Witnessing loss in the everyday

Community buildings in austerity Britain

Bibliographic Data

ID3139698
AuthorsKatherine Robinson (0000-0001-6141-1354, Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author), Ruth Sheldon (Birkbeck, University of London)
Year2019
Volume67
Issue1
Pages111-125
Publication date2019-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0038026118797828
OpenAlexW2891048023
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited22

This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of austerity rendered these buildings substitutable. Considering how abstract sociological conceptions of value/s can struggle to break into the embedded common sense of austerity, the authors explore how ethnographic practices of collaboration and attentiveness can help amplify alternative expressions of the meanings of these buildings for their communities. Enacting a form of ethnographic witnessing, which learns from Wittgenstein, the authors highlight the creative, vernacular registers and gestures of library users and day centre members, and show how these were anchored in the buildings themselves. In this way, the article supplements noisier, more hyperbolic accounts of the violence of austerity by amplifying quotidian responses, which express how ordinary buildings and the forms of life they sustain, matter

Austerity · Closure (psychology · Everyday life · Value (mathematics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Urban Planning and Governance

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Open DOISci-HubOpen Access