Lumpencity

Discourses of Marginality | Marginalizing Discourses

Edited by Alan Bourke, Tia Dafnos, Markus Kip

While it has been fashionable to think that academic research benefits marginalized groups, representational and methodological choices have often served to produce and legitimize marginalizing practices. The contributions to this volume reveal how authors have sought to engage with and transform their scholarly repertoires into tools of analysis useful for political action. We hope to encourage scholars, activists, and activist-scholars to reflect upon the complementarity of their academic and activist praxis, and to remain committed to unsettling both disciplinary norms and institutional boundaries.

Contents

1. Lumpen-City: Discourses of Marginality| Marginalizing Discourses (Alan Bourke, Tia Dafnos, and Markus Kip)

Part I | Contesting Discourses of Marginality

2. Understanding Obama’s Discourse on Urban Poverty (David Wilson and Matthew Anderson)

3. Legitimizing Violence and Segregation: Neoliberal Discourses on Crime and the Criminalization of Urban Poor Populations in Turkey (Zeynep Gönen and Deniz Yonucu)

4. Homelessness as Neoliberal Discourse: Reflections on Research and the Narrowing of Poverty Policy (Mark Willson)

5. Samuel Delany’s Lumpen Worlds and the Problem of Representing Marginality (Lisa Estreich)

Part II | Contested Representations

6. Indigeneity and the City: Representations, Resistance, and the Right to the City (Julie Tomiak)

7. Palestinian Refugees and Citizens: Trajectories of Group Solidarity and Politics (Silvia Pasquetti)

8. Sexual Violence and the Creation of a Postcolonial Ordinary: Engagements Between Street-Based Sex Workers and the Police in Machala, Ecuador (Karen O’Connor)

9. Making Sense of Failure: Why German Trade Unions Did Not Mobilize Against the Hartz-IV Reforms—Partisan Research in Frankfurt, Germany (Markus Kip)

Part III | Methodological Reflexivities

10. Participatory Practices: Contesting Accountability in Academic-Community Research Collaborations (Alan Bourke)

11. Lost in Translation: The Social Relations of an Institutional Ethnography of Activism (Kate M. Murray)

12. Shifting the Gaze “Upwards”: Researching the Police as an Institution of Power (Tia Dafnos)

13. Our Streets! Practice and Theory of the Ottawa Panhandlers’ Union (Matthew R. McLennan)

14. Afterword: A Call to Activist Scholarship

(End)Notes

Contributors