Silvia Pasquetti
Before joining Newcastle, I was a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow (Clare Hall) at the University of Cambridge. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2017-2018 I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton.
I am an interdisciplinary scholar and ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, political sociology, and the sociology of race. I have a focused interest in the study of forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of coloniality, race, militarism, and urban marginality.
I have published on issues of coloniality, displacement, urban militarism, law, emotions, and moral-political dispositions among Palestinians across the Green Line in journals such as: Theory & Society, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Political Power & Social Theory, International Sociology, and City. I have also published public sociology essays and review essays in British Journal of Sociology, Contexts, and Merip.
I am currently finishing an ethnographic book on emotions and political life among Palestinians in Lydda, an Israeli city, and Palestinians in Jalazun, a West Bank refugee camp whose inhabitants were displaced from Lydda during the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948. The book traces the different relationships of these two Palestinian populations with the Israeli security state within the broader settler colonial geography imposed on them and explores convergences and divergences in their emotions and political life. The book, titled Refugees and Citizens: Control, Emotions, and Politics in a West Bank Refugee Camp and an Israeli "Mixed" City is under contract with Oxford University Press for the series on Global and Comparative Ethnography.
I have also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southern and Northern towns in Italy as part of a new ethnographic project on global displacement and local urban marginalities across the Mediterranean. Fieldwork will be extended to North African cities. This project tentatively titled Injuries of Refuge: Refugees and Chains of Marginality examines old and new marginalities in the context of (post)colonial histories of mobility, urban marginality, border formation, and refugee reception. Two publications from this project can be found in The Middle East Report (Into the Emergency Maze: Injuries of Refuge in a Sicilian Town, 2016) and Qualitative Sociology (How Place Matters for Migrants' Socio-Legal Experiences, 2022, with Noemi Casati).
I am also working on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Displacement starting from his fieldwork with Abdelmalek Sayad in colonial Algeria (and also incorporating Sayad's sociology of postcolonial migration). I briefly discussed this strand of my work in its connections with Palestinian predicaments today at a workshop which was held at Chicago Sociology for the first edition in English of Bourdieu's Uprooting. Here you find the recording of part of the event (unfortunately the presentation on Bourdieu and Sayad's field experiences in colonial Algeria by Loic Wacquant is not there but please check out talks by Amin Perez and George Steinmetz):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEX9pYujFXY&t=1003s
I am an interdisciplinary scholar and ethnographer working at the intersection of law and society scholarship, urban studies, political sociology, and the sociology of race. I have a focused interest in the study of forced displacement in comparative and global perspective and in connection to histories and structures of coloniality, race, militarism, and urban marginality.
I have published on issues of coloniality, displacement, urban militarism, law, emotions, and moral-political dispositions among Palestinians across the Green Line in journals such as: Theory & Society, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Political Power & Social Theory, International Sociology, and City. I have also published public sociology essays and review essays in British Journal of Sociology, Contexts, and Merip.
I am currently finishing an ethnographic book on emotions and political life among Palestinians in Lydda, an Israeli city, and Palestinians in Jalazun, a West Bank refugee camp whose inhabitants were displaced from Lydda during the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948. The book traces the different relationships of these two Palestinian populations with the Israeli security state within the broader settler colonial geography imposed on them and explores convergences and divergences in their emotions and political life. The book, titled Refugees and Citizens: Control, Emotions, and Politics in a West Bank Refugee Camp and an Israeli "Mixed" City is under contract with Oxford University Press for the series on Global and Comparative Ethnography.
I have also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southern and Northern towns in Italy as part of a new ethnographic project on global displacement and local urban marginalities across the Mediterranean. Fieldwork will be extended to North African cities. This project tentatively titled Injuries of Refuge: Refugees and Chains of Marginality examines old and new marginalities in the context of (post)colonial histories of mobility, urban marginality, border formation, and refugee reception. Two publications from this project can be found in The Middle East Report (Into the Emergency Maze: Injuries of Refuge in a Sicilian Town, 2016) and Qualitative Sociology (How Place Matters for Migrants' Socio-Legal Experiences, 2022, with Noemi Casati).
