Fluent Essays

Answering the prompt through the reading provided. 1 to 2 paragraphs. The answer needs to be thoughtful and accurate. NO OUTSIDE should be use! valentine_geogs_encounter.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Progress in Human Geography 32(3) (2008) pp. 323–337
Progress in Human Geography lecture Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter† Gill Valentine* School of Geography, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK Abstract: In this Progress in Human Geography annual lecture I reflect on geographical contributions to academic and policy debates about how we might forge civic culture out of difference. In doing so I begin by tracing a set of disparate geographical writings – about the micro-publics of everyday life, cosmopolitanism hospitality, and new urban citizenship – that have sought to understand the role of shared space in providing the opportunity for encounter between ‘strangers’. This literature is considered in the light of an older tradition of work about ‘the contact hypothesis’ from psychology. Then, employing original empirical material, I critically reflect on the notion of ‘meaningful contact’ to explore the paradoxical gap that emerges in geographies of encounter between values and practices. In the conclusion I argue for the need for geographers to pay more attention to sociospatial inequalities and the insecurities they breed, and to unpacking the complex and intersecting ways in which power operates. Key words: encounter, inequality, intersectionality, power, prejudice. I The contact hypothesis Stuart Hall (1993: 361) has argued that ‘the capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the 21st century’. This question – framed in the more specific terms of how we might forge a civic culture out of difference – is something that has come to preoccupy a number of geographers recently through diverse writings about new urban citizenship, cosmopolitanism, hospitality and activism (eg, Amin, 2002; Yeoh, 2004; Barnett, 2005; Binnie et al., 2006; Chatterton, 2006; Iveson, 2006; 2007; Bell, 2007). While Geography might seem to us to be a natural disciplinary arena for such concerns given the implicit role of shared space in providing the opportunity for encounters between strangers, the importance of contact in mediating difference has a longer tradition in the discipline of psychology. Here, seminal work in the 1950s on prejudice by the social psychologist Gordon Allport (1954) developed what became widely known as the ‘contact hypothesis’. His thesis – which was influential across the social sciences more widely – was that the best way to reduce prejudice and promote social integration was to bring different groups together. The basis of his argument was that people are uncomfortable with the unknown † Given at the annual conference of RGS-IBG, London in August 2007 *Email: g.valentine@leeds.ac.uk © 2008 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309133308089372 324 Progress in Human Geography 32(3) and so feel anxious about encounters with difference. He argued that contact is an effective prejudice reduction strategy because it lessens feelings of uncertainty and anxiety by producing a sense of knowledge or familiarity between strangers, which in turn generates a perception of predictability and control. This behaviourist approach fell by the wayside in the 1980s as the focus in the social sciences shifted away from a concern with majority prejudice, towards a concentration on the experiences of minority groups and a focus on recognition and rights as the basis for social change. With this emphasis on the specificities and validation of ‘difference’, the issue of contact between majority and minority populations, alongside a concern with prejudice as a concept, became somewhat obscured (Valentine, 2007a). It is a matter, however, that has recently rematerialized within Geography and Urban Studies. After a decade or so in which the city was characterized as site of crime, conflict and withdrawal (eg, Valentine, 1989; Davis, 1990; Smith, 1996; Mitchell, 2003), the city of the twenty-first century is being reimagined as a site of connection. Iris Marion Young was one of the first commentators to celebrate the city as a site of difference. She described city life as ‘a being together of strangers’ (Young, 1990: 240). More recently, Doreen Massey (2005: 181) has referred to our ‘throwntogetherness’ with others in the city; Laurier and Philo (2006: 193) describe the city as ‘the place, above all, of living with others’; while Sennett (2001) argues that: ‘[a] city is a place where people can … enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives … to develop a richer, more complex sense of themselves’. Much of the writing that is associated with what might be regarded as a ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in thinking about the city celebrates the potential for the forging of new hybrid cultures and ways of living together with difference but without actually spelling out how this is being, or might be, achieved in practice (Sennett, 1999; Bridge and Watson, 2002). Rather, it is implied that cultural difference will somehow be dissolved by a process of mixing or hybridization of culture in public space (eg, Young, 2002). For example, Mica Nava (2006: 50) describes the everyday domestic cultures in many of London’s neighbourhoods as signalling ‘increasingly undifferentiated, hybrid, postmulticultural, lived transformations which are the outcomes of diasporic cultural mixing and indeterminacy’. She further argues that, what she terms the ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ of London represents a ‘generous hospitable engagement with people from elsewhere, a commitment to an imagined inclusive transnational community of disparate Londoners’ (Nava, 2006: 50). Focusing on the micro-scale of everyday public encounters and interactions, Eric Laurier and Chris Philo (2006) claim that low-level sociability, for example, in terms of holding doors, sharing seats and so on, represents one ‘doing’ of togetherness, one facet of mutual acknowledgement. Laurier et al. (2002: 353) write: ‘The massively apparent fact is that people in cities do talk to one another as customers and shopkeepers, passengers and cabdrivers, members of a bus queue, regulars at cafes and bars, tourists and locals, beggars and by-passers, Celtic fans, smokers looking for a light, and course … as neighbours.’ Ash Amin (2006: 1012) refers to such civil exchanges (after Lefebvre) as ‘small achievements in the good city’. Likewise, Nigel Thrift (2005) has argued that the mundane friendliness that characterizes many everyday urban public encounters represents a baseline democracy that might be fostered. He talks about overlooked geographies of kindness and compassion and about the potential for leaching these practices into the wider world (Thrift, 2005). Richard Boyd (2006) goes one step further to suggest that civility has a vital place in contemporary urban life and should be understood as form of pluralism predicated on moral equality. However, I want to argue that the extent to which these everyday Gill Valentine: Reflections on geographies of encounter 325 spatial practices and civilities truly represent, or can be scaled up to build, the intercultural dialogue and exchange necessary for the kind of new urban citizenship that commentators (Isin, 2000; Staeheli, 2003) are either already celebrating – or at least calling for – needs much closer consideration. Some of the writing about cosmopolitanism and new urban citizenship appears to be laced with a worrying romanticization of urban encounter and to implicitly reproduce a potentially naïve assumption that contact with ‘others’ necessarily translates into respect for difference. In this paper, I therefore draw on a wider literature review, and original material from a research project about white majority prejudice, to think more closely about what Sennett (2000) refers to as the importance of the ‘collectivity of space’. I begin by critiquing some of the work celebrating urban encounters through using empirical examples of where contact with difference leaves attitudes and values unmoved, and even hardened, before going on to consider debates about what kind of encounters produce what might be termed ‘meaningful contact’. By this I mean contact that actually changes values and translates beyond the specifics of the individual moment into a more general positive respect for – rather than merely tolerance of – others. In doing so, I identify a paradoxical gap that emerges in geographies of encounter between values and practices. The empirical material employed in this paper comes from a qualitative research project funded by Citizenship 21 as part of a two-stage investigation into the nature of prejudice. This study addressed negative social attitudes towards a range of minority groups, not just minority ethnic and migrant communities. In the first stage, MORI (a social research company, now known as MORI IPSOS) conducted a nationwide questionnaire survey about prejudice for Citizenship 21. The survey asked respondents which groups, if any, they felt less positive towards. It was completed by 1693 adults who were interviewed across 167 constituency-based sampling points. The data was weighted to reflect the national population profile. The results of the poll were published in a report titled Profiles of Prejudice (Citizenship 21, 2003). The subsequent qualitative study upon which this paper draws was funded by Citizenship 21 to understand some of the patterns identified in the national survey. It involved nine focus group discussions and 30 in-depth autobiographical interviews with white majority participants. The research design included both group and individual methods because previous research has shown that some individuals feel more comfortable expressing particular attitudes in a social context with others, whereas others may only talk freely in a private, one-to-one situation. The focus groups were used to look at shared values and general issues, whereas the individual interviews were designed to examine the particular processes that shaped individuals’ biographies and the development of their social attitudes. Like the survey this qualitative research focused on the white majority informants’ attitudes towards a range of minority and marginalized social groups (including, for example, disabled people, lesbians and gay men, transsexual people, gypsy and travellers, women, children and young people, asylum-seekers, minority ethnic and faith-based communities). In this sense, this research extends much of the writing about geographies of encounter because it focuses on a complex range of intersecting differences rather than adopting the more common bipolar approach of considering only relations between white majority and minority ethnic groups. The qualitative research was based in three contrasting UK locations: London, the West Midlands, and the southwest. Details of the specific locations are withheld to protect the anonymity of those who participated in the study. The quotations presented in this paper are verbatim.1 326 Progress in Human Geography 32(3) II Parallel lives? There is increasing evidence that contact between different social groups alone is not sufficient to produce respect (eg, Valentine and MacDonald, 2004). Indeed, many everyday moments of contact between different individuals or groups in the city do not really count as encounters at all. In a study of social interactions in urban public places in Aylesbury, UK, Caroline Holland and colleagues (Holland et al., 2007) found that, although their research sites were frequented by a range of different groups, this did not necessarily mean that there was any contact between the diverse inhabitants. Rather, their observations suggested that while different groups coexisted and even observed each other, none the less there was little actual mixing between different users who self-segregated within particular spaces, carving out their own territory. A similar study, by Dines and Cattell (2006) in east London, UK, found that good relations tended to emerge in spaces such as a park attached to a school where the parents’ interests and attachments to place were able to converge and evolve. Likewise, Ash Amin (2002) has observed that city streets are spaces of transit that produce little actual connection or exchange between strangers. A process exacerbated by the emergence of a mobile phone culture, which Deborah Cameron (2000) has observed, contributes to incivility in public space as individuals move in and through locations while locked in the private worlds of their conversations with remote others. Other studies have also provided evidence that low-level incivilities still persist, with so-called ‘respectable people’, including the middle-aged and elderly, being most likely to be rude to strangers in interpersonal encounters (Phillips and Smith, 2006). Beck (2002; 2006; see also Beck and Sznaider, 2006) argues that, although an internalized globalization of society has occurred, not everyone sees themselves as part of this cosmopolitanism or will choose to