The Stuff of Contention and Care: Affective Materiality and Everyday Learning in Bristol, UK

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a "learning city" within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork conducted in sites of informal and non-formal learning on the margins of a UNESCO Learning City, we argue for an ethnography that is attentive to the ways in which learning manifests itself in everyday life. Through three field sites-a community space, a bicycle workshop, and a contested heritage campaign-we demonstrate the significance of material culture, controversy, and care as constitutive of learning processes within urban life. Through these examples, we aim to reframe questions on the complexity of learning at a city scale as part of affect-driven knowledge and the material, embodied transmission of skill and everyday practice. By tracing how learning plays out in everyday life, we can begin to interrogate what happens beyond the neoliberal forms of educational governance, and the extent to which the everyday practices challenge or reinforce top-down formulations as well as potentially transforming forms of knowledge production.

Towards a more just world: an agenda for transformative heritage planning futures

“…So, whether it is put to work for wellbeing, urban development, tourism or other aims, it is (re-)enacting, (re)producing and mobilizing selective past(s) (Davidson 2016;Ugwuanyi 2020;Wong 2013) and often doing many other unplanned and unintended things. Moreover, it resonates with what has been coined the 'affective turn' in heritage studies (Crooke and Maguire 2018;Tolia-Kelly et al 2017), showing how affect and emotions influence our dealings (and doings) with heritage and how heritage is affective and emotive (Buchczyk and Facer 2020). This is not just a theoretical debate, as we discussed above.…”

A research Agenda for heritage planning. Perspectives from Europe A research Agenda for heritage planning. Perspectives from Europe , edited by Eva Stegmeijer and Loes Veldpaus, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, xxvi + 256 pp., $147,00 (hardback), $47,00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-78897-462-2, Open Access (ebk), ISBN: 978-1-78897-463-9

“…So, whether it is put to work for wellbeing, urban development, tourism or other aims, it is (re-)enacting, (re)producing and mobilizing selective past(s) (Davidson 2016;Ugwuanyi 2020;Wong 2013) and often doing many other unplanned and unintended things. Moreover, it resonates with what has been coined the 'affective turn' in heritage studies , showing how affect and emotions influence our dealings (and doings) with heritage and how heritage is affective and emotive (Buchczyk and Facer 2020). This is not just a theoretical debate, as we discussed above.…”

Goodnight Colston. Mourning Slavery: Death Rites and Duppy Conquering in a Circum‐Atlantic City

“…Until recently, some six streets, three schools, an international concert hall, several offices, Bristol’s tallest tower, numerous student halls, an ornate almshouse, a Freemasons’ lodge, at least two pubs, and a sweet bun all bore his name (Steeds and Ball 2020:297–298). In a paper on Bristol’s affective landscapes, Buchczyk and Facer (2020:616) interviewed a Caribbean chef who discussed the Colston Hall concert venue (now renamed Bristol Beacon) and why, despite its good programming, he stopped attending shows there. He described his “discomfort”, “feeling a strange atmosphere”, and the building being “cold and awkward”.…”

“…Perhaps it was neither. Whatever the actor’s intentions, the spiritual elements for cleansing the “Colston urban assemblage” (Buchczyk and Facer 2020:614)—that crossroads where Colston Avenue, Street, statue, Hall, and Tower meet at Bristol’s centre—were in deep play. Whilst I have shown how Bristol has experienced what Deb Thomas (2020) calls “the looping temporalities of racial reckonings”, reckonings that recur across circum‐Atlantic sites, I believe that this ceremony sought to go one step further; to break the civic impasse surrounding Bristolian slavery.…”