Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
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November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
104
COMPLETED DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS
Name
: Maja Hojer Bruun
Affiliation
: Aalborg University, Denmark,
Awarded
: 2012, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Social Life and Moral Economies in Danish Cooperative Housing: Community,
Property and Value
This thesis examines how contemporary cooperative housing in Copenhagen is lived in and
imagined —
and the tensions that arrive from the paradoxes that such housing incarnates. The
thesis is based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2008-2009 in eight
selected housing cooperatives in Copenhagen. The ethnography is drawn from the perspective
of current occupants but these narratives are also contextualized by histories of welfare, urban
regeneration, gentrification and social and cooperative housing provision in Denmark, with a
detailed account of recent changes accompanying the neoliberalisation of national
government and municipal administration. The effects of these changes are accentuated by the
global financial crisis of 2008 and its continuing aftermath. As the thesis demonstrates, the
home and cooperative are caught at the nexus of apparently opposing values of investment
maximization and long-term social reproduction, and the thesis allows informants’ voices to
puzzle through these contradictions. The thesis captures the processes through which
economic and political issues of great significance to individuals and families are negotiated
and managed collectively. One of the main contributions of the thesis is the notion of
collective housing as a symbolic and concrete commons in the nation and the local collective.
Dr Maja Hojer Bruun
is Assistant Professor in Applied Anthropology at the Department of
Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University, Denmark. She received her PhD in anthropology
from the University of Copenhagen in 2012. Her research interests are in urban anthropology,
organizations, politics, economy and technology. She is part of an interdisciplinary research project
on contested property claims and social controversies surrounding the issue of squatting and the use
of urban space.
Name
: Cynthia Gonzalez
Affiliation
: Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Awarded
: May 2014, California Institute of Integral Studies, Los Angeles
Watts, Our Town: ‘Nothing about us without us, is for us’. An Auto-Ethnographic
Account of Life in Watts, Los Angeles, CA
This dissertation explores the popular and scholarly representation and construction of Watts
— a 2.5 mile inner-city neighbourhood of Los Angeles — vis-à-vis an auto-ethnographic
