Search

This essay opens with a creative response to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's short story 'The Shortcut through IKEA' and continues with a reader's appreciation of her 2012 short story collection The Shelter of Neighbours. Consisting of fourteen stories, the collection is set in the fictional south county Dublin estate of Dunroon Crescent. Each story draws, in one way or another, on the Irish proverb ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine ('people live in one another's shelter'). Dunroon Crescent is a community in proximity, where connections have either been forged or exist solely because of geography. The estate's inhabitants are detached from themselves and each other but their lives also overlap and intersect, illuminated by the light of their pasts, by remembered loss and the legacies of earlier choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of “neighbouring”—that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours—to potentially bolster the social fabric of neighbourhoods and strengthen relationships. With the potential of neighbourhood walking in mind, this article investigates how everyday encounters while engaged in routine neighbourhood walks strengthen and/or weaken social ties among neighbours. To this end, the article draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (a) “walking diaries” in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (b) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (c) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. The findings provide evidence of how interactions among inhabitants, while engaged in neighbourhood walking, help generate greater social connectedness.

Studies find a direct association of collective violence with relational distance: lower the relational distance, lower the violence. Where people live as neighbours, spatial proximity provides more opportunity for contact. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours who had previously coexisted with their victims in apparent harmony. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence is a social violation: it shakes our confidence in the collective values of 'neighbourliness' and the strength of prior relations. In two state-orchestrated pogroms in India – against Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in 2002 – the nature of prior neighbour relationships is delineated to identify why some neighbours participated in attacks, others in rescues. A qualitative analysis of 50 survivor affidavits and 41 in-depth interviews enabled reconstructing the texture of these relationships. Neighbourliness and situational factors (timing of attacks; built environment) provided a more nuanced understanding of behaviour. For democratic polities that authorise pogroms, findings challenge existing knowledge on contact and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of "neighbouring"--that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours--to potentially bolster the social fabric of neighbourhoods and strengthen relationships. With the potential of neighbourhood walking in mind, this article investigates how everyday encounters while engaged in routine neighbourhood walks strengthen and/or weaken social ties among neighbours. To this end, the article draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (a) "walking diaries" in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (b) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (c) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. The findings provide evidence of how interactions among inhabitants, while engaged in neighbourhood walking, help generate greater social connectedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on the pamphlet The Life and Death of Griffin Flood informer (1623), which tells the career and execution through pressing of an informer and murderer working in early modern London. It outlines what archival research reveals about this figure, and thereby re-examines how far crime pamphlets were rooted in social actuality. Secondly, it shows that The Life and Death does not follow what historians have identified as the conventions of rogue literature and murder pamphlets, and that scholars' treatment of cheap print has often overlooked its generic instability and inconsistency of tone. Finally, it highlights how the representation of Flood's career as an informer casts new light on attitudes towards non-citizens within early modern London. The article concludes by arguing that The Life and Death (and many similar pamphlets) invoked communitarian understandings of justice, and emphasized neighbourliness, social peace, and charity, rather than the themes of redemption and divine retribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Antwerp, everyday interactions in ethno-racially diverse neighbourhoods have become the object of polarized debate and policy interventions that posit 'living together' as an ideal. Residents routinely use living together as a frame to assess themselves and their neighbourhood. They also bring divergent vernacular moral practices and sensory experiences to everyday interactions across difference. This complicates understandings of conviviality as a singular, demarcatable dimension of urban life. This paper delineates, instead, theoretical, methodological and textual manoeuvres for approaching conviviality in the plural. Methodologically, biographical interviewing and go-alongs are combined to explore diverging vernacular modes of engagement, and their intersections. Textually, the stylistic device of a collage of 'mobile monologues' – first-person, situated stream-of-consciousness narrations – works to recreate in writing a polyphony of embodied and moral modes of being, and their unfolding across myriad interactions. Finally, mobile monologues bring-out understudied dimensions of conviviality: (1) the situated performance of local narratives, (2) the circulation of moral economies of neighbourliness, (3) the contested political resignification of vernacular notions and practices in relation to discourses of living together. Conviviality emerges as heterogeneously assembled from a multiplicity of intersecting vernacular universes, whose political relevance in relation to living together is actively made and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dansk Sociologi is the property of Djøf Forlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores how silence is held and transmitted through the materiality of deserted and abandoned places along the Polish frontier; and the generative role that silencing plays in local practices of tolerance. The article discusses two specific sites of silence in a town on Poland's eastern border. Both sites were abandoned or destroyed at the same time, and are part of a larger landscape of religious and ethnic conflict in the area. This history of conflict is managed through small everyday acts of forgetting, minimising and silencing. Yet, the two sites at the centre of this article demonstrate that silencing is an incomplete process. The fragmented materiality of the two places undercuts local silences, actively invoking experiences and memories of the Holocaust. The objects missing and present in these haunted places are too inconsequential to be considered ruins - one site is notable only because it is an empty field. Yet these sites and objects act as powerful silent traces. Traces, as Napolitano (2015) has observed, are knots of history with an ambiguous auratic presence, located between memory and forgetting, repression and amplification. Traces conjure that which we can and that which we cannot say. The deserted places of the town draw attention to the silences that conviviality is built upon. This article considers how paying close attention to the specific silences concerning 'unthinkable' histories can reveal the power relations embedded in the process of history making and community building not just nationally, but also at the local level (Trouillot 1995). