Author Archives: lidiakcmanzo

CITY-OF-CARE in Dublin: the launch!

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In November 2020 a two-year research project was launched in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, funded through the European Research Council’s Marie Sklodowska Curie Grant Scheme. Abbreviated to the concept CITY-OF-CARE, this study looks at the lived experiences of solidarity and support developed in social housing communities, and by women particularly. The project seeks to achieve this understanding through a comparison of two European cities undergoing major urban/housing/financial transformations: Dublin in Ireland and Milan in Italy. P.I.: Lidia Katia C. Manzo, Supervisor: Enzo Colombo.

Thank you Oliver Bond House Residents Group and Robert Emmet Community Development Project for enabling this project in the Dublin’s Oliver Bond flats. And thanks to the powerful Gayle in the photo taken by Pierluigi Cattani Faggion who is cooperating with me in this new (urban) adventure.

Read (and watch) more on the Dublin multimedia section here.

CITY-OF-CARE is a EU funded ​ research project hosted at the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale in partnership with Maynooth University Department of Geography.

Madri lavoratrici al tempo del Covid-19

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***Cercasi partecipanti a interviste virtuali***

Insieme ad altre colleghe abbiamo promosso uno studio internazionale sul tema della riorganizzazione del lavoro professionale e familiare al tempo del Covid-19.

Come si svolgerà lo studio? 

Consapevole del momento storico difficile, ma anche della necessità di far sentire la nostra voce, ti chiedo di partecipare a questa ricerca con una video-chiamata via ZOOM nella quale io o una mia collaboratrice, ti faremo quattro domande sull’organizzazione del tuo tempo in famiglia e nel lavoro, le strategie di supporto pratico ed emotivo che hai attivato, le ripercussioni sul tuo lavoro a breve e lungo termine.

Chi stiamo cercando?

  • madri professioniste con almeno un figlio piccolo (max 5 anni)
  • che durante il Covid-19 lavorano da casa

Se vuoi partecipare, manda un’email a: mammasmart2020@gmail.com

Ti contatterò per fissare insieme un momento per questa intervista. So di chiedere un grande sforzo, ma i risultati saranno importanti per definire gli effetti di questa crisi sulle nostre vite professionali.

Sono a disposizione per qualsiasi chiarimento, grazie.

Se vuoi condividere l’annuncio clicca qui!

 

Second CFP: LOVE IN THE DIVERSE CITY (Session 52) ISA RC21 conference | July 14-16 2021, Antwerp (Belgium)

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***CALL FOR PAPERS***

ISA RC21 2021 annual conference “Shaping & Sensing the city. Power, people, place”

Antwerp (Belgium). July 14-16 2021

https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/rc21-sensing-the-city

SESSION N. 52 (Re-opened)

Love in the diverse city

ORGANIZER
Lidia Manzo
​Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy)
lidia.manzo@unimi.it

 

Abstract

One of the most profound effects of globalization is that people from everywhere are falling in love with people from everywhere else. Increasing migration worldwide has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, ethnicities and, presumably, cultural backgrounds. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, the classic assimilation theory no longer suffice in tackling the growth of large cities, which are witnessing unprecedented levels of diversity.

Thus, mixed unions may do more than reflect the nature of social boundaries. In urban areas of super-diversity, there is a growing likelihood that multiple and overlapping forms of mixedness will characterize many romantic relationships and it may be that while some ethnic and racial boundaries will remain persistent, others will become more blurred and of diminishing social significance. However, despite the centrality of sexuality to the conduct and continuation of urban life, investigations of intercultural love remain curiously absent from urban studies.

Cities can be seen as roiling maelstroms of affect, love styles and spatially contextualized romantic emotions. Mixed couples and their intimate lives are the focal point at which the different aspects of the globalized world literally become embodied. They define resistance against the state’s biopolitical power to control people and become a space of intimate citizenship. At the same time, these relationships may represent a ‘quiet revolution’ that holds for re-envisioning people’s idea of ‘us and them’, challenging what it means to inhabit multiculturalism in our everyday lives. But how are people inside a family to withstand, negotiate and survive pressures that separate whole worlds from one another?

