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Research

culture and power

- Makerspaces: politics and communities of innovation in contemporary China (2016-2019)

Funded by the SNSF, this project is lead by Dr. Florence Graezer Bideau in collaboration with Dr. Marc Laperrouza, Monique Bolli and Clément Renaud (Iags, EPFL). It investigates the social, technical and commercial attributes of key Chinese makerspaces and their communities in three Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen). While limited in size and scope, makerspaces and the maker movement in general offer a very rich environment to study much broader social, political and economic transformations taking place in contemporary China. It aims to shed light on how a bottom-up and autonomous movement responds to the co-opting of the State and to discuss the Chinese government’s plasticity and capacity to engage with emerging classes.

- Cultural policy in China in the 20th century (1995-2005)

Funded by several institutions (Mobility Grant between the University of Lausanne and Peking, Cantonal Grant of the Swiss Universities Central Office, and SNSF), this doctoral project was developed in China (Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, Peking University, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing), Australia (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU, Canberra) and France (China Centre (CECMC), EHESS, Paris). The construction of cultural policy made up the core of my Ph.D. research in Beijing and Shaanxi Province between 1995 and 2000. I explored it through the detailed study of the practice of yangge, a traditional folk dance ritual banned during the Cultural Revolution but is now practiced once again under China's reform policy. The practice of yangge allowed me to reflect on issues of popular culture in 20th-century China and analyze the processes of selection and categorization of cultural elements essential to cultural policy at the national level. Central to my training as an anthropologist and a sinologist, this research on the development of cultural policy and the use of popular culture provided the starting point for my current work on intangible cultural heritage and heritagization at different national and international levels.

heritage

- Mapping controversial memories in the historic urban landscape : a multidisciplinary study of Beijing, Mexico City and Rome (2015-2017)

Funded by the SNIS, this project is lead by Dr. Florence Graezer Bideau in collaboration with Dr. Yves Pedrazzini, Lesslie Herrera, Lucia Bordone (EPFL) and scholars in HES-Sierre, Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage à Beijing, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana –Iztapalapa à Mexico City, Politecnico Torino, Tsinghua University, Roma 2 and Roma 3. The research aims to produce a comparative, multidisciplinary study on the impact of UNESCO’s Recommendation on the historic urban landscape, (RHUL 2011), which seeks to integrate conservation and development in urban policy. The project addresses three questions in Beijing, Mexico City and Rome.
1) Which memorial references are mobilized by local actors in their historical urban landscape?
2) To what extent does the perception of collective-memory overlap with the existing local implementation of heritage conservation policies?
3) Which potential approach for the recognition of plural memories within the RHUL best underpins attachment to urban territories?
Combining methods from urban sociology, cultural anthropology and visual modeling, this project strives to contribute a better understanding of so-called collective memory dynamics and controversies that are emerging in these historic cities. The research encompasses popular understanding of uses of heritage, official norms and regulations as well as controversies produced by the mismatch of practice and discourse at the different levels of analysis: local; national; and international.

- Implementation of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland: an ethnography of cultural bureaucracy in the federalist context (2009-2012, 2012-2014)

Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Sinergia Projects "Intangible Cultural Heritage: the Midas Touch?"and "Intangible Cultural Heritage: Whispered Words", directed by Prof. Ellen Hertz, University of Neuchâtel), this project followed the implementation of the UNESCO Convention, ratified by the Swiss Confederation in 2008. Using ethnographic methodology, complemented by a thorough mastery of the relevant documents and policy decision, this project explored how this new international cultural policy was applied in Switzerland and what effects it produced on Swiss conceptions of, and mobilization around, local, regional and national cultural forms. By surveying the process of cataloging intangible cultural heritage at various levels (local, cantonal, federal and international) - with a special focus on moments of definition and selection, (selection criteria, user guides, the use of outside expertise, the reference to "civil society") - this project shed new light on the nature of the relationship between state and society in the field of culture, the commodification or reification of cultural expressions and traditions, and the emergence of new forms of nationalism linked with folklorization. Adopting a broadly based comparative approach, this project not only explored Swiss cultural policy from a new angle - "intangible cultural heritage" - but also considered more comprehensively the effects of the UNESCO Convention on cultural policies worldwide.

- Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and making heritage in Malaysia: overview from the Straits of Malacca (2006-2011)

Begun in the context of the French-speaking Swiss Graduate Programme in Socio-Cultural Anthropology (CUSO) and funded by the University of Lausanne (Research Grant of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences’ Dean office), this project was carried out in collaboration with Prof. Mondher Kilani (Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale, University of Lausanne) between 2006 and 2011. It was a reflection on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in Malaysia and revolved around the perceptions and representations of tangible and intangible cultural heritage within the three main communities of the Federation (Malay, Chinese and Indian) using a series of case studies in George Town (Penang), Melaka, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The comparative analysis of these distinct processes of heritagization highlighted political, economical, social, religious and cultural issues linked to the Malaysian "rainbow nation", while also drawing attention to some of the problems inherent in the apparently universal UNESCO framework (contradictions between tangible and intangible heritage, commodification of living culture, consequences of gentrification, etc.).

making of the city

- Hybrid cities: Informal Resistances to the Violence of Urbanization in China, India and Venezuela (2016-2019)

Funded by the SNSF, the project is lead by Dr. Yves Pedrazzini (LAsur, EPFL) in collaboration with Dr. Florence Graezer Bideau, Salomé Houllier, Caroline Iorio (EPFL) and scholars in Politecnico di Torino, Anna University in Chennai, Instituto de Estudios Avanzados and Fundación Caracas and South China University of Technology in Guangzhou. As both a science and an ideology, contemporary urbanism induces a violence of urbanization. This is usually done in the name of formal planning of territory at the expense of informal settlements. The latter resist this formalization and their scheduled deletion, sometimes resorting to violence. In some cases this confrontation overcomes the duality between formal and informal. The confrontation of two icons of the modern city, the informal slum and the formal skyscraper, produces hybrid structures, objects, and details that move towards a new urbanism; our current cities are built by architectural, urban, territorial and social hybridization. This process creates an innovative and critical approach to the modern models of formal urbanization that seems to persecute the inhabitants of informal settlements, giving rise to resistance movements. These modalities vary widely across differing geopolitical contexts, which is why we work in three large urban areas simultaneously – Chennai in India, Guangzhou in China and Caracas in Venezuela. These we consider as separate expressions of a process that is global and complex; a process within which social struggles and urban problems bind closely through the development of new contradictions, all of which takes place at the heart of the city.

– Chinese New Towns: negotiating citizenship and physical form (2015-2017)

Funded by the Politecnico di Torino, the CeNTO project lead by Prof. Michele Bonino (Department of Architecture and Design) looks at the construction of the “third-generation” of Chinese New Towns that will host another 300 million rural Chinese migrating to urban areas over the next 20 years. Conditioned by certain new key-words promoted by the Chinese government - such as “innovation”, “sustainability”, “inclusive growth” - this research investigates how, through the lens of architecture and urban design, physical form, can reveal experimental processes of the negotiation of both citizenship and social identity. It also explores how Chinese New Towns have appropriated urban models from different contexts.