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacement‐affected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge – spaces whose production is contingent on support from neighbourly relations and networks that are mediated in moments through conceptions of conviviality informed by religion. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. This helps highlight the limits built in to thinking about the movement of refugees from the global South through Euro‐centric ontologies of the social. More than this, following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socio‐cultural memories of jiwār or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. In turn, the evidence from Athens indicates that refugee perspectives on neighbourliness are imperfectly translated by migrant rights activists as solidarity, obscuring the different ways Muslim structures of feeling contribute to the production of refugee squats. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. Following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socio‐cultural memories of jiwār or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses an exceptionally well-documented law case from the 1650s to offer a fresh perspective on the English experience of Atlantic settlement during its early years. It argues for the centrality of the Essex county quarter sessions court in the building of neighbourhood on the geographic and cultural margins of the Massachusetts Bay colony. By focusing on the north-eastern margin at Cape Ann, the analysis reveals aspects of state building through a common law judicial process which was just as important, but less readily apparent, in other settings. The article addresses three major historiographic areas, engaging with the historical literature on English neighbourhoods and English adaptation to the American environment, on the significance of witchcraft or maleficium in English societies, and on the nature and meanings of law, law courts and judicial process in the building of communities. Case documents also enable the use of some concepts and techniques of literary analysis related to the study of narrative, arguing that judicial verdicts selected and suppressed aspects of local stories elicited during the course of the investigation in order to craft an account of local neighbourhood that suited a broader cultural narrative of Massachusetts Bay's political consolidation during the 1650s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the life in the neighbourhoods stuck between the gated communities recently built in the district of Sancaktepe, in terms of neighbourliness and social networks in the neighbourhood. In this context, in-depth interviews were conducted with the residents of the neighbourhoods about their lives, experiences, relations, urban structure, urban transformation and the rise of gated communities. All interviewees stated that they were generally content with where they lived, and, for most of them, the key factor for this satisfaction was the neighbourly relations. Contrary to the prevalent opinion that urbanization weakens the neighbourly relations, the neighbourhood residents emphasized the intensiveness of the neighbourly relations and its determining role in their lives, and they distinctly distinguished themselves from those living in the gated communities by virtue of these relations.

The article aims to show neighbourly relations based on the experiences of people living in three locations. The case analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork that was carried out in the small town of Kernavė (in the Širvintos district), and in the village of Marijampolis and the village of Nemėžis (both in the Vilnius district) in 2017 and 2018. A few goals were set: to learn how people in these places describe neighbourliness, to see if they have a differentiated attitude towards individual neighbours, to see what forms of mutual assistance connect them, to see how daily life and feasts are constructed in the neighbourhood, and to see what impact the changing place of residence has on neighbourly ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medium-density mixed-housing is promoted in various countries as a means toward creating more sustainable settlements. It does, however, require residents to live closer to their neighbours, share outdoor spaces, and be more neighbourly than what may typically be required in lower density suburban neighbourhoods. Yet, how important are outdoor design and neighbourliness for the success of medium-density mixed-housing in a South African context? This article examines the perceived importance of a number of outdoor design and neighbourliness factors from the point of view of residents living in such developments in South Africa. A survey of 300 residents across 10 developments reveals the importance of both outdoor design and neighbourliness, particularly if children, women, and older residents are involved. Planners and designers should, therefore, include sufficient private and common outdoor spaces to address the needs of residents and to promote neighbourliness and consequently the social acceptability of this type of housing in South Africa.

Despite the urgent need for local economic development in South Africa, Local Economic Development (LED) as area of professional endeavour/activity has largely failed to live up to this need. In this article, an alternative approach to local economic development, which involved a ‘bottom-up’ approach to urban renewal is explored. The urban renewal work of the Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA) in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality is used as a case study of a ‘successful example of an LED-initiative’. By taking into account the needs of the customer (or local community), a respect for difference, a conscious drive to ensure participation of, and benefit for all affected parties, keeping the eye on the ball, a desire to learn and innovate, and a pragmatic action-orientation, the MBDA achieved success in its local economic development initiatives. The value of this article lies in the experience of lessons learned, the overall understanding of urban planning, and the necessity for urban planning to respond to the local economy of a particular city.

This paper addresses the way that religious affiliation and conversion shape ongoing tensions over historical periods of exile, resettlement, exodus and elimination in a small town on the Eastern Polish border. I explore how local Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian’s negotiations of a troubled past are materialized and managed through narrating family histories of conversion, In particular, this paper focuses on the compromises that enable mixed faith marriages and the conflicts that emerge over the burial of religious converts. In these negotiations, members of both congregations deploy the local model of “neighbourliness” and the ideal of the borderlander, to greater and lesser success. Day-to-day the practice of considered neighbourliness helps local people to acknowledge and minimize religious and ethnic difference. However, conversion brings the realms of religion and relatedness into conjunction in a risky manner: marriage may offer an opportunity to enhance neighbourly connections, but burial is an event where the tensions over histories of conflict become apparent disrupting neighbourly relations and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we investigate the connections between population development, socio-economic status and the sense of belonging, in the understanding of social life in places. The article is based on a mixed-method study that includes register-based demographic data on inhabitants in the municipality of Aalborg in Denmark, survey data, and findings from fifty qualitative ethnographic interviews. We argue that local belonging is important to people, although increasingly complex and varied across local neighbourhoods. The conceptualization of the relations between demographic change, neighbourhood development and belonging is influenced by the Human Ecology (Park & Burgess 1925) that offers useful but also premature theoretical contributions in this field. Thus we argue that this perspective need to be expanded in order to pay attention to the varied meanings ascribed to place and discuss the possibility of mapping out zones of belonging in the contemporary society.

This article focuses on an analysis of threshold concepts (TCs) within disability theology. It explores a range of ideas linked to TCs and the experience of people living with a disability (people LWD). The world in which Christian parishioners encounter people LWD (the focus of this article), could be described as a ‘liquid world’ which is fuzzy, uncertain, unstable and marked by ‘dissolving boundaries’ (Barnett, R. 2012. “The Coming of the Ecological Learner.” InTransitions and Transformations in Learning and Education, edited by P. Tynjälä, M.-L. Stenström and M. Saarnivaara, 9–20. Dordrecht, NL: Springer) The authors argue that, despite such boundaries, or perhaps because of them, certain thresholds need to be crossed by members of faith communities in order for a person LWD to feel as if he/she genuinely belongs to a community. Nevertheless it is acknowledged that some people involved might be both people LWD and parishioners. The three interrelated thresholds examined within this article are — empowerment, hospitality and neighbourliness. The article links these thresholds with TC theory, and also addresses two related topics — a definition of disability within the discipline of theology, and Jesus asthemodel for threshold crossing within the Christian tradition. Reflections on TCs in this article are deliberately grounded in the most recent collection of TC theory from Land, R., J. H. F. Meyer and M. T. Flanagan, editors. (2016.Threshold Concepts in Practice. Rotterdam, NL: Sense). Finally, the article considers some relevant, practical responses which, it is argued, members of Christian faith communities ought to consider, so that people LWD feel that they genuinely belong to that particular community. It concludes with a summary of key insights and some possible future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The prevalence of neighbour disputes among social housing tenants is often seen as the outcome of social residualisation and the physical characteristics of social housing. While such explanations have usefully drawn attention to the structural sources of problem neighbours in the social housing sector, rather than reduce them to the anti-sociality of tenants, this work has been disconnected from a consideration of the social and interactive contexts of neighbouring more broadly and its influence on how neighbour problems emerge and are managed in specific situations. In response, this paper examines the conditions that lead to the formation of a distinct style of neighbouring among social housing tenants, one that is prone to conflict and tension because of its intensively sociable, as opposed to anti-social, nature. Drawing on mediation data from Dispute Resolution Centres in Queensland, Australia, this paper illustrates how intensive modes of neighbouring combine with disadvantage and close physical proximity to create the conditions for neighbour problems to arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the importance of everyday encounters in underpinning sociality, focusing especially on the located and material aspects of social relations. Bringing together debates about social relations, place attachment and population turnover (or ‘churn’), and using research carried out in the UK city of Leicester, in an inner city neighbourhood with high population turnover, the article investigates incidences of neighbourliness, probing what happens to social relations between neighbours in a place which could be considered to be unstable in terms of population, and where conviviality could be deemed to be under threat by wider structural economic forces. Three overlapping questions are addressed: how does neighbourliness manifest itself in such conditions, where is it practiced, and how do people relate to the material environment around them when the social landscape is apparently so unstable? Drawing on in-depth interviews with inner-city Leicester residents this article considers not only the narrated practice of social and neighbourly relations in a particular setting, but also how important place is to this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Pacific Islands' peoples, relationships are of enduring importance. Yet, in spite of decades of aid giving and receiving, relationships in Pacific aid communities have predominantly been indifferent. In an era of global challenges, a new