Abstract Book

CONTENTS Session 1. Submerged conflicts. Ethnography of the invisible resistances in the quotidian p. 3 Session 2. Ethnography of predatory and mafia practices 14 Session 3. Young people practicing everyday multiculturalism. An ethnographic look 16 Session 4. Innovating universities. Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same? 23 Session 5. NGOs, grass-root activism and social movements. Understanding novel entanglements of public engagements 31 Session 6. Immanence of seduction. For a microinteractionist perspective on charisma 35 Session 7. Lived religion. An ethnographical insight 39 Session 8. Critical ethnographies of schooling 44 Session 9. Subjectivity, surveillance and control. Ethnographic research on forced migration towards Europe 53 Session 10. Ethnographic and artistic practices and the question of the images in contemporary Middle East 59 Session 11. Diffracting ethnography in the anthropocene 62 Session 12. Ethnography of labour chains 64 Session 13. The Chicago School and the study of conflicts in contemporary societies 72 Session 14. States of imagination/Imagined states. Performing the political within and beyond the state 75 Session 15. Ethnographies of waste politics 82 Session 16. Experiencing urban boundaries 87 Session 17. Ethnographic fieldwork as a “location of politics” 98 Session 18. Rethinking ‘Europe’ through an ethnography of its borderlands, periphe- ries and margins 104 Session 19. Detention and qualitative research 111 Session 20. Ethnographies of social sciences as a vocation 119 Session 21. Adjunct Session. Gender and culture in productive and reproductive life 123 Poster session 129 Abstracts 1 SESSION 1 Submerged conflicts. Ethnography of the invisible resistances in the quotidian convenor: Pietro Saitta, Università di Messina, [email protected] Arts of resistance. The every-day life of street art and the norms in urban control Fabio Bertoni, Università di Padova, [email protected] By illustrating some preliminary results of a research underway, which is developing through ethnographical observation and visual research methods, this paper aims to describe the street artists’ performances within the city of Padua, examining their exhibition strategies and reading them as a repertory of daily resistance in the urban background. The city is a multiple, splintered space and a social process which takes shape in a plurality (Amin and Thrift, 2002). In this multiplicity the citizens’ life goes beyond institutionalized forms of control and it shows a continuous experimentation in forms of expression and sociality. This “porosity” (Stavrides, 2010) of times and places allows to consider the urban dimension as a place in which resistances are built up. From this viewpoint, the unconventional artistic activities carried out by jugglers, buskers, mimes and street musicians, allow us to analyze the forms of material and symbolic demand, showing how everyday life creates ways of re- appropriation of the space. With their shows, the street artists catch gaze, show off their identities (Frers and Meier, 2007) and contest other people’s image of the place they live in, and also of their presence in it. In this way, the artists renew the public dimension of the city: their exhibitions permit to highlight the public area as a space open to contrasts and accessible through activities that turn out to be asymmetrical forms of resistance (Saitta, 2015). Padua shows itself as a crucial case-study and a profitable field for the sociological investigation: the “academic city” dimension makes Padua appealing for a large amount of students who request the access and the use of the public space, and promote desires and motions of diversion, entertainment and spontaneity. On the other hand, a management of the territory grounded in the rhetoric of security is supported, aiming to pathologize those behaviors which do not comply with the definition of decency (Pitch, 2013) – the driving force of the governance activity. Among the various by-laws directed to the limitation of unwanted forms of use and appropriation of the public space, also the street artists’ activities have been subjected to restrictions: their opportunities to perform have decreased, due to the imposition of limits both in terms of space, with a reduction of allowed areas, or of time, with a reduction of time slots. Faced with this institutional and juridical ruling, the buskers have manifested different reactions. We will introduce an interpretation of these artists in terms of opposing activities, forms of smuggle and of unspoken and personal subversion (Scott, 1990). In particular, the subject matter of this article will focus on the following aspects: after an overview on the administration deeds and on the forms of control and repression put in place by security forces