that support infant word learning. Frame‐by‐frame coding of 2‐hr video recordings of 32 mothers and their 18‐ to 23‐month‐old infants focused on infant manipulation and mother and infant naming of 245 unique objects. Objects manipulated by infants and/or named by mothers were more likely to appear in infants’ vocabularies and spontaneous speech relative to nonmanipulated objects and objects that mothers did not name. Furthermore, the vocabularies of 5,520 infants hosted on Wordbank revealed an early age of acquisition of words for objects that mothers named and infants manipulated. Infants actively build object–word mappings from everyday engagements with objects in the context of social interactions.

“Pivoting Between the Past/Present and Towards the Future/perfect of Autoethnography”

Following the guide of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group preconference at the 2021 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), this short think piece was placed on the closing panel. The charge was to “speculate on autoethnographic futures.” This contribution uses the notion of national and international pivoting due to the Covid pandemic in practical everyday engagements to theorize on the notion of “the new normal,” not only reduced to conditions of pandemic but political and civic unrest linked with a range of identities to push commitments to social justice. The piece engages a provocation of autoethnographic futurity that is not just about standing in the present reflecting on the past, but a call for civic action for future (queer) worldmaking.

‘A country can only have a foreign policy it can afford’: South Africa’s Economic Reaction to Zimbabwe’s Independence, 1980–1982

The largely cordial relationship between Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, established in the 1890s, instantly turned hostile at Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. This reconfiguration, marked by Harare’s termination of diplomatic contact with Pretoria, was due to divergent ideologies between apartheid South Africa and the black majoritarian Zimbabwean government. Shying away from the orthodox approach that emphasises the security and military dimension of the breakdown of relations, the article utilises the lens of diplomacy and everyday interstate engagements to explore Zimbabwe’s anti-apartheid posture and its campaign against South Africa’s occupation of Namibia. It considers how South Africa attempted to exploit Zimbabwe’s overwhelming economic reliance on its trade and transportation networks and infrastructure to assert its power and force its northern neighbour to abandon its hostile stance. Relying largely on recently available archival material, I argue that Zimbabwe terminated political contact in order to force South Africa to change its domestic and regional politics while Pretoria adopted trade and transportation diplomacy as a stick with which to beat its obstinate neighbour.

Feminised concern or feminist care? Reclaiming gender normativities in zero waste living

Growing awareness of environmental issues and their relation to consumption patterns has given rise to calls for sustainable consumption across the globe. In this article, we focus on the zero waste lifestyle movement, which targets high-consumption households in the Global North as a site of change for phasing out waste in global supply chains. Our article is concerned with asking how gender and household sustainability are mutually constituted in the zero waste lifestyle movement. We establish an analytical tension between understanding zero waste living as a further intensification of feminised responsibility for people and the planet and as offering potential for transformational change – as feminised concern or feminist care. Through qualitative content analysis of the 10 most influential zero waste blogs globally, we show how the five zero waste rules of conduct – refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot – guide consumers towards everyday and situated engagements with waste. Organised by three cross-cutting themes – communing with nature, organising time, and spending money – we present the normativities these rules call into being for reconfiguring domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. In the discussion, we draw out the implications of zero waste living’s emerging, contradictory gender normativities, while recalling the political economy in which it is situated, namely a neoliberal, postfeminist landscape. We identify a continued feminisation of domestic responsibilities that is uncontested in zero waste living but also explore the progressive potential of waste-free living to bring collective, naturecultural worlds into being as part of domestic environmental labour.