Oceania Education aid community is called to journey together to the common good through relational generosity. This call is based on the premise that people relationships constitute the glue that binds communities. The paper offers for consideration, three opportunities for the Oceania Education aid community to explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living together in neighbourhoods characterised by various aspects of diversity is central to the everyday life of Casamançais in both Catalonia, Spain, and Casamance, Senegal. Discursively, Casamançais speak about it similarly in both localities, construing co-residence on the neighbourhood scale as a sociality that builds on similar moral values such as relative equality, respect and consideration. At the same time, this sociality also implies negotiation, interaction and translation as central everyday practices. Investigating these practices reveals how they facilitate locally specific forms of neighbourliness. These practices are central to the suggested conceptualisation of conviviality as a process in which a fragile balance is maintained over the course of both cooperative and conflictual situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Turks returning from Germany to Turkey self-fashion as 'orderly neighbours'. By maintaining aesthetically pleasing homes and gardens, keeping public spaces clean, and obeying rules and laws in public, return migrants believe they act as modern 'European-Turks' and exemplify good neighbourliness. Many neighbours, however, feel these actions are unnecessary or even disruptive to Turkish communities. In conversation with the burgeoning anthropology of ethics, this research explores how local, national and transnational assemblages foster reflections and debates on neighbourly ethics. Further, this study highlights anxieties about individualism, reciprocity, 'modernity' and 'European-ness' in today's Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys – fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance – are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, planning and modernization, and the circulation of gift and sin. Three interwoven arguments bear on studies of modernity, urban governance, and post-humanism. First, Indian cities are not becoming irreversibly bourgeois and sanitized; humans engage in varied ways with monkeys and are complicit in their presence, by ritually gifting food. The logic of the gift vies with the desire to cleanse; a supernatural current animates the modernist city. Second, studies of bureaucratic power often presume coherence and efficiency. In contrast, I illustrate official ambivalence to cleansing, as well as structural constraints and makeshift arrangements that conspire against the master plan. Third, I question post-humanist and multi-species theories that seek to transcend Western ontology. The monkey-catchers’ porous taxonomy for human–animal differences affirms human primacy as much as it dissolves dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores how long-term residents in a small city with rural links in the East of England related to new migrants at a time of changing patterns and increased volume of migration. Based on in-depth interviews and observations in 2005–6, the article shows dynamic, complex, and nuanced constructions of belonging and governmentalities of belonging. Long-term Peterborians felt proud that their city attracted migrants and became more multicultural. Many saw this as a normative aspect of being modern. Yet, the arrival of migrants also led to tensions and re-inscribed the racialization of Peterborough's ethnic minorities, articulated through the theme of neighbourliness. Through the figures of ‘uncaring migrant neighbours’ and ‘ruthless Pakistani landlords’, migrants and ethnic minority Peterborians were portrayed as refusing injunctions to care for the neighbourhood and the nation. Ethnic minority Peterborians were positioned ambivalently as hosts of and – at times – targets of racism by new migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent times, similar to many other cities such as London, Manchester and New York, there has been a considerable population influx into Dublin's inner city. The attraction of new residents back into the central area has resulted in economic and social restructuring and the creation of new 'social spaces', as new urban residents are often very different in demographic and socioeconomic terms than members of established communities (i.e. younger, more affluent and ethnically diverse). The overall aim of this paper is to examine the extent and significance of neighbourly ties in these new relatively high density residential environments in the central area of Dublin city. Findings in this paper demonstrate that these new residential neighbourhoods are characterised by a lack of 'neighbourliness' which call into question the long-term stability and cohesion of these new residential environments. Results from a binary logistic model indicate that background variables such as age, gender and ethnicity emerge as significant predictors of neighbourly interaction. The presence of friends and or relatives in the neighbourhood, the level of trust in neighbours and finally respondents' intended future mobility behaviour were further factors found to have a significant influence on the level of interaction with neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that local social networks are crucial toaddressing the perceived shortfall in 'respect' and civility. Meanings of 'respect' are explored and older people's narratives of the decline of neighbourliness are used to explore the sense that for many people 'community' has been lost. It is argued that policy and practice have a role to play in the reinvigoration of local social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a sociological research paper that deals with the issue of neighborliness and privacy in a low income housing estate in the South of England. The author attempts to critically examine sociological theories which hold that the importance of social cohesion between neighbors have diminished in people's everyday lives. However, findings of the study reveal that: there were intimate and strong relationships among neighbors because of the need for shared solidarities in the wake of hardships; women were playing the role of social facilitators; and trivial and traumatic events often resulted in the reinforcement of community and neighborly bonds.