2014/2015 Janey Annual Workshop: Olimpia Mosteanu and Manuela Badilla Rajevic
Friday April 10th, 10am, History Conference Room 529
Janey Fellows Olimpia Mosteanu and Manuela Badilla Rajevic present their most recent work based on the 2014/2015 Janey Fellowship they were awarded. See titles of their presentations and abstracts below:
Olimpia Mosteanu: Social Practices in the Comparison of Cities: The case of the Tenements of Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1920
In this paper I focus on the issue of ‘commensurability’ in the (historical) comparative study of cities. The research I conducted in Buenos Aires in June and July 2014 constituted a preliminary phase of my dissertation project. This larger project is concerned with the question of how various symbolic and material practices – through which urban space was transformed in the tenement neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and New York City during 1870 and 1920 – became modalities of cultivation of ethical selfhood in the tenement households. Based on the findings I gathered during this preliminary research, I contrast two different theoretical and methodological approaches to how cities are studied comparatively – namely, the traditional comparative approach and the relational approach. The former conceives of cities as bounded and self-identifiable; it equates the city with the territory it occupies. The latter approach emphasizes the connections, the entanglements, the fluidity and the constructed nature of ‘territory’ through social practices. In this paper, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches in the context of the study of tenement buildings, the infrastructures in which they were and came to be embedded (e.g. systems of sewage, illumination, roads, etc.), the discursive practices (how the tenements were portrayed in the press, novels, written records) that shaped and were shaped by the materiality of the tenements, and various dwelling practices (cooking, sweeping the floor, washing clothes, etc.). In this paper this theoretical discussion is built primarily through the case of tenements in Buenos Aires.
Manuela Badilla Rajevic: The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina: Between Official and New Discourses About the Violent Past
A generation is a group of people passing through time, during or after critical or traumatic events, that will reach self consciousness and in some cases the possibility of social action (Mannheim, 1952). Following this traditional approach, scholars have defined the post-dictatorship generation in Latin American countries, and in Argentina in particular, as a group marked and sometimes haunted by the human rights violations and traumatic events that took place during the authoritarian regimes (Kaisser, 2005; Hirsch; 2010; Ros, 2012). Yet, recent literature on the concept of generation has emphasized the significance of different systems of meaningns, discourses and practices in building generational consciousness as well as the influence of discursive struggles in which this process takes place (Turner and Edmund, 1998; Corsten, 2009; Foster, 2014; Aboim and Vasconcelos, 2014). Following this perspective, in this paper I explore the intersection between the dominant systems of meanings and discourses about the recent past and the emergence of new genearational discourses regarding the violent past in Argentina.