Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is undergoing a significant change of its built environment due to a massive process of development since the mid-2000s. This series of construction, destruction, transformation and modernising processes has radically transformed a central industrial locality of the city into a wholly new business-administrative district. My ethnography is dedicated to unravelling the development's impact on people's living conditions, experiences, and everyday making-sense practices and actions. I am drawing on Michael Jackson, who claims that humans desire to act in the social world which is acting upon them in order to shape a sense being-at-home-in-the-world. Hence, the central focus of this ethnography is to find out how my informants make sense of the city’s transformation, shape their sense of at-home-ness and how they seek a balance between acting and being acted upon in changing social world. In order to do so, I analysed data gathered from more than twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews and two walk-alongs. Based on that, I claim that informants share a common condition of uncertainty which is experienced as insecurity or hope. In order to shape a sense of home-ness, certainty, belonging and recognition, they create and employ two specific practices. They either retreat to the notion of the city of past and detach themselves from the new developing Bratislava, or they reach to the city of future and feel belonging with the development narratives of future utopias. Hence, I conclude that the sense and experience of home are not being lost but rather dislocated and disintegrated within collective engagements with the transforming city and at the same time in the process of re-shaping in new temporalities and spatialities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-385332 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Repka, Robert |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för kulturantropologi och etnologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Masteruppsatser i kulturantropologi, 1653-2244 ; 94 |
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