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  • Published on

    Techno-material entanglements and the social organisation of difference

    At the start of my PhD, Steven Vertovec shared his ideas about his conceptual triangle - Configurations, Representations, Encounters. It was intriguing. Even better to see it published as his take on the social organization of difference in Ethnic and Racial Studies. The best is, though, to critically review and extend it with my colleagues Fran Meissner and Nikolaus Vertovec. We went in two crucial dimensions: the technical and the material to take account of the longue durée of difference that is always also unequal, cast in hierarchies, especially in cities. I am looking forward to where this think piece goes. 

    Abstract:
    Vertovec’s social organisation of difference framework links three research areas. They study difference and its social importance: encounters, representations, and structural configurations. This paper argues for an expansion of the framework. It should recognise that those three domains are co-constituted and mediated by technical transformations and material sedimentations. An expanded focus is vital to address old and new inequalities. While Vertovec’s original framework paid limited attention to techno-material entanglements, we highlight their importance. The material and the technical matter at the intersections of encounters, representations, and configurations. Where possible, we point to examples. We thus call for more research and cross-disciplinary dialogue beyond the social sciences. We re-emphasise the framework’s usefulness for this and for engaging with (urban) complexities and difference. As a think-piece, the article shows the benefits of nuancing Vertovec’s framework by considering the technical and material.

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    Habilitation / Livre docente

    Events Inequality Wood

    Done.

    The German academic world is sometimes particular, despite having some resemblance in other parts of the world, for example, São Paulo. After your doctorate, you continue on precarious contracts - other than the few who pass directly onto Junior professorships - and start preparing a second project. It needs to be distinct from your doctoral research. In Anthropology, this refers to both regional and thematic/conceptual expertise.

    While in the midst of writing my second book, my colleagues at Cologne University convinced me last year that this further seal of academic excellence and loyalty to a peer group would not do harm. I embarked on submitting 6 peer-reviewed, article-length text that show an internal coherence, wrote a long introduction on Assembling Social Hierarchies, submitted all to the faculty and four reviewers, received positive verdicts. The faculty followed the recommendation of the reviewers and invited me to submit yet another three different topics for my oral habilitation colloquium, open to the faculty and with the necessary participation of 24 full and associate professors.

    I had the pleasure to present a new research idea on Urban wood/s to sixty interested and enthusiastic colleagues and students. If the faculty next Wednesday follows the unanimous recommendation to also accept that oral habilitation exam, I will have reached what they call the end of the ladder. Done.

    An inaugural lecture will follow, and hopefully soon the second book as well.
  • Published on

    Normative multiplicity (CLACSO, 2024)

    Entanglements and frictions of legal pluralism, multinormativity and conviviality

    With my colleagues, Samuel Barbosa and Osvaldo Barreneche, we just published the edited volume on normative multiplicity with CLACSO.

    Link

    The book is a multilingual exploration with a co-written introduction in English and Spanish as well as contributions in Portuguese, Spanish and English. In two parts, the book discusses the conceptual entanglements of legal pluralism, multinormativity and conviviality and empirical case studies from across Latin America in different historical moments.

    I personally discuss how multinormativity dialogues with the anthropological debate on everyday ethics and how this influences the ability to judge and form ones one self as newcomers in Rio de Janeiro. Read more.
  • Published on

    About doorman and what they don't say

    I just published a short research provocation in Nature Cities in the section "I and the city" on one of the most fascinating urban archives that exists: entry halls and their staff.

    The article is the back cover of the current issue of the journal and you can read it here.

    Enjoy!

    Abstract
    Maintaining one’s reputation is a central concern in Latin American cities, and the doormen of buildings have a crucial part to play. Tilmann Heil delves deeper into the intricate dynamics of Rio de Janeiro’s entry halls and highlights how they operate as urban microcosms in which reputation, security and care materialize across structural inequality.
  • Published on

    Heteromelancolia no Rio de Janeiro

    Um suspiro das mulheres espanholas em relação aos homens cariocas

    PT:
    Este capítulo aborda etnograficamente o dilema vivido por mulheres espanholas heterossexuais e liberadas que constroem uma relação de solidariedade com grupos queer no Rio de Janeiro mas expressam sentimentos de heteromelancolia. Aparentemente contra sua vontade, elas relatam momentos de tristeza quanto à queerização da população masculina do Rio de Janeiro naquilo que é, para elas, um processo crescente. Em diálogo com os comentários delas sobre esses encontros, registrados entre 2014 e 2020, ofereço percepções etnográficas sobre sua experiência distinta de diferença interseccional e conexão parcial com pessoas queer. Essas relações foram ofuscadas pela heteromelancolia que advém das tensões entre a liberação feminista/queer e o desejo heteronormativo.
    fulltext

    Hetero-melancholia in Rio de Janeiro

    A sigh of Spanish women in relation to local men

    EN:
    This chapter ethnographically engages with the conundrum experienced by straight liberated Spanish women who encounter in solidarity with queer people in Rio de Janeiro but express their feelings of hetero-melancholia. Seemingly against their will, they conveyed moments of sadness in face of the queering of Rio de Janeiro’s male population, to them, an advancing process. Engaging with the commentaries on such encounters, recorded between 2014 and 2020, I offer ethnographic insights into their distinct experience of intersectional difference from, and partial connection with, queer people. These relations were overshadowed by hetero-melancholia, born out of the tensions between feminist/queer liberation and heteronormative desire.

    Please get in touch if you would like to read an English version of this paper.
    in: Sarah Albiez-Wieck, Silke Hensel, Holger M. Meding and Katharina Schembs (eds.) Género en América Latina: Homenaje a Barbara Potthast, 443-465. Madrid, Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert.
  • Published on

    Assembling social hierarchies. Newcomers' urban Journeys in Rio de Janeiro

    In this paper, I ask whether and how the assembling of social hierarchies in the everyday of urban newcomers can be conceptualised. In my ethnographic work with Senegalese and Spanish in Rio de Janeiro since 2014, I have been interested in the unexpected and multiple stories and materialities of the city as they unfold upon arrival. Assemblage thinking – the meshing together of urban components so that they work well together– has an edge over other approaches to account for a multiplicity of urban worlds in the making. At the same time, assemblages have been critiqued for being overly horizontal, unable to capture inequality and hierarchy. Inequality and hierarchy, however, are constitutive of Rio de Janeiro as is the case for most contemporary urban configurations. In Rio de Janeiro, newcomers continuously evaluate multiple and intersecting differences in countless and often ambiguous ways. Newcomers perceive, question, position themselves in relation to, and re-assemble urban hierarchies in known and new ways. These sensory, reflexive, and material constitutions of valued difference are crucial to the worlds that unfold in an unequal city. I will ground this productive conceptual tension in selected vignettes of the fragmented urban trajectories of newcomers in Rio de Janeiro that compose my emerging ethnography. I invite the seminar participants to joining my quest of how to best comprehend such an assembling of social hierarchies through concepts that may travel to facilitate comparison.