In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men that matched viral online images in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the “affective turn,” in this article I unpack the structural and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. I situate this episode within current debates about the entanglement of neoliberal disciplinary regimes and the reproduction of particular social orders, and argue that attention to such outbursts can help us revitalize and rethink existing notions of class.
In this article I examine some of the ways in which giving and receiving care on the margins of Casablanca become ambivalently constituted acts inscribed in a context of historical trauma and growing economic insecurity. Within this context I explore the usefulness of “un‐homely” as a conceptual tool for discussing forms of domestic care on the margins of a growing urban center. Drawing on fieldwork material gathered during 2013–2014 in a marginalized and criminalized neighborhood in Casablanca, I use an ethno‐historical approach to unpack the production of marginalization and poverty, and explore which forms of care are available to urban lower class women in particular. With the help of my closest interlocutor, Amina, I offer a discussion on the labor of caring, for oneself and of others, as well as the particular affect associated with this labor. I suggest that such skilled routines of caregiving do not only function as a coping mechanism for women in precarious situations, but they reproduce affects of un‐homeliness as much as they contain them. I argue that it is this ambivalent weaving, between containment and acceptance, that ultimately serves to help make precarious homes and uncertain futures livable.
Struggles over housing, land, and forms of mobility have been mainstays of both academic and popular coverage of North Africa in recent decades. As we firmly enter a period of accelerating crises linked to global forces, it remains important to document and reflect on how these issues are played out through local protests and debates over public goods and shared futures in the region. As such, this issue brings renewed attention to existing and emerging practices, ideas, spaces, and actors involved in shaping and contesting both old and new commons, and different understandings of the public good. Our goal is to better attune scholarly attention to emerging social dynamics and political agendas, especially in the aftermath of stalled revolutions and the ongoing privatization of space across the Maghreb region. Grounded in long-term, qualitative research conducted in Morocco by a combination of early career and established scholars, this collection of articles address how 'commoning' practices are enacted, contested, or recuperated and mobilized by various actors at different scales. The territorial manifestations, social entanglements, and discursive production of commons and collectivities emerge as ongoing processes crucial to both the reproduction as well as contestation of social orders and trans-local planning and governance regimes. The contributions gathered here are the outcome of conversations and work presented in November 2018 during the symposium Urban Space and the Common Good organized by the guest editors at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR), with the collaboration of the Leiden University Center for Islam and Society (LUCIS).KEYWORDS Commons; public good; Morocco; Rabat; peri-urban; shared resources We are currently living through a period of disappearing commons: spaces and forms of shared ownership and knowledge-making have been severely errored over the course of the last century across North Africa, whether it be the decline of historical institutions and forms of 'traditional commons'
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