Community Ties
Low-income Lone Mothers, Citizenship and Public Space: Contestations of Belonging
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lea Caragata
This paper explores gendered and racialized income inequality and its implications for ‘belonging’ and inclusion in Toronto, Canada. Once regarded as one of the world’s most livable cities, globalization related changes have caused dramatic transformations in Toronto and across the country. Canada’s growing precarious labor market now accounts for the employ of almost 30% of Canadian workers. Characterized by the uncertainty of continuing employment, low wages and minimal regulatory protection, these labor market differences mark a major social divide that is perhaps especially visible in Toronto, a key labor market hub. These employment shifts and their social and economic effects have been exacerbated by the retrenchment of social citizenship rights and welfare benefits. In this context, accompanied by US-styled ‘workfare’ requirements, low-income lone mothers are an increasingly vulnerable population. This economic vulnerability is marked in place and space. This paper utilizes data from a longitudinal research program that examined the impacts of work-first welfare policy and labor market change on poor lone mothers in 3 Canadian cities. Data from 3 sets of interviews with 38 lone mothers from Toronto are analyzed exploring women’s attachment to place and experiences of urban life. Explored are themes of safety, engagement, integration – and exclusion - to understand whether and to what extent the assets of a city such as Toronto accrue to its citizens who are gendered, racialized – and poor. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of these changes for Canadian cities, for social cohesion and a sense of belonging.
The Link: A Collaborative, Community-focused Approach to Examining How Diverse Cultural and Social Contexts Translates into the Built Environment
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anthony Monica, Peter Aylsworth
In the Fall of 2023, faculty at Belmont University coordinated a collaborative partnership between the American Institute of Architects, the Civic Design Center, and Music City Baseball (MCB), to develop a uniquely impactful, interdisciplinary design studio project. A private investment and development organization, MCB is committed to bringing a Major League Baseball franchise to the city of Nashville as part of a new mixed-use entertainment district. Interdisciplinary design teams, including Architecture and Interior Design students, were established to develop proposals for extensive community-centric programs in conjunction with MCB’s vision for the new district. As part of that vision, teams were challenged to tell the story of the original Nashville Stars, a historic Negro League Baseball team, to which the new team’s name will pay tribute. The site identified for the project was in a historically under-resourced African American community divided by the construction of Interstate 40 in the 1960’s, and decimated by other hardships dating back to the 1930’s. This further challenged the students to consider how design can preserve a community’s history, while celebrating its future. Given the project’s scale, client, site, and relevant history, students were forced to consider how diverse cultural and social contexts translate into the built environment and how the integrated nature of the profession impacts the design process across multiple scales of community projects. This paper tells the story of this project: its context, methodologies, outcomes, and potential impacts, illustrating a potential model for future collaborative public/private partnerships and educational interdisciplinary design studios.
Entangled Stories: The Production of Belonging for Sierra Leonean Muslims Living in the Interstices between Home (Sierra Leone) and Abroad (Washington, D.C.)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session JoAnn D'Alisera
This paper focuses on the experiential and narrative logics of public storytelling by Sierra Leonean Muslims living in Washington D.C. I illustrate how reflexive accounts of loss, despair, and accommodation to diasporic circumstances produce interpretive vocabularies that enable subjects to negotiate highly charged contested moments that emerge at the intersection of nostalgic longing, global Muslim expression, and exilic displacement. I examine how the public expression of personal narrative is an effective strategy to interrogate the Sierra Leonean Muslim diasporic experience and contribute to the production of post-migration subjectivities. In so doing, I show how publicly articulated self-understanding can be especially useful for the exploration of the ways that nostalgic longing for Sierra Leone and everyday lived experiences in the diaspora form new understandings, spatial practices, and material expression that call attention to and counter intense feelings of displacement with a collective sense of belonging that has a profound impact on the way diasporic urban spaces are reimagined. Publicly sharing powerful affective personal stories allows people to negotiate the ongoing struggle to reconcile complex positionalities that reside in the disjunctive gap between home and diaspora and provide insights into the intersection of individual life trajectories and collective forces beyond the individual. They thus offer a methodologically privileged location from which to comprehend human agency and the intersubjective dimensions of social life lived across transnational ethnoscapes.