participate in interactions with people different from themselves. Spatial proximity can actually breed defensiveness and the bounding of identities and communities (Young, 1990). Both the Home Office (2001) and the Chair of the UK Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips (2005) [now head of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission], have raised concerns about self-segregation within some UK communities. A report by the Home Office community cohesion independent review team describes, for example, a picture in which ‘[S]eparate: educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. Their lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchange’ (Home Office, 2001: para 2.1). Indeed, Debbie Phillips (2006) has recently demonstrated that, contrary to popular stereotypes of British Muslims as selfsegregating and culturally inward-looking, her research participants had a range of housing aspirations and neighbourhood preferences, and some had sought to live in mixed neighbourhoods. However, these preferences for greater interaction with people from other backgrounds were frustrated by white self-segregation in the suburbs, institutional racism in housing markets and racial harassment. This quotation from one of the focus groups captures a sense of the persistence of divided communities (albeit in relation to other ethnic groups): R1: Like the Jew boys … I mean I wouldn’t go to Stamford Hill (a Jewish neighbourhood) and I wouldn’t be allowed to go in their community … R2: You would be allowed but. R1: But I wouldn’t feel right in their community … and they wouldn’t feel right in my community. (London, focus group) Gill Valentine: Reflections on geographies of encounter 327 Indeed, it is close proximity which often generates or aggravates comparisons between different social groups in terms of perceived or actual access to resources and special treatment. The West Midlands site where this research was conducted is an area of relative social and economic deprivation. Many of the informants were in comparatively low-income or unstable forms of employment and had either housing or health concerns relating to themselves, their children or older parents. They told community-based narratives of injustice and victimhood, for example that migrants are stealing jobs, that minority groups such as Muslims, lesbian and gay men and disabled people are receiving unfair cultural support or legal protection and so on. In both forms of account – of economic and cultural injustice – minority groups were represented as dependent on the State. This position of parasitism was contrasted in these narratives with the perceived unacknowledged rights and contribution to society of the white majority community. The research in London was conducted in one of the most culturally diverse boroughs that has an indigenous white working-class population as well as significant Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and Turkish communities and a growing number of refugees and asylum-seekers. This area has also undergone a process of gentrification in the past 10 years and so is also socio-economically diverse. Here, the white majority interviewees’ accounts were also laced with examples of perceived economic and social injustices. These included claims that minority groups were taking advantage of the welfare system and receiving preferential treatment in terms of benefits, housing and health care as well as receiving financial and political support for their own faiths, languages and wider cultural practices. In each research location such narratives provided the basis for the interviewees’ justifications of their openly held prejudices towards minority groups in the local neighbourhood (Valentine, 2007a), as these quotations demonstrate: They forget that they’ve been born and bred here [referring to British minority ethnic groups] but they’re not putting anything into the country … you know they’re taking … you know people who haven’t worked for over 20 years and they’re getting this, that and the other, to me they’re not putting anything in … Because most people round here they’re workers, they’ve always worked and everything and everybody works. (Woman, 60s, West Midlands) If there’s an English bloke, or a white bloke let’s say and you get one of these coloured ones, these immigrants coming in the country. They struggle between them and it’s always the white bloke’s fault, not the other’s fault, they always take the side of these immigrants which they shouldn’t. (West Midlands, focus group) R1: To be truthful, it’s like they had a mosque put on Station Road and on a quiet day, like a Sunday morning you will hear it, yeah. R2: Wailing. R1: To be truthful when I hear it I do, I will say I feel like I’m in some other country, do you know what I mean? Interviewer: It’s cultural strangeness? R3: Yeah it is strange. R4: It doesn’t mix. R1: No, it don’t feel right to have that on your doorstep anyway. But they’ve built that when they should I think have other important things to build … R2: There’s schools and hospitals that are needed and they build a mosque. They closed the Children’s Hospital … that children’s hospital had been there for years and years. Interviewer: So the mosque you’re saying? R2: It was taken from taxpayer’s money. R1: It came from the council it shouldn’t have … it’s a grievance. (London, focus group) 328 Progress in Human Geography 32(3) In the context of such personal and community insecurity, it is possible to see why some find it hard to have mutual regard for groups they perceive as an economic or cultural threat. Indeed, being prejudiced can actually serve positive ends for some people, for example, by providing them with a scapegoat for their own personal social or economic failures (Valentine, 2007a). This means that prejudiced individuals can have a vested interest in remaining intolerant despite positive individual social encounters with communities/individuals different from themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, everything from hate crimes and violence to discrimination and incivility, motivated by intolerance between communities in close proximity to each other, is commonplace. The geography literature documents many examples of socially mixed neighbourhoods that are territorialized by particular groups and rife with tensions over different ways of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ in shared space (Webster, 1996; Watt, 1998; Watt and Stenson, 1998). These include power struggles and conflicts over the ownership and ... Purchase answer to see full attachment