I am also working on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Displacement starting from his fieldwork with Abdelmalek Sayad in colonial Algeria (and also incorporating Sayad's sociology of postcolonial migration). I briefly discussed this strand of my work in its connections with Palestinian predicaments today at a workshop which was held at Chicago Sociology for the first edition in English of Bourdieu's Uprooting. Here you find the recording of part of the event (unfortunately the presentation on Bourdieu and Sayad's field experiences in colonial Algeria by Loic Wacquant is not there but please check out talks by Amin Perez and George Steinmetz):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEX9pYujFXY&t=1003s
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JOURNAL ARTICLES by Silvia Pasquetti
https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/pgrsociology/2020/07/16/towards-sanctuary-reflecting-on-clients-stories-and-the-june-2020-wers-webinar-lifelines-lockdown-imagination-and-trust/
https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/pgrsociology/2020/07/16/the-west-end-refugee-service-wers-at-20-histories-and-challenges-of-refuge-in-newcastle/
This blog entry is part of a broader virtual initiative on refugee lives in Newcastle (UK) co-produced by Newcastle Sociology Staff Members and Students and the West End Refugee Service (WERS), a charity that has worked with refugees for twenty years. Marking WERS 20th anniversary year, this blog reflects on histories, spaces, and practices of refuge in Newcastle. It situates WERS' important role in the broader trajectory of the city from a site of 'dispersal' of refugees driven by top-down Home Office policies to a bottom-up (still ongoing) process of building spaces of sanctuary. It is part of a critical exercise in collective reflexivity on how we can turn memories into action and mobilize the past to redress social inequality and injustice in the present. This exercise also includes a webinar with WERS staff members and undergraduate sociology students. Link to the webinar is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mc1SVXyO0Q&t=133s
We would like to thank the Newcastle Centre for Heritage and the Sites of Conscience Network for their support for this ongoing project.
This blog is released as part of Newcastle University Refugee Week Program 2020.
pragmatic sociology of ordinary judgments of fairness.
Available at:
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/CRZXBRSNZYMVS83SWJXG/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101518-042609
BOOK REVIEWS by Silvia Pasquetti
CONFERENCES & WORKSHOPS by Silvia Pasquetti
While challenged or obfuscated by perspectives such as multiculturalism and hybridity, the ‘ideal’ city often evokes hygenized and purified urban spaces, which are divided along class, race, and nationality. Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, among others, have highlighted the role of ideas of purity and pollution in structuring social relations and subjectivities. Studies on sex and gender urban divisions, sanitation, and, more broadly, ‘technological networks’ within cities have deployed the concepts of purity and pollution as meta-phenomena relating to certain symbolic meanings, but not as broader ideals actively shaping social relations.
This session aims to address how the paired concepts of purity and pollution shape urban policy, public discourses, everyday practices, and their related negotiations, critiques and resistances. In particular, we will address the making and unmaking of urban closures, which are intended as both splitted spatial configurations and mental and symbolic processes of purified partitioning.
We seek papers focusing on:
• the (de)formation of purified urban localities,
• the production and working of hygenized mental maps,
• the role of ideals of purity within cities.
We are equally interested in papers looking at how purified urban configurations are lived through, negotiated, and transgressed. In examining these questions, the session invites papers that explore specific historical or contemporary case studies, engage in broader theoretical reflections, as well as papers that approach the making and unmaking of urban closures from a comparative and global perspective.
