Andrés Di Masso

Displacing xeno-racism: The discursive legitimation of native supremacy through everyday accounts of ‘urban insecurity’:

Socio-cultural approaches to fear of crime have suggested that responses to questionnaires may channel broader social attitudes towards other culturally-related topics which also shape the public meaning of ‘crime’, such as immigration. Building on this idea, this article uses a discourse analytic framework to examine how xeno-racist ideas, claims and positions are metonymically worked through everyday opinions about ‘urban insecurity’ as a crime-related construct. The analysis of open-ended interviews with ordinary citizens in Barcelona shows that the position of a ‘threatening Other’, typically afforded by the insecurity narrative, is pervasively constructed in xeno-racial terms, whether explicitly or by implication, but is rhetorically rejected on the narrative grounds of its alleged criminal acts. This xeno-racial version of the criminalized Other is itself managed in interaction as a sensitive topic through a set of deracialization strategies that displace rejection from the language of immigration towards culturally contiguous languages of incivilities, cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantage. The article deepens the ideological versatility of discourses that subtly warrant the structural privilege of ‘natives’ vis-a-vis ‘immigrants’, thereby legitimizing a tenacious system of native supremacy.

More Than Words: Place, Discourse and the Struggle over Public Space in Barcelona

The social construction of human-environment relations is a central concern of an emerging tradition of research on place, which extends the so-called “discursive turn” in social psychology. This research highlights the primary role of everyday linguistic practices in the production of place meanings, challenging the prevailing tendency among environmental psychologists to treat place meanings mainly as an expression of individual cognitions. By the same token, in this article we argue that research on human-environment relations also has the potential to enrich the field of discursive psychology, tempting discursive researchers to move beyond their customary focus on verbal and written texts. Specifically, we propose an analytic framework that transcends the dualism between the material and discursive dimensions of human-environment relations. In order to develop this argument, we outline the novel concept of place-assemblage and illustrate its utility by conducting an analysis of a recent conflict over a public space in Barcelona. This analysis shows how discursive constructions of the development of this public space over time were inextricably entwined with other kinds of material and embodied practices—practices through which place meanings were actively performed, reproduced and contested.

Place Attachment, Sense of Belonging and the Micro-Politics of Place Satisfaction

This chapter tackles the political dimension of place satisfaction, both as a psychological experience and as a conceptual approach to people-place bonds in environmental psychological research. In the first section of the chapter, we locate place satisfaction within a broader set of concepts traditionally used to account for how people feel, think and act towards places, stressing in particular the relationship between place satisfaction, place attachment and place identity. In this frame, we review some theoretical and methodological approaches to place attachment and place identity research, highlighting recent contributions that deepen into the interdependence, if not confusion, between concepts.

Apego al lugar: una aproximación psicoambiental a la vinculación afectiva con el entorno en procesos de reconstrucción del hábitat residencial

Urban studies focused on spatial transformation processes have paid little attention to the emotional relationships between people and their transformed environments. Given its ambiguous definitions and concepts, this phenomenon has not been properly understood. Environmental psychology has thoroughly studied the individual-environment relationship through the analysis of the emotional attachment to a specific place. The present paper describes three possible approaches used by this discipline to study the subject-environment relationship: the analysis of the emotional affinity to places; the identification of the social meanings that create emotional attachment to spaces; and the exploration of the material practices that enable the creation and generation of feelings associated with places. Each approach is described and complemented with the outcomes of a research on the sociospatial relationships generated in four cases of socio-natural disasters in Chile. Finally, this paper considers the potential practices offered by emotional attachment in the reconstruction of residential habitat.

Significados del espacio público en contextos de transformación por desastres socionaturales

Los desastres socionaturales y las acciones de reconstruccion activan la conciencia del entorno construido y la circulacion de narrativas en los habitantes de las comunidades afectadas. En este proceso se articulan distintos significados espaciales, que al igual que los grandes discursos del espacio publico, operan significando el espacio urbano y condicionando las practicas de apropiacion. Este estudio analiza los relatos de personas afectadas por tres de los desastres socionaturales que ocurrieron en los ultimos anos en Chile: el terremoto del ano 2007 en Tocopilla, la erupcion del volcan Chaiten en 2008 y el terremoto y tsunami de 2010 en la region centro sur. Con el objetivo de explorar la configuracion de los significados en torno al espacio publico en personas que han estado expuestas a los procesos de transformacion urbana producidos por el desplazamiento o reconstruccion de barrios tras estos desastres, se realizaron 17 grupos focales con la participacion de 117 habitantes de las localidades de Chaiten, Constitucion, Dichato y Tocopilla. Desde una perspectiva cualitativa, se analizaron los relatos que configuran las distintas perspectivas discursivas del espacio publico: el espacio publico como perdido, como agente de la civilidad y como contestacion para la consecucion de justicia social.