I was thinking about organising my literature review into “things I see myself in relationship with, hoping to deepen and breathe with” and “things I want to push against, turning and twisting into different directions”
I also have come to realise that
This research is founded on the fact that we can’t build everyday lives alone. That the stuff of collective everyday life, which for many - is the post-modern, neoliberal hegemonic praxis - and is the reflexive practice cultural and artistic practice. It is constructing through and by itself.
Solomon, Debra, and Maria Kaika. ‘Methodological Rift: Applying Infrastructure Activism’s “Skin in the Game” Embodied Art Research Methods to Urban Green Infrastructure Planning’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 7, no. 4 (2024): 1504–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241256622.
These include action research, grounded theory, participant observation, performance ethnography, field study, autobiographical narrative and thick description (KUNCI Study Forum and Collective, 2023). The appearance of the longitudinal embeddedness of qualitative methods in such contexts also means that artistic research methods are embedded in the social sciences.
Loftus, Alex. ‘Intervening in the Environment of the Everyday’. Geoforum 40, no. 3 (2009): 326–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.04.005.
“Thus, through recognising the urbanisation of nature and the environment of the city as a terrain over which hegemony is consolidated and contested, and over which the struggle for a new culture might be conducted, urban interventions generate radical possibilities. The nature of the city becomes both an inspiration and a means of artistic production. In turn the conditions of possibility for revolutionary change are seen to be latent within the environment of the everyday. Experiencing this and, in turn, being able to intervene in the processes through which this experience is produced is key to the revolutionary possibilities in gramscian political ecologies.” (p332)
In my PhD, I keep writing about ‘arts collectives’ as the embodiment of this change - as many reflect on the physical material and everyday life
Doshi, Sapana. ‘Embodied Urban Political Ecology: Five Propositions’. Area 49, no. 1 (2017): 125–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12293.
Attention to embodiment helps avert dualistic framings that oppose docility and resistance. Embodying urban political ecologies in theory and practice thus deepens understandings of the terrain of political transformation.
urban ecology of arts collectives, specifically investigating the spatial influence, cultural urban development through time and the participation ‘oppositional placemaking’, where local actors actively shape spaces in and for their neighbourhoods. By mapping these influences, the research hopes to test the notion of a shared ecology, how do local actors participate, reject, or are even missing from participating in collectively built spaces.