This session examines how romantic relationships between native majorities and immigrant minorities are experienced and performed at the urban scale by inviting papers that address some of the following:

*  first, in order for an intercultural couple to love one another, the two individuals need to meet. Which are their “places of the heart”? Where do they meet in the diverse city? Are these spaces permeable, opened, and available to the dating and mating between natives and migrants? We want to explore these emotional geographies of mixité by revealing the ways in which different kinds of places can elicit specific feelings of intercultural love;

*  in romantic love, individuals are apt to encounter inequality within their relationships. Yet, how are these disparities experienced? What is the role of local communities? We point to the enduring inequities inherent in the experience of love and difference in our societies and the opportunities or the obstacles that may arise in the urban milieu;

*  from a social network perspective, support or opposition from one’s social surrounding affect the course of love over its various developmental stages, including its initiation, maintenance, and termination. Thinking about young people, parental approval to an intercultural romantic relationship remains controversial and deserves more attention;

*  what the political consequences of thinking more explicitly about these topics might be?

Keywords

Intercultural Love, Urban Diversity, Emotional Geographies of Mixité, Spatialities of Love, Everyday Multiculturalism

References

Alba, Richard, and Nancy Foner. 2015. ‘Mixed Unions and Immigrant- Group Integration in North America and Western Europe’. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciencehe ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 662 (1): 38–56.

Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 2013. Distant Love. Cambridge: Polity press.

Parisi, Rosa. 2015. ‘Practices and Rhetoric of Migrants’ Social Exclusion in Italy: Intermarriage , Work and Citizenship as Devices for the Production of Social Inequalities’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 22 (6): 739–56.

Root, Maria P. 2001. Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Song, Miri. 2016. ‘Multiracial People and Their Partners in Britain: Extending the Link between Intermarriage and Integration?’ Ethnicities 16 (4): 631–48.

Song, Miri, and David Parker. 1995. ‘Commonality, Difference and the Dynamics of Disclosure in in- Depth Interviewing’. Sociology 29 (2): 241–56.

Stets, Jan E., and Jonathan H. Turner, eds. n.d. Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Sp.

Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. The Dictionary Of Human Geography. New York: Routledge.

HOW TO PRESENT A PAPER FOR SESSION 52:

Abstracts (maximum 250 words) need to be mandatory submitted through the conference website via the following weblink: www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/rc21-sensing-the-city/call-for-papers/submit-your-abstract/ .

DEADLINE

4 December 2020

General inquiries can also be directed to Lidia Manzo at lidia.manzo@unimi.it

Notification of abstract approval is expected to take place around 20 January 2021

New journal article: “Constituting SWIG Ireland: Community, Social Capital and Academic Citizenship”

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A new research article reflecting on how women-centred organisations can achieve a “communal democracy” to sustain their support in academia over the long haul has now been published online on Irish Geography and is available at http://www.irishgeography.ie. In this paper I use the Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) Ireland group as a case to make this argument. I contend that women’s work in academia, as well as in community organising, can both be considered invisible, devalued labour. Building on this, I show that the potential ability of communities to achieve representation and gain resources, to actualize goals (intellectual, professional, and personal) and to provide collective goods, might support women in academia in addressing this severe oversight. In the current academic climate of structural change and funding cuts, ensuring the full participation of all genders in consultative processes is more important than ever. It is time now to recognise the gendered nature of academic citizenship whose membership to the community also implies duties deriving from kinship in reciprocation of the benefits that membership brings. To this end, I outline the women-centred community organising model, the social capital that is involved, and the range of activities for empowering women to alter the efforts in Irish academia to making this change.

Lidia KC Manzo (2019). “Constituting SWIG Ireland: Community, Social Capital and Academic Citizenship“ in Irish Geography 52(1). ISSN: 0075-0778 (Print) 1939-4055 (Online)

10th Summer Course Personal Networks, (UAB) Barcelona, July 1-5, 2019 (Spain)

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10th Summer Course Personal Networks

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, July 1-5, 2019

Lecturers: Jürgen Lerner (University of Konstanz), Miranda Lubbers (Autonomous University of Barcelona), José Luis Molina (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Thomas B Smith (University of Florida), Gabriel Hâncean (University of Bucharest) and Alejandro García-Macías  (Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes).
The aim of this summer course is to enable graduate students and researchers in the social sciences to create personal network research designs and to analyze personal network data. The course is a mix of lectures and computer sessions. On the first morning, we will discuss the basic definitions and central concepts in personal network research and we will briefly relate personal networks (sometimes called egocentric networks) with various theoretical streams in the social sciences. This will give students an understanding of the different requirements that researchers may pose to their designs or instruments. We will then introduce the basic steps of measurement of personal networks. The second morning is focused on delineating the networks. Students will be introduced to the variety of name generators and alternative approaches used in the social sciences, which will be compared with respect to contents, the characteristics of the measured networks and ties, the reliability and validity of the measures, and respondent burden. On the third, fourth and fifth morning, we will discuss the statistical analysis of personal networks with R. The participants will have ample opportunity to discuss their own research projects using personal networks.
More information: gr.egoredes@uab.cat

