Jasmine Arpagian

In recent years, many of Bucharest's residential properties registered as historic landmarks were vacated, which in some instances led to the eviction of families informally occupying these properties. Reasons provided by the municipality included projects to consolidate against seismic risk, rehabilitate for historic preservation, and address concerns about public health. The analysis presented here explores the municipality's official public policy discourse around the practice of squatting historic monuments and the squatters themselves. The dominant discourse homogenizes squatters as criminals and vandals of cultural heritage. Excerpts from field interviews with informal occupants are presented in order to identify discrepancies between lived realities and representations of squatting. Findings from this study provide an alternative interpretation to the dominant discourse around this housing practice, a version that highlights the multidimensional insecurity and social inequalities experienced by squatters.

Housing evictions are understudied from a psychogeographic perspective. With this paper, we use Lauren Berlant's idea of living in ellipses and Donald W. Winnicott's object relations theory of potential spaces to help understand the pushing out, dissociations, leaps and abridgements that categorize housing evictions. There is something impulsive, capricious and fickle about the idiosyncratic and inconsistent violence of evictions. We argue that there is a generative potential for transformation and change through mutual aid, which facilitates Berlant's idea of falling apart without ceasing to exist. With this paper, we highlight what displacement does - its affects - amongst Roma in central Bucharest using an elliptical approach. We argue that although the consequences of evictions are appalling and horrific, there are often opportunities for new associations through mutual aid.

Qualitative geographic information systems (qual-GIS) incorporates nonquantitative data into GIS, integrates qualitative data collection and analysis with quantitative spatial analysis facilitated by GIS, adopts epistemologies typically associated with qualitative research, or a combination of these. Qual-GIS is simultaneously represented as a spatially oriented organizer of qualitative data, a mixed-methods research approach, and an open-ended style of knowledge making. Qual-GIS emerged as a response to criticisms that GIS is rigidly embedded in positivist epistemologies. In the 1990s, GIS supporters and critics debated the implications of GIS on society (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Geographic Information Science”). The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) organized a series of meetings to bring GIS practitioners and social geographers together to address this debate. In 1993, these specialists met in Friday Harbor, Washington, and developed a research agenda to better understand the implications of GIS on society. This meeting resulted in a series of publications, including a 1995 special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Systems (“GIS and Society: Towards a Research Agenda”; see Sheppard 1995, cited under GIS Critiques), with research papers and essays that focused on GIS ethics, technocracy, practices, and politics. A companion book edited by John Pickles titled Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems (see Pickles 1995, cited under GIS Critiques) provided a more theoretical critique of spatial technologies. NCGIA also held a specialist meeting in 1996 about Initiative 19, titled “GIS and Society: The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment Are Represented in GIS,” to further develop this research agenda (see Harris and Weiner 1996, cited under GIS Critiques). With these works as a beginning, progressively more researchers acknowledged GIS as socially constructed, and qual-GIS emerged as an alternative. Politics of knowledge production with GIS were especially significant given the technology’s use in community planning. Researchers and practitioners began to more widely promote the general public’s participation in the development and use of GIS (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Public Participation GIS, Participatory GIS, and Participatory Mapping”). Incorporating local and indigenous knowledges into GIS has become a popular research agenda. Some human geographers, seeking to reconfigure what they consider a positivist and exclusive technology, advance a version of GIS with a critical edge that analyzes subjective rather than objective data, recognizes partiality of knowledge, and promotes alternative geographies (e.g., critical, feminist, queer, affective, and nonrepresentational GIS). Relevant qual-GIS case studies include projects that organize and subsequently visualize qualitative and subjective data. Qual-GIS could contain multimedia (e.g., images, audio, and video), ethnographic (e.g., narrative text about human experiences, perceptions, and emotions; maps sketched by participants), and historical (e.g., past events, temporal changes) data; however, considerable limitations exist regarding their cartographic representation. Qualitative data collection methods (e.g., in-depth interviews, oral life histories, participant observations, surveys, and sketch mapping) are joined parallel with GIS analysis and visualization but are performed as separate steps. Triangulation validates data sets and results by using multiple and mixed methods. Researchers have advanced the capabilities of existing GIS software to also perform qualitative data analysis. Qual-GIS is used in the humanities as well (e.g., historical GIS, narrative GIS). The topics in this article represent the disciplinary trajectories and debates that led to or influenced qual-GIS, and primary ways that qual-GIS is understood by its applicants.

This chapter suggests that the nature of the modern homo sacer is exemplified by the problematic dystopian imaginaries that circle some Roma peoples, and that these imaginaries are often codified spatially by local council and state policies. It draws upon ongoing fieldwork—in the form of interviews and observation-bolstering archival and news media research—which began in Slovenia in Autumn 2013 and in Romania in Autumn 2015. The chapter considers the Roma primarily from their urban, but also national, political subjectivities. It argues that young ethnic minorities are particularly vulnerable to a revanchism that is hidden under state policies of seeming democracy and justice. The chapter examines that the contexts of urban Roma youth denied full citizenship rights for a variety of reasons, and how that denial contextualizes itself in the urban spaces of Maribor in Slovenia, and Cluj-Napoca in Romania.

The eviction of families from historically nationalized and recently restituted houses in Romania is tied in complicated ways to postsocialist transitional justice policies. Delayed enactment of restitution legislation and inconsistent application leave families, and neglected houses, in a precarious state. As families remain in place, they create a politics that pushes against dispossession. Evidence of this push comes from a study of Roma families, who are arguably the most marginalized of Romania's low-income peoples. Theoretically, we draw on Butler and Athanasiou's understanding of precarity and dispossession and Askins's emotional citizenry, from which we find a glimmer of hope in the everyday performance of the political among threatened families.