(SCL10a) Sociology of Space, Place, and Time I

Social processes occur in space and over time (Maritn and Miler, 2003). Thus, social processes are intertwined with spatiality and temporality. Everything we study is emplaced ... place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but an agentic player in the game (Gieryn, 2000). In this session, we explore a diverse body of research that intersects with the sociology of space, place, and time. We encouraged submissions from various theoretical and methodological approaches that place an emphasis on the spatiality or temporality of social processes.

Organizers: Foroogh Mohammadi, Acadia University, Pouya Morshedi, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador; Chairs: Foroogh Mohammadi, Acadia University, Pouya Morshedi, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

Presentations

Jeongwon Gim, University of Alberta

Knowing by Drawing: Sketchigram as Exploratory Approach to Studying Urban Brandscape

In contemporary social research, drawings are often perceived as subjective and considered less credible compared to mechanically produced data, such as statistics or photography. However, there has been a recent increase in scholarship that examines the potential of employing drawing as a crucial part of the research process including data elicitation, analysis, and dissemination of findings. Despite this, the contemporary visual method toolkits overlook the significance of researcher-generated drawings, which involve both in-situ and post-situ modes of production. Besides, when examining modern urban brandscape, relying solely on the logic of “scientific” method prove insufficient for perceiving and comprehending the underlying intangible forces, including branding strategies and the deliberate creation of sensory experiences. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how drawing can empower researchers to deeply engage with and obtain fresh perspectives in understanding the problem, focusing particularly on inquiries into the urban brandscape. The study presents Sketchigram as an alternative approach to drawing, incorporating conventions of in-situ observational sketches, cartoons, cartography, and diagrams, including infographics. It involves an iterative process between in-situ observational vignettes of the place and annotated cartographic diagrams produced in the studio. These two modes of drawing operate as a set, essential for conceptualizing drawing as both a documentative and a thinking tool. This exploratory research specifically investigates how the practice of ‘Sketchigram’ (re)shapes the way researchers think about the urban brandscape. The theoretical perspectives to line, drawing, and arts-based methodology largely inform the study. This encompasses the discussions on the production of subjectivity, the reconsideration on the nature of social inquiries, the affordances of drawing, and the idea of drawing as correspondence. These concepts help theorize Sketchigram as an anticipatory and exploratory practice, shifting from viewing knowledge as a ‘report on the world’ to perceiving it as a way of being in the world’ that is open for modification and experimentation. The research first identifies the features Sketchigram shares with other visual methods techniques. This will be followed by a discussion on insights gained from the three ethnographic case studies on the residential brandscape in South Korea. Last, the study outlines the distinctive characteristics of Sketchigram that prove beneficial for researchers studying the urban brandscape. The study demonstrates that Sketchigram, as an anticipatory and explorative approach to drawing, provides a unique way to interact with the built environments and reflect on the researcher’s own involvement in the research process. Thus, Sketchigram is a reflexive approach presenting a way of ‘knowing by doing.’ Its distinctive characteristics, such as multimodality, decentralized reading, and meticulous and satirical annotations, afford powerful tools for capturing, understanding, and communicating invisible and multi-dimensional significance—for instance, functional, visual, material, and symbolic aspects—of the urban brandscape.

Bonar Buffam, University of British Columbia

Rituals of Halloween mischief and the governance of urban space in Vancouver, 1910s-1970s

On the 31st of October 31, 1932, The Vancouver Sun reported on a local Halloween bomb plot that the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) had foiled by confiscating a significant number of explosive devices in the basement of a home in Shaughnessy Heights, a wealthy residential neighborhood. According to the VPD, the six youth who were arrested for this plot had ‘an elementary knowledge of chemistry and had made the bombs in preparation for their Halloween pranks’. The day after Halloween local papers ran stories about multiple incidents of mischief, vandalism, and ‘obstructive’ behaviour that occurred in particular pockets of the city. Along one of the main avenues in Kerrisdale, another wealthy neighborhood southwest of Shaughnessy, youth erected barricades with an auto chassis, ash cans, and fallen trees, obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to disband large unruly gatherings of youth. While some observers likened this kind of mischief to a youthful rite of passage, the extent of the vandalism renewed conversations amongst residents and municipal authorities about how to facilitate more orderly Halloween festivities, conversations that recurred at different yearly intervals well until the 1960s. In this paper I examine local episodes of Halloween mischief that occurred between the 1910s and 1970s to explain how they reflect changes in public ritual and urban governance. Using archival research, I track the contingent spatial and temporal dimensions of such seasonal rituals as they were detailed in local newspapers and the documentation of municipal authorities. Following critical theorists of religion and secularism, my paper stresses the expressive and inscriptive qualities of these rituals, specifically their capacity to recreate and redraw the relations of power that characterize public places. By attending to where and how this mischief was staged in Vancouver, it illustrates how these rituals reflect particular orientations to the disposability of common space and the vulnerability of marginalized populations. Particular attention is paid to years when these rituals were animated by anti-Asian sentiments and culminated in collective acts of racial violence against the homes and businesses of Japanese and Chinese residents. My paper is also concerned with how civic responses to Halloween mischief reflect broader changes in urban governance, particularly control over nocturnal social activities. On the one hand, I engage the literature on night studies to explain how mischief served as a basis for law enforcement to establish and negotiate its jurisdiction over some seasonal rituals of Halloween as well as the night as a distinct temporal realm of (dis)order. On the other hand, I consider how municipal authorities, leisure clubs, and fraternal organizations staged Halloween events and parties to provide young people a more supervised context for their holiday activities. Finally, this paper tries to explicate the varied and intersecting orientations to time that are at play in these contingent rituals of Halloween mischief, including the temporalities of nighttime, seasonality, calendrical time, and historical change. Through such attention to the social conditions and coordination of time, my analysis reveals how different, sometimes competing temporalities of repetition and change have been formative of urban contexts like Vancouver as well as the collective dimensions of public ritual(s).

Maricia Fischer-Souan, Sciences Po Paris and Université de Montréal

Marseille and Montréal in North African Migrant Narratives: From Postcolonial Entanglements to Radical Imaginations?

This article explores the migratory imaginations of Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians living in two different European and North American contexts: Marseille, on the one hand, as a long-standing “window onto Europe” from the Mediterranean, and Montréal, on the other – a new gateway of Maghrebin migration to North America. While immigrants from the Maghreb are among the most numerous of foreign-born residents in both these metropolitan areas, the historical contexts and trajectories characterising North African migration in each location are extremely different. Indeed, the diversification of migration routes beyond the traditional Maghreb-France relationship can be seen as an illustration of the growing ‘ex-centricity’ of North African emigration processes, unsettling traditional postcolonial linkages. Yet, this paper argues that the Maghrébin presence both in Marseille and Montréal can be understood in terms of European (post)colonial continuities, rather than ruptures. I show how Maghrébin migrants both in Montréal and Marseille are embedded within complex legacies of coloniality. Using Olivia C. Harrison’s concept of the ‘transcolonial imagination’ and Cornelius Castoriadis’ ‘radical imagination’, I cast light on the heterogeneity of (post)colonial sites and temporalities that emerge in migrant narratives in both cities. Through biographical interviews with North Africans in Montréal and Marseille, I find that migratory imaginations vary in their critical and comparative scope and degree of connection-making between individual biography and structured (post)colonial processes. These connections are nourished by processes including (i) the ongoing significance of (post)colonial legacies in the society of origin, (ii) diasporic and racialized forms of consciousness in the society of residence, and (iii) encounters with unresolved legacies of colonialism, both in Canadian and French national contexts.