Queering Communia: the politics of positionality when doing research on squatting in Rome

Feliciantonio, Cesare Di

doi:10.1080/0966369x.2016.1263603

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In the case of this research, my positionality as an activist already engaged with both student and queer politics in the city granted me the opportunity to ‘enter the field’ easily, albeit posing important questions regarding boundaries of the ‘fieldwork’ (e.g. ‘when does it start?’, ‘where does it end?’) and the (fluid) politics of positionality shaping the whole research process (see Di Feliciantonio, for a full discussion).…”

Section: A Multi‐methods Methodology For a Fragmented ‘Field’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Feliciantonio

2017

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Asserting the need to acknowledge the role of the current crisis and austerity politics in fostering the re‐emergence of squatting initiatives in Rome, this article brings together the literature on squatting as an urban social movement, notably Martínez López's holistic approach, with a political economy perspective analysing the current stage of ‘late neoliberalism’. In so doing, I use the conceptualization of ‘expulsions’ developed by Sassen to show how emerging squatting initiatives in Rome represent the ‘spaces of the expelled’. Focusing on the case of Communia in San Lorenzo neighbourhood, the article shows how Martínez López's approach is able to account for the rapid success and support enjoyed by Communia, going as it does beyond the ‘single‐issue’ perspective that has dominated much of the squatting literature. Indeed, the main claims addressed by Communia activists concern a plurality of issues grouped around the concept of urban commons, as both a practice and a goal. Methodologically, the article is the result of 18 months of fieldwork based on an activist/participatory action research (PAR) approach, comprising participant observation/observant participation, in‐depth interviews and questionnaires.

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Section: A Multi‐methods Methodology For a Fragmented ‘Field’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Feliciantonio

2017

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…Literature on positionality typically discusses the influence of key demographic or social identifiers and tends to focus almost exclusively on characteristics such as: gender (Chiswell & Wheeler, 2016;Kusek & Smiley, 2014), age (McGarry, 2016;Tarrant, 2014), ethnicity/race (Carter et al, 2014;Fisher, 2015), class (Ganga & Scott, 2006;Mellor et al, 2014), dis/ ability (Brown & Boardman, 2011;Tregaskis & Goodley, 2005), sexuality (De Feliciantonio, 2017;Kaspar & Landolt, 2016), and/or the intersections between these categories (Caretta & Jokinen, 2016;Carstensen-Egwuom, 2014;Muhammed et al, 2015). Perhaps surprisingly, religion tends not to feature explicitly in accounts of researcher positionality unless in direct association with participants' ethnic or racial affiliations (see e.g., Sanghera & Thapar-Bjorkert, 2008).…”

Section: Positionality Faith and Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Faith, values, and metaphysical positionality in qualitative research

Johnsen

Fitzpatrick

2021

Trans Inst British Geog

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Like politics, faith is not generally considered a suitable subject for dinner-party conversation. That faith in the public realm is about both religion and politics make this highly charged territory. (Dinham & Lowndes, 2009, p. 1; emphasis in original)Faith is a deeply personal or "touchy" matter for many people, and sociopolitical sensitivities regarding religion are legion. These often come to the fore when faith community involvement in public service delivery is under discussion (Jochum et al., 2007). One might therefore expect that introducing such issues into research involving highly vulnerable people might complicate the research dynamic, and perhaps even risk aggravating raw nerves when people are in the

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“…Doing research in solidarity and being part of a living struggle entailed complex methodological challenges, especially in terms of crossing the borders between academia and activism(Butcher, 2020;Kitchin & Hubbard, 1999;Routledge, 1996). Recent research on squatting has upended the idea that being a researcher and an activist at the same time is irreconcilable, by uncovering the importance of engaging into activist research(Di Feliciantonio, 2017a, 2017bSqEK, 2010). Moving the emphasis from identities to relations is crucial for embracing 'a collaborative and dialogical approach to knowledge production' (SqEK, 2010, p. 380) that acknowledges that activists do produce knowledge, just like any other social actor.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political infrastructures of care: Collective home making in refugee solidarity squats

Kapsali¹

2020

RHJ

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Since 2015, Greece has emerged as a major stopover in refugees’ journey seeking a better life in Europe. In Greece, as in the rest of Europe, the long summer of migration has given rise to official discourses about ‘Europe’s refugee crisis’ and the management of migration flows. The Greek state in collaboration with global, European and national actors, adopted various housing practices in order to provide temporary accommodation to refugees. At the antipode of such discourses and policies, refugee solidarity squats have been organised in Greek cities through common struggles among local activists and people on the move. This article contributes to contemporary debates around migrant struggles for housing by conceptualising refugee solidarity squats as political infrastructures of care. By bringing into dialogue Jacques Rancière’s political writings with feminist scholarship on care and social reproduction, the article argues that refugee solidarity squats are not only sites of struggle against anti-migration policies but also stages for the collectivisation of care through the enactment of transversal equality. Through a close urban ethnographic reading of the Orfanotrofio housing squat for migrants in Thessaloniki, Greece, the article narrates the process of collective home making in the squat. In doing so, it analyses the everyday practices through which Orfanotrofio’s participants materially reproduced and affectively cared for each other and investigates how activists and refugees negotiated their different subject positions and challenged the differential lines of power that defined the squat’s participants, such as gender, political background, race and so on. Based on this, it manifests that distancing themselves from humanitarian approaches to housing that revolve around a disembodied care from a distance, spaces like Orfanotrofio construct in the here and now common political spaces of home and give birth to collective political subjects.

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Queering Communia: the politics of positionality when doing research on squatting in Rome

Cited by 8 publications

References 33 publications

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Faith, values, and metaphysical positionality in qualitative research

Political infrastructures of care: Collective home making in refugee solidarity squats

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