Ethnographic Accounts of Personal Networks, SIAA (Italian Society for Applied Anthropology) VII annual meeting: 12-14 December 2019, Ferrara (Italy)

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SIAA (Italian Society for Applied Anthropology) VII annual meeting

Ferrara (Italy). 12 December 2019

PAPER SESSION: ‘Ethnographic Accounts of Personal Networks’
We practice personal networks every day. Each of us is the center of our own universe. We know who our friends are, how they are connected to each other, and what kinds of sociability, help, and information they might provide. But how do such network individuals operate? Personal network analysis and visualization combined with ethnographic interviews and participant observation have the potential for researching creatively integrating ethnography and network analysis, based on the assumption that it is due to ethnography that we characterize ties. Ethnography permits the revealing, the unveiling, and the classifying of networks. In this sense, the information on composition of networks are gathered ethnographically in a rich and complex fashion due to the extended contact time between researchers and the community of participants. These ethnographic accounts of personal networks accurately display social relationships as they come and go, thus demonstrating their dynamism and mobility.
In this panel session we analyze territorially specific patterns of social interactions that are bundled in the urban social milieu by inviting papers that address some of the following:
– communities as networks with a focus on social integration and mobility of migrants and/or minority groups;
– the role of specialized ties in promoting social support and network capital;
– how do homogeneous networks are conduit for social control and channels for the reproduction of inequalities? In other words, how does homophily is disadvantageous for lower-status groups?
– linkages over time between life stage experiences, relationships and changes in personal networks.
References
Chua, V., J. Madej, and B. Wellman (2011). Personal Communities: The World According To Me. In J. Scott & P. J. Carrington (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis, pp. 101-115. London: Sage Publications.
Domínguez, S. and Hollstein, B. (ed.) (2014). Mixed methods social networks research: design and applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hannerz, U. (1980). Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology (chapter 5: “Thinking with Networks”). New York: Columbia University Press.
McCarty, C., Lubbers, M. J., Vacca, R., & Molina, J. L. (2019). Conducting Personal Network Research: A Practical Guide. New York: Guilford Press.
Wellman, B. (2007). The Network is Personal: Introduction to a Special Issue of Social Networks. In Social Networks 29, 349–356.
ORGANIZERS
Lidia MANZO, lidia.manzo@unimi.it
Enzo COLOMBO, enzo.colombo@unimi.it
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy)

 

Download the full conference program.

CURA Urban Methodologies Summer School, (De Montfort University) Leicester, 12-13 June, 2019 (UK)

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CURA Urban Methodologies Summer School

De Montfort University, Leicester (UK) 12 – 13 June, 2019

The Centre for Urban Research on Austerity Urban Methodologies Summer School is a two-day event aimed at PhD researchers, early-career academics and advanced postgraduate students. It will be held at De Montfort University, Leicester, on 12-13 June 2019. The UMSS will feature four masterclass sessions led by David Bailey (Birmingham), Sarah Marie Hall (Manchester), Cristina Temenos (Manchester) and Michael Hoyler (Loughborough). These sessions will cover novel and innovative approaches to researching disruption and urban resistance, the everyday of austerity, urban policy mobilities and the global urban of world city networks. Two Doctoral Student Plenaries will also feature, where selected participants will deliver short fifteen minute presentations on their own research methodology to receive feedback from participants and a panel of CURA researchers.
Details of masterclass sessions can be found here.
The provisional programme is available to view here.

