Social Change and the Everyday Practice of Dealing with Difference in the City: Banal Transgression in Allotment Gardens

• Applicant: Dr. Nina Schuster
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389804180

The planned project aims to connect a perspective on social inequality with a conflict theory perspective on the everyday practices of dealing with difference in the city. Due to social inequality and the related unequal distribution of material and symbolic goods, of formal education and life chances as well as due to social exclusion on the basis of prejudice and discrimination, processes of differentiation are a relevant issue of social research. The project will use Bourdieus understanding of social space as a relational "space of power positions" whose participants struggle for the positions in social space. In these struggles, each one is disposing of a different set of capital and is underlying structural constraints. The project will focus on the everyday practices of differentiation, with special interest for the contexts and mechanisms of the everyday "doing difference" (Fenstermaker/West) as well as for the categories of difference used for the everyday presentations and constructions.For urban societies, social heterogeneity has always been fundamental and cities have always been expected to crucially contribute to social integration. But since the 1970s mass loss of jobs in the productive sector, some sociologists worry about the missing of an integrational mode and about a growing social divide for Western societies. They also fear that spatial dynamics within powerful spatial processes in the city might intensify existing social inequalities. In consequence, contemporary and future cities are sketched as places of conflict that is complicating and preventing integration. Thus, urban sociologist detect a lack of forms and situations to revive and develop an integrated urban society.The planned study relates to that diagnosis, using a conflict theoretical approach that reverses the assumption of conflicts as signs of disintegration. Conflict theoretical approaches in social theory consider conflicts as crucial for a society (Dahrendorf). In order to clarify the urgent question of how urban societies manage to deal with difference, the proposed project will direct attention to contexts of "banal transgression" (Amin). Amin considers the everyday micro-publics where people connect and coexist while unavoidably negotiating difference. In these settings of inevitable contact, participants depend on each other in a framing that is neither family- nor friendship-oriented. The proposed project is an ethnographic study of six allotment garden associations in the cities of Dortmund and Leipzig. With regard to urban social life, German allotment gardens are still quite relevant. The study addresses the everyday practices of coexistence-togetherness of its participants considering their function for banal transgression in processes of differentiation and conflict.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants