Social Spheres
Common Routines of the Child of Pevidém, Portugal
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paula Martins
This research focuses on exploring children and their daily routines and common practices that inhabited spaces reflect. As a study territory, the village of Pevidém emerges as a place experienced by residents and neighbouring communities, through processes of observation and recognition. It is intended to understand how personal, spatial, and temporal relationships are created. Starting with an initial action of observation, through fourteen field visits, the observer walks through Pevidém, visit after visit, in order to recognise the spaces of children within the community. After the initial observation, it is proceeded to the second act of the research: the dialogue. Thirteen distinct conversations reflected in twelve personal maps drawn by those who live them daily, represent routines, movements, and actions. The space becomes a place experienced by people, by routines, by the everyday life. Dialogue portrays the progress over observation, allowing an in-depth proximity to Pevidém, in order to understand and map the socio-spatial narratives of this common lived place.
What Is (the) Matter?: Tracing the Thread(t)s of Cotton Practices in Vale do Ave
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fernando P. Ferreira
Matter is a noun that comprises a myriad of meanings. It might refer to a physical substance, a subject, or a problem. Matter is also the beginning of this paper, which intends to interrogate critically “what is the matter with cotton?” in order to debate between interdisciplinary scales how an ancestral fibre, such as the cotton that circulates globally since modern history, has been affecting places through matter flows undermined by capitalist intentions (Beckert, 2015). To do so, I depart from Vale do Ave – an urbanized area located in the northwest of Portugal, which is rooted in a long history of industrial architecture and textile production (Fernandes, 1999) – to argue that the imported cotton practices in this specific landscape (spinning and weaving) might be tackled as a two sided matter: on one hand, it might be considered as a ‘subject’ connected to processes of urban transformation; on the other, it might be measured as a ‘problem’, that threatens the built environment through colonial trading, social inequality, and ecological issues, particularly on sites of cotton’s cultivation and harvesting located in the Global South. To explain my argument, the paper is structured into four parts that identify and study the major modes of cotton practices historically and currently reproduced by most textile companies in Vale do Ave, through acts of fluctuation, paternalism, colonialism, and mechanization. This paper uncovers and narrates hidden textile architectures, and questionable aspects related to colonial and political trade, gender, and labour.