Love in a time of Globalization: intimate relationships as practices of everyday multiculturalism , 3-4 June 2019, Padua (Italy)

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‘Migration and Migrant’ seminar at the University of Padua

Padua (Italy). 3-4 June 2019

WORKING PAPER ‘Love at the time of Globalization: intimate relationships as practices of everyday multiculturalism’
One of the most profound effects of globalization is that people from everywhere are falling in love with people from everywhere else. Increasing migration worldwide has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, ethnicities and, presumably, cultural backgrounds. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, the classic assimilation theory no longer suffice in tackling the growth of large cities, which are witnessing unprecedented levels of diversity. We know little, therefore, about what happens the next generation down: the romantic relationships among young people in super-diverse urban contexts.
Drawing on narratives collected from a qualitative research study, this paper provides a beginning exploration for how difference both matters and does not matter in young adult (native born) Italians’ relationships with the second generation migrants in the metropolitan area of Milan. What meaning is made about these differences? And what is the role of the network, the extended family, the neighborhood, and others in constructing difference? In eliciting discourses of difference, mixed couples face more prejudice from outsiders, and subsequently they may feel that the experience of diversity is a source of great stress. Particularly from their parents, tensions and negative reactions are based on discriminatory attitudes and preconceptions linked to the partner’s origin, phenotype or ethnocultural characteristics, such as religion, in intersection with gender. At the same time these relationships represent a ‘quiet revolution’ that holds for re-envisioning people’s idea of ‘us and them’, challenging what it means to inhabit multiculturalism in our everyday lives.
Keywords
Intercultural Relationships, Everyday Multiculturalism, Second Generation Migrants, Young Adults, Integration, Milan
Authors
Lidia MANZO, lidia.manzo@unimi.it
Enzo COLOMBO, enzo.colombo@unimi.it
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy)
Download the full conference program

 

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New journal article “Supported Home Ownership and Adult Independence in Milan: The Gilded Cage of Family Housing Gifts and Transfers”

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A new research article reflecting on practices of intergenerational support for homeownership among different generations of families in Milan has now been published online on Sociology and is available at “https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038518798761“. The article explores the meanings and moral reasoning behind the decision to accept (or not) support in context of contemporary discourses surrounding the liquidity and availability of housing and finance. It highlights the moral compromises and emotional negotiations inherent in the giving and receiving of support for housing, contributing to a body of literature concerned with the reproduction of home and family. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of homes and housing assets in mediating dependence and re-affirming family bonds within a family-oriented welfare context, despite conflict, resistance and frustrated aspirations.

Lidia KC Manzo, Oana Druta, Richard Ronald (2018). “Supported Home Ownership and Adult Independence in Milan: The Gilded Cage of Family Housing Gifts and Transfers“ in Sociology 00(0). DOI: 10.1177/0038038518798761

Post-Crash Cities: Housing Financialisation, late-Neoliberalism and Community Responses

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Pre-Conference of Irish Geographers Workshop

Maynooth University | South Campus | Rhetoric House | ROQUE LAB | Maynooth | Ireland
Tuesday, 8 May 2018 at 15:30 – Wednesday, 9 May 2018 at 19:00 (IST)

The increased intertwining of finance and real estate was a prelude to and intimately bound up with the global economic crisis, yet the aftermath has been particularly dynamic as new roles are cast for private-equity firms and other financial actors in the ‘for-rent’ residential sector and as states engineer new policies to further affirm the treatment of housing as a financial asset. One upshot of these new post-crash configurations of cities has been to accentuate sharply the vulnerability of urban communities, left with fewer state protections and buffers to resist urban marginalization.

This workshop brings together the latest theories and empirical findings in the research field surrounding contemporary cities and late-neoliberalism, taking into account the ‘aftermath’ of the global economic crisis and its different implications – from political-economic arrangements to more micro consequences for urban communities, such as housing accessibility crises, marginalized citizenries and raising socio-spatial segregation. It does so with a multi-disciplinary approach that seeks to better unify geographical, economic, political, sociological and anthropological understandings of the intertwining of global processes of financialisation of housing and gentrification with neoliberal urban policies at different scales.

The ‘Post-Crash Cities’ workshop is organised by Sinéad Kelly and Lidia K.C. Manzo at Maynooth University, Department of Geography with the generous support of Maynooth University Conference & Workshop Fund, Irish Research Council, MU Department of Geography.

Attendance is free and we hope that you will all enjoy it!

Register here: https://post-crashcities.eventbrite.ie

 

For enquires about this workshop please contact: lidia.manzo@mu.ie

All details can be found on the MU Department of Geography website: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/geography/events

And on the Conference of Irish Geographers’ website: http://www.conferenceofirishgeographers.ie/events