“From a Hackney Council Estate to a Kenyan Orphanage: transnational encounters
and cosmopolitan youth identities?” Ruth Judge, UCL Geography
In the past, much scholarship on transnational encounters has been concerned
with either relations of domination between ‘the west and the rest’, or the
struggles facing forced migrants. However, work around diasporas and
cosmopolitanism has opened the way for more nuanced analyses. In my PhD
research, I hope to further some of these analyses through looking at new
international youth volunteering initiatives. These initiatives take youth from
multiethnic, low-income, urban backgrounds in the UK on volunteering trips to
‘developing’ countries. This presentation will explore how such transnational
encounters bring together two groups frequently portrayed as ‘marginalised’,
complicating binaries around ‘self’ and ‘other’, dominance and victimhood. It
will also raise questions about how embodied and emotional dimensions of
encounters with ‘other’ people and places relate to young people’s identity
construction, and the possibility of ‘cosmopolitan’ identities in both local
and global spheres. Such transnational encounters push us to engage with ideas
about contact, identity and prejudice: Do young people’s embodied encounters
with ‘others’ destabilise existing class and ethnic identities? What insights
might these encounters bring to debates about ‘community cohesion’, hybridity
and cosmopolitan identities? This presentation is based on the early stages of
my PhD research and will draw on a review of literature, complemented by some
preliminary reflections from a volunteering trip.
“Re-enacting the city: curatorial practice as a form of architectural
production.” Mariana Pestana, UCL Bartlett Architectural Design
My practice as an architecture curator actively discusses notions of memory,
identity and fiction through the making of multidisciplinary spaces.
The research that I am developing through the PhD concerns the curation of
architecture as a form of architectural practice, and investigates the
possibilities that this practice opens in terms of dialogue with communities
and policy makers, hence in the development of the city.
I am currently working on a two day event in Croydon - in collaboration with
the Council and various local cultural and educational structures – which I
will present. The event explores the construction of memories after spatial
experiences and the construction of space through memory. Located in a disused
car park space awaiting a decision about its future use and development, the
event – as a self-referential representation- is based on the blueprint of a
fictional members club: The Croydon Club. At the Club, we will enact and
re-enact histories of Croydon, in order to reflect upon its current state and
its position towards the future.
Playing with notions of authorship and hospitality, this event will engage
visitors in an immersive experience where they become, more than passive
viewers, active agents in the construction of the city and its history.
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