This was a lecture group presentation for the HBSE 350 course, we did with my peers at West Virginia University in 2014. We were doing community profile and also gave back to the community some hygiene goodies and toiletries to homeless... more
This was a lecture group presentation for the HBSE 350 course, we did with my peers at West Virginia University in 2014. We were doing community profile and also gave back to the community some hygiene goodies and toiletries to homeless shelter.
The UHI Centre for Remote and Rural Studies convened a roundtable event in November 2010 that brought together practitioners, policymakers and academics from Scotland, the UK and internationally. The aims were: (i) to explore the... more
The UHI Centre for Remote and Rural Studies convened a roundtable event in November 2010 that brought together practitioners, policymakers and academics from Scotland, the UK and internationally. The aims were: (i) to explore the implications of existing Scottish, UK and international research for the ownership of assets by communities; and (ii) identify regional research priorities and the key players in taking a potential research agenda forward. This paper provides an overview of key areas of discussion and debate.
Keywords: Community assets; renewable energy; social justice; learning partnerships; regional policy; politics of community.
SUMMARY Anthropologists studying the Andean community politics have increasingly emphasised the role of pragmatic, informal 'vernacular' political strategies in achieving material and political empowerment of the poor. However, while the... more
SUMMARY Anthropologists studying the Andean community politics have increasingly emphasised the role of pragmatic, informal 'vernacular' political strategies in achieving material and political empowerment of the poor. However, while the concept of vernacular politics marks an advancement over binary and often polarised discussions of the role of local communities in development processes, studies have not fully explored the full range of implications of vernacular strategies on development processes. While researchers have demonstrated the substantial agency that local community actors have to influence development processes, the extent to which this influence effectively resists or reinforces the logic of public policy implementation has not been studied. This article explores the techniques used by rural communities in their interactions with public institutions in rural Bolivia. It shows that community organisations' vernacular political strategies have mixed outcomes: on the one hand, they allow the rural poor to assert their own agendas vis-à-vis the state so that they can benefit from public spending, while on the other hand, their tactics have the potential to entrench the influence of local power brokers and perpetuate inefficient uses of public funds.
This thesis evaluates the colonial productions and contestations of Puerto Rican public housing and its residents as urban ‘others’. It combines a historical analysis of the political, spatial and material trajectory of the island’s... more
This thesis evaluates the colonial productions and contestations of Puerto Rican public housing and its residents as urban ‘others’. It combines a historical analysis of the political, spatial and material trajectory of the island’s projects with an ethnography of the resistances enacted by a group of residents- mainly women- from one such complex called ‘Las Gladiolas’ against an impending order of demolition and displacement.
I argue that while a context of socio-spatial exclusion and environmental determinism has pervaded the constructions of these postcolonial ‘projects’ in ways that have significantly discriminated against its residents, public housing has never been and can never be completed according to that limited governmental design- which today exists under the rubric of urban redevelopment- mainly because communities of solidarity, dissent and conflict emerge simultaneously with and against those formulations, taking on a life of their own in ways that collude with and escape rigid technocratic formulations of housing policy. The research presented emphasizes the symbolic struggle and material reality embedded in Las Gladiolas’s community politics which resists and disrupts a homogeneous vision of past, present and future urban space.
The historical analysis highlights the ways in which ‘othering’ was set in place within the colonial context of Puerto Rico’s urban development in a way which has allowed for the continued stigmatization of public housing projects and for the reproduction of residents’ disadvantage according to raced, gendered and classed discriminations. Those distinctions of difference also created the conditions for particular forms of resistance to emerge. The ethnographic data tells the story of how the political and physical enactment of the buildings’ deterioration intersected with residents’ informal, institutional and legal resistance to relocation. It shows how the contemporary production, experiences and contestations over public housing are not fixed, but multiple and highly ambiguous. The complex interplay that emerges between political, social and material elements demonstrates that the boundaries separating Las Gladiolas from its urban environ, and Puerto Rican housing agencies from the American ones, are in fact open and porous, fluctuating according to use, appropriations, and political and legal transformations.
