Ash Amin

Ash Amin (2004) Regions unbound

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Ash Amin (2010) Land of strangers

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Summary

Many people express their concerns that the twenty-first century public realm is in decline. They complain that people have shrunk away from collective life and that social bonds are decaying and need to be rebuilt. Politicians, policy-makers and theorists call for the revival of community spirit and shared identities. This is also a theme that has become an important emphasis in social policy initiatives, with a focus on enhancing integration, cohesion and interaction. Behind much of this concern, and behind many of these initiatives, is the idea that diversity, difference and pluralism is a problem, to which more community, more cohesion, more integration is the solution.

Ash Amin (2010, 2012) presents an exploration of the moral and material basis of how to nurture a sense of togetherness in a society of relative strangers. He considers relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to offer new suggestions for living in diversity and opportunities to fabricate a different politics of the stranger. 

Amin proposes a politics of care. He argues that a politics of care, aware of the limitations of interpersonal proximities, might usefully turn to strategies to reinforce social interest in the shared material, virtual and affective common. It considers curatorial attention of the zones of engagement with other humans and non-humans to hold more promise for a politics of bridging difference than is an ethic of care for the stranger or for a particular notion of the community (2012, p.8).

Amin triest to rethink the politics of togetherness in a society of strangers. He argues that any such politics cannot rest alone on an ethos of recognition and community. Ash Amin argues that attempts to address challenges of pluralism through policies resting on presumed ideas of community, unity and identity are problematic themselves.  

According to Amin collective understanding of imagined community is of critical importance for the power it pocesses to define who belongs and the terms of togetherness ( p.11). To do this requires institutional supports, embedded in material infrastructures of various sorts.

Ash Amin

Formele omschrijving

Articles by Ash Amin

Schema: ZHDSM scheme, Context: ZHDSM context
Verwant: ZHDSM Doreen Massey, ZHDSM The encounter

Referenties

• Amin (2004) Regions Unbound, Ash Amin, Geography Annals, 1 januari 2004.
• Ash Amin (2010) Land of Strangers, Ash Amin, 1 januari 2010.