Embodied, Affective Feminist Methodologies
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Roskilde University Making Senses of Nordvest Tracing the spaces, bodies and affects of a gentrifying neighborhood in Copenhagen Lapina, Linda Publication date: 2017 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (APA): Lapina, L. (2017). Making Senses of Nordvest: Tracing the spaces, bodies and affects of a gentrifying neighborhood in Copenhagen. Roskilde Universitet. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain. • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 10. Oct. 2021 Making Senses of Nordvest Tracing the spaces, bodies and affects of a gentrifying neighborhood in Copenhagen Linda Lapiņa Roskilde University, PhD thesis On the cover: The last “dormant” construction site in Nordvest (Glasvej) “FYR DIG SÆL”: “FIRE YOURSELF” Above: January 16, 2017 Below: February 1, 2017 Photos by Linda Lapiņa Making Senses of Nordvest Tracing the spaces, bodies and affects of a gentrifying neighborhood in Copenhagen Linda Lapiņa PhD Thesis Cultural Encounters Department for Communication and Arts Roskilde University, Denmark March 2017 Supervisors: Garbi Schmidt and Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen Supervisor at Department for Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia, Canada, fall 2016: John Paul Catungal 1 “All of us shaped by all of us and then other things as well.” (Spahr, 2005, p. 31) Rainbow over a construction site and a blank billboard on Tranevej, Nordvest, September 2015 2 Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to all the informants who shared their time, knowledge and presence with me, as well as all the spaces of Nordvest that enveloped and sometimes ejected me. I thank my supervisors, Garbi (Schmidt) and Kirsten (Hvenegård-Lassen) for holding and opening spaces with me in these past three years. You helped me contain what needed to be contained and, on other occasions, encouraged me to proceed towards not-quite-known destinations. Your confidence that things were possible was part of what made them possible. Thank you so much, Rikke (Juel Madsen), for reading all of my thesis and helping it become a body in the world! You were always an inspiring, giving presence, and your thoughtful reflections and enthusiasm made such a difference in the final weeks of writing! It all became lighter, more inspired, and less lonely. Karen (Søilen)! Thank you for your sharp and generous eyes that so thoroughly engaged with Chapter 1 of this text. And thank you for the wine and so many other things. Paldies, mīļā ģimene! Es zinu, ka jūs ar mani lepojaties. Es jūs ļoti mīlu un esmu jums ļoti pateicīga. Es arī ļoti lepojos ar jums, katru dienu. Un paldies, Līvu, par Tavu draudzību un atbalstu šeit, Kopenhāgenā! Thank you, dear friends, who have supported me and continue to do so. You know who you are, all of you. Thank you, JP (Catungal), for being my host at the University of British Columbia, for your generosity and inspiration, and for treating me to the best fried cauliflower I have ever had! Thanks to everyone at the Department for Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice and the members of the feminist geographies reading group. I am grateful and indebted to the activists, community organizers, artists and academics who facilitated indigeneous and decolonial queer and feminist events and conversations in Vancouver while I was there. I learned a lot from being present in these spaces. Finally, thanks to everyone else who welcomed me to UBC and Vancouver. Thank you, Maria (Persdotter), for the spaces, cakes and stories you shared with me in Vancouver, and the friendship that extends beyond then and there. Thanks to Randi (Gressgård) and Tina (Jensen), my first journal editors, for your critical, attentive support. And Randi, thank you for believing in “Making Senses” and for encouraging me to become my own editor—and for the specialty coffee. 3 I am very grateful to the Danish Council for Independent Research, whose EliteForsk travel grant took me to Vancouver and enabled my presence in numerous conferences and research communities. Thanks to my wonderful colleagues at Cultural Encounters (KOS-gangen) and at Roskilde University. Thanks to Nils Holtug and everyone in the Politics of Social Cohesion research project, of which this PhD has been a part, and for which the Danish Council for Independent Research provided financing. Thanks to all the kind, generous presences in academia and beyond, who have inspired and encouraged me, knowingly and unknowingly. I also extend my deep gratitude to the PhD students in Denmark and elsewhere who have been my partners in sharing inspirations and doubts, and who established caring spaces where we faced our challenges and insecurities together. Thanks to all of you and all of us. 4 Contents1 Chapter 1. By way of entering ............................................................................................................... 8 Unraveling the body of thesis ............................................................................................................. 8 A body full of knots? ......................................................................................................................... 11 Affective ecologies of knowledge: thinking beside(s) paranoia ....................................................... 13 Nordvest erupts: a motley crew of voices and places ...................................................................... 17 Peter: a backyard cat .................................................................................................................... 17 Zane: a death of a rat .................................................................................................................... 18 Morning run .................................................................................................................................. 18 This is not Copenhagen, part 1: Claus’s photos ............................................................................ 18 Municipality garbage bin, volume 1: dissolution .......................................................................... 20 Municipality garbage bin, volume 2: Daniel on life, anger and biodynamic agriculture .............. 21 “Such a fine flower you have there” ............................................................................................. 21 Lars, take 1: True Nordvest, “the lowest of the low” ................................................................... 22 Lars, take 2: “I’m on tape with all my prejudice” .......................................................................... 22 Stine: Nordvest as the un(der)told ............................................................................................... 23 This is not Copenhagen, part 2: “What are you doing here?” ...................................................... 23 Li: “There are still people here” .................................................................................................... 24 This is not Copenhagen, part 3: Linda, tea and baklava ............................................................... 25 Where is this heading? The modes of operation of the thesis ......................................................... 26 A guided tour: walking into wilderness ............................................................................................ 29 Chapter 2. Towards embodied, affective methodology ..................................................................... 37 Recruited into Danishness? An affective autoethnography of passing as Danish ............................ 41 “Diverse” or un(re)marked: the author’s changing positionings ............................................ 41 An autoethnography of passing as Danish ................................................................................ 43 Conclusion: Unmarked labour of normalcy and shades of Danishness ........................................ 52 Conducting empirically driven research: notes towards an embodied, affective methodology ..... 56 Affective struggles: zooming in on research as affective labour ...................................................... 59 Taking place as an ethnographer: arriving into fieldwork ................................................................ 61 On modalities and instrumentalities of discomfort .......................................................................... 64 Working through discomfort: relationality, situatedness and embodiment in data production ..... 67 “Isn’t it too cold for the homeless people to be outside?” .......................................................... 67 Irrelevance, claustrophobia and cookies from Lidl ....................................................................... 69 Enacting reflexivity, enacting majoritized positionalities ............................................................