Nirmal Puwar

Thinking About Making a Difference

This article works across disciplines: politics, geography and social and cultural theory. Issues of space and body are brought to bear on how we think about the question ‘making a difference’. By considering difference in terms of the socio-spatial impact of the presence of hitherto socially excluded groups, such as women and racialised minorities, the gendered and racialised nature of the body politic and most specifically its ‘elite’ positions is brought into focus. The co-existence of women and ‘black’ and Asian MPs in Westminster demonstrates how these ‘groups’ are both historically and conceptually ‘space invaders’. This positionality underlies a series of social processes which illustrate how their very presence is a disruption as well as a continual negotiation. While accepting the agnostic perspective that there are ‘no guarantees’ that the arrival of these ‘new’ bodies will articulate a different politics, in terms of policy outcomes and political debate, this article asserts that the sociological terms of their presence deserves in-depth attention.

A manifesto for live methods: provocations and capacities

In this manifesto for live methods the key arguments of the volume are summarized in eleven propositions. We offer eleven provocations to highlight potential new capacities for how we do sociology. The argument for a more artful and crafty approach to sociological research embraces new technological opportunities while expanding the attentiveness of researchers. We identify a set of practices available to us as sociologists from the heterodox histories of the tradition as well as from current collaborations and cross-disciplinary exchanges. The question of value is not set apart from the eleven points we raise in the manifesto. Additionally, we are concerned with how the culture of audit and assessment within universities is impacting on sociological research. Despite the institutional threats to sociology we emphasize the discipline is well placed in our current moment to develop creative, public and novel modes of doing imaginative and critical sociological research.

Multicultural fashion ... stirrings of another sense of aesthetics and memory

abstractThis paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction.

The Archi-texture of Parliament: Flaneur as Method in Westminster

How does one approach a study of the archi-textures of parliamentary spaces? How do the walls, floors, doors, grilles, sculptures, murals and glass sensate legitimate parliamentary rites, rituals and performances? How do they also provide researchers with opportunities for telling altered iterations of how parliamentary space has both contained and been taken apart? If the buildings and its textures are embedded with iconography and haptic architectures which provide containers of democracy, how can we, as researchers working through different occupations of architectures, evacuate a different imagination of political space?

Sensing a Post-Colonial Bourdieu: An Introduction:

A textured reading of intellectual writings and relations, as well as the complicated ways in which they are interwoven across time with specific issues, is likely to shed light on the social conditions of production of what we count as knowledge, including what we see as post-colonial knowledge. The colonial context of social theory is not automatically acknowledged by sociological practice. By turning our attention to the contexts, alliances and commitments – as well as the readings and ideas – that informed the development of Pierre Bourdieu’s thought, we can start to appreciate the colonial and post-colonial textures of his work.This requires us to pay attention to Bourdieu’s references, influences, collaborations and relations. Attentiveness to epistemic and symbolic violence became a hallmark of Bourdieu’s reflexivity.This was not developed without an understanding of the violence and inventive modes for survival within colonial Algeria. For Bourdieu, his experience of Algeria continued to impact upon his theoretical formulations, position takings or as he would say the ‘space of possibles’ in the academic field, most notably in the tensions within philosophy, anthropology and an emerging sociology, as well as how he intervened and conducted himself as an intellectual in the public realm. In recent times, a number of collections on Bourdieu have started to evaluate how Algeria was critical to his political and intellectual development, including the formulation of key concepts such as habitus (see the journal Ethnography, 2004 (5); ReedDanahay, 2005; Goodman and Silverstein, 2009). Despite these recent developments, Bourdieu is still overwhelmingly received in the UK, as a theorist of class, who has very little awareness of racism or post-colonial conditions in France. Thus it is not surprising that students of sociology often find it difficult to see the link between Bourdieu’s widely used concepts – such as cultural capital and social space – and his work on French pacification policies, displacement and migration. The colonial and post-colonial presence in the historical practice of his intellectual explorations has not been centred in the communication of his intellectual corpus in lecture theatres. Despite a scholarly emphasis on the reading of basic texts as vehicles

Social Cinema Scenes

This article centers the methodological need to study both (a) social scenes and (b) social cinema scenes to elucidate a much more complicated sense for understanding how cities and space are inhabited, produced, and invented. Using a practice based method of research, it utilizes aural and visual methods to revisit how we approach and conceptualize postwar lives in the United Kingdom, beyond the limits of an either—or analysis of celebration or trauma and victimhood.

Noise of the Past: Spatial Interruptions of War, Nation, and Memory

ABSTRACT This article layers current ways of contesting the linkage of war, memory, and nation making through post-colonial bodies and ambivalences of allegiance. It senses creative productive possibilities for inviting a different occupation of space, one that allows for an altered imagination of how we hear and experience hitherto erased pasts, in the context of the move to encounter difference from within post-imperial nations today. Working from the Noise of the Past project, it offers a case for how a call-and-response methodology can be activated—to creatively, through co-production, call out, in public, to the residual narratives of consecrated sites of memory and performative rites of remembrance, by setting them into play with disavowed sounds, documents and images, to deliver “new situations.”

Mediations on Making Aaj Kaal

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts.

Exhibiting Spectacle and Memory

This article offers a way to do the work of memory work and migration with, so to speak, the clothes in our mothers trunks, in full awareness of the analytical traps of cultural diversity, anthropological spectacle, exhibitory objectification and the circulatory moves of commodified exoticism.

The Archi-Texture of Parliament at Westminster

The walking narration of parliament (ritualised in tour guides) produces and repeats specific renderings of the making of nation and architecture together. This chapter offers an alternative feminist walking tour within parliament. The notion of the masculine flaneur is de-toured via the practice-based method of being a feminist rambler in a house that was built for specific sorts of masculinities. The very gendered nature of the public sphere of parliament is situated by highlighting specific points of contention as enacted within the very archi-texture s of parliament. Architectural elements from the building thread the sign posts across the entire article. Particular grilles, galleries, rooms, vents, statues, paintings, walls, halls, curtains, stairwells, seats, rods and feet provide points from which to tell the sedimented, layered and contested stories of occupation, performance and ritual.