"Everydayness"

I remembered talking about this notion with Sahera on our way back from Vancouver to Seattle in Jnue. We both like the term but not even sure who coined the word.

Interestingly, I revisited this idea in Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Amin and Thrift, 2002, p95). "Everydayness" was introduced as Lefebvre's idea about "spaces of representation, the lived space." As noted, "an everydayness located in Lefebvre's other two terms of the equation of everyday life(spatial practice, the percieved) and the everyday(representations of space, the conceived)which both embrace it and make it possible." (p95)

While i don't think it is necessary to add another term to describe the same notion, I feel like this subtle distinction of the three-"everydayness, everyday life, the everyday" is worth knowing.

BTW, I am going to Hong Kong for my field work tomorrow. I know that Sahera is leaving soon and Andrew has been home, right? Ozge should get most fruitful work done since you will be in the field for that period of time. Anyway, I hope i can try my best to keep field notes and share with you all. Acutally, I talked to some people in Taiwan about urban renewal in Taipei and their interactions with professionals in Hong Kong on this topic. I do have some thoughts, however, not to the point that I can clearly organize them and post them here. I will try to spend more time on it.

Take care, all my friends.

Participatory diagramming as an engaging method

I found a chapter on "Participatory diagramming" very useful, providing applicable techniques and also critically discussing strengths and weakness of this method. Examples of diagrams are presented as well. Perhaps you will be interested if this may be one of method applicable to your research. Besides, the book is a very recent, comprehensively collecting essays on Participatory Action Research. I personally feel like the book is worth keeping at hand.

"Participatory diagramming: A critical view from North East England" in Participatory action research approaches and methods, Sara Louise Kindon, Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby Eds. pp112-122
The book on google book:

Practical Intelligence and Explicit Knowledge

After coming back to Taiwan, I have found myself amazed by tons of information on the ground. They take shape in a variety of forms everywhere, everyday. I think i have to start taking notes and share them with you or i will just watch them going through my fingers without any footprint.

The first thing i wanna share is an intersting issue of "business weekly" published in Taiwan. While waiting in a bank,I noticed that cover story, "street wisdom."

"Isn't that something similar to what we wanna learn from the everyday life?" I was very much intrigued by how a notion as such will be discussed in a business journal. Interestingly, there are some reports focusing on how several successful business men established their know how from practices on the forefront instead of taught knowledge from business schools. Most important of all, it's a kind of tacit intelligence that is not easily shared and transferred. For example, how to make your baked goods more delicious than others by different hand efforts? How to manage social relations within a team in your office? I cannot but recall how Dr. Bob (my chair, also on Sahera and Ozge's committee) use riding bicycle as an example to talk about what we know is always larger than what we can make explicit.

However, as part of academia, we do our best despite impossibility to make it exaughstively explicit. However, i also feel more relaxed since we are then not the one who is supposed to "create" intelligence. Instead, we only need to have the willingness to approach them on the street, in everyday life.

The report also mention a scholar in human cognition, Robert J. Sternberg(an American psychologist and now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University). He suggests three kinds of intelligences in human cognition:

-Analytical intelligence is the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions.
-Creative intelligence involves going beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
-Practical intelligence is the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.
See more here.

i think Sternberg is largely echoing de Certeau's idea. I found this very interesting even though it is coming from a very different field. I believe this is a trend that we need to pay attention to.

Edward Said

Sara Roy - Beyond Occupation

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

http://fora.tv/2008/10/14/Sara_Roy_Beyond_Occupation

On Political Fragmentation: Hegemony and Colonialism

"The debate between the two different military doctrines of territorial organization - linear fortification and a network of strongholds laid out throughout their depth - recalls comparisons suggested by Antonio Gramsci between the "war of position" and "war of [manoeuver]", with similar political patterns. For Gramsci, the shift from the former to the latter implies an erosion in political hegemony. He noted (allegorically perhaps) that since linear defense 'demands enormous sacrifices by an infinite mass of people ... an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more "interventionist" government .. [that will] organize permanently the "impossibility" of internal disintegration - with control of every kind, political, administrative, etc.' The political 'war of [manoeuver]', by contrast, exists according to Gramsci as a multiplicity of non-centralized and loosely coordinated actions that aggressively compete with the power of the state."

Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel's architecture of occupation. London: Verso. P. 77.

The Politics of Urban Space (another Lefebvrian quote)

What exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships?... The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself.

– Henri Lefebvre.

Key words for Research Agenda

On our way to come up with a proposal for research cluster, i suggested starting our shared understanding by throwing out key words in research agenda for each of us.

Sahera: everyday, space, occupation, oppression, resistance

Shu-Mei: everyday, right to the city, care ethics (caring relationships), appropriation, resistance

Andre: privatization, community, housing/real estate, everyday, migration(and moving), colonization

Ozge: to be added..

Apparently, "everyday" stands out to be our shared concern for now. However, all of them should be open to change and part of our discussion through the ongoing collaboration.

"What is a theory, if not the articulatoin of a pracitce? "

Another quote from M. de Certeau that I am in love with right now:

"What is a theory, if not the articulatoin of a pracitce? And what is an epistemology, if not a discourse that elucidates that relationship?"

I am hoping that our cluster could be a pracitce of inquiry as such.

"politics of location" : Provocative extracts from bell hooks's writing

Thinking of our discussion yesterday, I was very excited when reading these extracts as follows this morning, which may be helpful in terms of clarifing our research identities and place/space/location. Here I would like to share with you all since I really like it though the label of "postmodernity" might remain an ongoing issue open to debate.

It is actually quoted by E. D. Soja in his "Planning in/for Postmodernity"(pp.247-8) from this book

"Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices... A space is there for critical exchange...[and] this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.

As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, the "politics of location" necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision oneself there is diffcult yet necessary. It is not a "safe" place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

There is a definite distinction between the marginality which is imposed by oppresive structure and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance, as a location of radical openness and possibility. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and to create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonizer/colonized. Marginality is the space of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there."

Isn't the last paragraph inspiringly covering what we were grappling with yesterday? :P

umkahlil: Yom al-Ard/Day of the Land/Tag des Bodens

umkahlil: Yom al-Ard/Day of the Land/Tag des Bodens