and county police, we will consider different ways of contrast. Some of these have evolved as arranged mobilization, as actions of explicit claim of the freedom of expression and of the right to the city. Other forms of opposition are minute and hidden. We will put serious attention exactly on these latter actions, describing common and widespread practices, individually achieved in everyday situations that, as an “art of the weak” (De Certeau, 1980), move between the matrix of control. Within this framework, the mere presence of the artists on the streets becomes a violation of the rules, and, at the same time, it represents a way of resistance which takes shape in the reinterpretation of the city as a stage. Through their exhibitions, the buskers take back areas which have been denied to them, producing both an accident and unwanted relation with the material aspects of the space. They suspend the imposed representation of that space, portraying it aesthetically and emotionally. The presence and the uses of the bodies, the imprinted signs and the identity feature that spot them as street artists, allow to show how disruptive the corporeal expression is (Bizzaglia, 2014). The artists’ bodies have the ability to explore the power’s limitations in its visible and invisible configuration (Derrida and Roudinesco, 2001). Thanks to the sensations that the bodies gives both to the actors and to the audience, being publicly visible implicates not only the taking back of the space through the corporal practice, but the chance to create daily opposing resistances towards the definition of what can be seen, experienced and felt (Manzo, 2015). References: Amin A., Thrift N. (2002), Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Oxford, Polity Press. / Bizzaglia G. (2014), La città che cammina. Per una sociologia del corpo metropolitano, Milano, Franco Angeli. / De Certeau M. (1980), L’invenzione del quotidiano: l’arte del fare, Roma, Edizioni Lavoro (tr. it. 2001). / Derrida J., Roudinesco E. (2001), Quale domani?, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri (tr. it. 2004). / Frers L., Meier L. (2007), Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City, Farnham, Ashgate. / Manzo L.K.C. (2015), Culture and Visual forms of Power, Experienc- ing Contemporary Spaces of Resistance, Champaign, Common Ground Publishing. / Pitch X. (2013), Contro il decoro. L’uso pubblico della pubblica decenza, Bari-Roma, Editori Laterza. / Saitta P. (2015), Resistenze. Pratiche ai margini del conflitto nel quotidiano, Verona, Ombre Corte. / Scott J.C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, Yale University Press. / Stavrides S. (2010), Redefining the right to the city: Representations of Public Space as Part of the Urban Struggle, in Sonda G., Coletta C., Gabbi F. (eds.), Urban Plots, Organizing Cities, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010. The forest policies of the excluded. Agricultural encroachments and illegal felling in Sefwi forest reserves (Ghana) Stefano Boni, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, [email protected] Colonial and post-colonial forest legislation and policies in Ghana have systematically excluded forest-fringe communities: legislation has vested timber property in the State and chiefs; these have rented out concessions to large Abstracts 3 private enterprises. Creation of forest reserves in the Sefwi area, where the ethnographic research was carried out, continued from the 1920s to 1970s and covered almost half of the total district’s surface. Reserves were constituted to protect timber for export: the industry produced a major source of tribute for the State and profits for entrepreneurs but provided very little benefits to forest-fringe communities. Local residents were impeded access to reserved areas which often fell in the immediate vicinity of settlements. Relations between farming communities which had their agricultural expansion hampered, on the one hand, and the State and timber firms, on the other, have been tense. From the 1990s the submerged conflicts began to surface when local residents challenged the State’s monopoly of forest resources. I focus on two dynamics. First, agricultural encroachments in protected areas. Since the demarcation of forest reserves, farmers have entered reserves, cut down timber and started planting cocoa; however encroachments intensified in the last three decades. In the 1980s hundreds of hectares were farmed yearly in reserves; villages were constituted within protected areas. In the second half of the 1990s soldiers burnt down settlements, cut down thousands of cocoa trees and planted timber seedlings, which were killed by farmers. In 1996 “rapid response units” were created to monitor encroachments which however continued

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