Towards energy care ethics: Exploring ethical implications of relationality within energy systems in transition

Social science energy research is asking important questions about the social, political, and economic implications of energy transitions, and the consequent changing roles and relationships in the energy system. This has given rise to ethically driven research agendas, with an increasing focus on the need to better understand how people relate in their daily lives, both to mundane dilemmas around energy use, and to bigger questions around energy systems and energy system change.Based on insights from empirical Q-methodological research in Denmark and the UK, this article illustrates relational understandings of energy systems and a language of dependence, necessity and needs as important elements in how people make sense of the energy transition and their place in it. This challenges dominant frameworks and discourses of energy and energy transitions rooted in individualism and a language of individual responsibility, rational choice and/or individual rights and justice. In this article, we argue that a recognition of relationality and (inter)dependence as basic conditions of existence, and as basis for ethical reasoning in everyday engagements with energy in transition, is key to reflecting ways of relating to energy ethicalities in the everyday. This speaks strongly to recent advances of relational theories of energy systems and transitions, but calls for a recognition not only of inter-connections and relations, but of their ethical significance. To this end, we engage a feminist theory of care and care ethics in a proposition to ‘think energy with care’.

Doing digital exclusion – technology practices of older internet non-users

Gerontological literature has widely explored barriers to technology use in later life, often drawing upon binary conceptualizations of “using” and “not using” a certain technological device. However, such concepts have been increasingly up for debate. Using a praxeological approach, this study aims to explore technology use and non-use in later life not as dichotomous counterparts, but as routine experiences that take place in the everyday lives of older adults, asking: Which technology practices that go beyond using and not using a certain device can be found in the everyday lives of older non-users? How are these practices related to experiences of age and aging?The paper draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with older adults (65+) in Austria, who self-identify as ‘non-users’ of digital technologies. Data was analyzed using thematic coding (Flick, 2016) and revealed that while interviewees saw themselves as “non-users” of digital technologies, they all regularly engaged with digital technologies in their daily lives. These manifold everyday engagements with digital technologies can be summarized as four bundles of technology practices: (1) avoidance practices, (2) usage practices, (3) appropriation practices, and (4) subjectivation practices. Non-users regularly engaged in and transitioned between these practice bundles. Not using digital technologies therefore emerged as an ambivalent, everyday experience, rather than an actual practice pattern that can be measured using binary categories of ‘use’ and ‘non-use’.By understanding the use and non-use of digital technologies in later life not as binary counterparts, but as an active process of doing, this paper highlights how the use and non-use of digital technologies is not a rational decision, but rather an ensemble of avoidance, usage, and appropriation practices that older adults experience and negotiate in their everyday lives. This paper therefore suggests moving away from technology use and non-use as central concepts for studying technology in later life, and instead questioning which practices are valued as a ‘right’ or ‘real’ way of using digital technologies, and which are devalued as ‘wrong’ usage.

The Social Life of the State: Relational Ethnography and Political Sociology

Political sociologists have typically studied the state as a self-enclosed institution hovering above civil society. In this formulation, the state is rendered as omniscient, gazing out over a passive civil society as if it were a naturalized landscape. But in this special issue, we think about how states “see” in relation to whom and what is seen, and how these subjects and collective actors become visible in the first place. We advocate a relational political ethnography that views the state and civil society as inextricably intertwined and mutually co-constitutive. People’s experiences with the state shape their visions of that state, which in turn inform their strategic decisions and everyday engagements. And these decisions and engagements affect how the state views them. To put it differently, in this special issue, we explore the dialectical relationship between how the state “sees” and how it is “seen.” They are inseparable processes. As we argue here, the very unity and coherence of the state apparatus turns not just upon its self-representation but equally upon how people make sense of these representations. How people understand this apparent state in the context of their everyday lives is a crucial source of its power and authority; it explains the reproduction of the state as a social institution. We conclude by introducing the seven empirical contributions to this issue, all of which practice relational political ethnography.

An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures

This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all things. The object biography of mobile phones, including MicroSD cards, typically short, fits into a broader historical pattern of everyday engagements with materializations of transience in the Lau Lagoon. Three types of visual media are exemplary in this regard: sand, ancestral material cultures and digital visual media (photographs and videos). Ultimately, Lau experiences of transience in their visual media are located in their visual technological history and the choices they make about which materials to maintain or dispose of.