https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/pgrsociology/2020/07/16/towards-sanctuary-reflecting-on-clients-stories-and-the-june-2020-wers-webinar-lifelines-lockdown-imagination-and-trust/
https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/pgrsociology/2020/07/16/the-west-end-refugee-service-wers-at-20-histories-and-challenges-of-refuge-in-newcastle/
This blog entry is part of a broader virtual initiative on refugee lives in Newcastle (UK) co-produced by Newcastle Sociology Staff Members and Students and the West End Refugee Service (WERS), a charity that has worked with refugees for twenty years. Marking WERS 20th anniversary year, this blog reflects on histories, spaces, and practices of refuge in Newcastle. It situates WERS' important role in the broader trajectory of the city from a site of 'dispersal' of refugees driven by top-down Home Office policies to a bottom-up (still ongoing) process of building spaces of sanctuary. It is part of a critical exercise in collective reflexivity on how we can turn memories into action and mobilize the past to redress social inequality and injustice in the present. This exercise also includes a webinar with WERS staff members and undergraduate sociology students. Link to the webinar is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mc1SVXyO0Q&t=133s
We would like to thank the Newcastle Centre for Heritage and the Sites of Conscience Network for their support for this ongoing project.
This blog is released as part of Newcastle University Refugee Week Program 2020.
pragmatic sociology of ordinary judgments of fairness.
Available at:
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/CRZXBRSNZYMVS83SWJXG/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101518-042609
While challenged or obfuscated by perspectives such as multiculturalism and hybridity, the ‘ideal’ city often evokes hygenized and purified urban spaces, which are divided along class, race, and nationality. Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, among others, have highlighted the role of ideas of purity and pollution in structuring social relations and subjectivities. Studies on sex and gender urban divisions, sanitation, and, more broadly, ‘technological networks’ within cities have deployed the concepts of purity and pollution as meta-phenomena relating to certain symbolic meanings, but not as broader ideals actively shaping social relations.
This session aims to address how the paired concepts of purity and pollution shape urban policy, public discourses, everyday practices, and their related negotiations, critiques and resistances. In particular, we will address the making and unmaking of urban closures, which are intended as both splitted spatial configurations and mental and symbolic processes of purified partitioning.
We seek papers focusing on:
• the (de)formation of purified urban localities,
• the production and working of hygenized mental maps,
• the role of ideals of purity within cities.
We are equally interested in papers looking at how purified urban configurations are lived through, negotiated, and transgressed. In examining these questions, the session invites papers that explore specific historical or contemporary case studies, engage in broader theoretical reflections, as well as papers that approach the making and unmaking of urban closures from a comparative and global perspective.
Silvia PASQUETTI, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, [email protected]
Giovanni PICKER, Higher School of Economics, Russia, [email protected]
Abstract
At the turn of the twenty-first century, informality and confinement are perhaps the most striking features of the everyday lives of the urban poor across the globe. On the one hand, scholars such as Asef Bayat and AbdouMaliq Simone have argued that, under conditions of global neoliberalism, informality has become “a way of life” for the urban poor especially but not only in the Global South. On the other hand, however, the state infrastructural power over dispossessed populations has not disappeared and state and international bureaucracies increasingly relied on devices of spatial confinement to manage dispossessed people within or at the outskirts of cities in both the Global North and the Global South.
This session aims to explore the interplay between informality and confinement at both the macrolevel of neoliberal processes, modern bureaucracies, and forms of control and the microlevel of everyday emotions, moralities, and practices.
We seek papers that will help us bring informality and confinement within the same analytic framework thus allowing a better understanding of how these two features of life at the urban margins – in their spatial logics and effects – interact with one another in the policy arena as well as on the ground. Specifically, we seek papers that study dwelling and employment practices among urban populations who experience spatial confinement, as well as papers that explore the ways through which state and international bureaucracies manage – allow, contain, or suppress – these practices. Our goal is to generate scholarly debates on the interactions between informality and confinement in everyday life and in the policy arena: How and to what extent informal practices belong to ruling agencies and to the experience of people inhabiting spaces of confinement such as refugee camps, camps or villages for Roma/Travellers, centers for undocumented migrants, squatter settlements, and ghettos? Under what conditions and through which ways do state and other ruling agencies accept, reward, suppress, and punish informal practices from below?