Spotting emerging disorders and conflict management in urban public spaces

Francou, Lionel
(2017) 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA) « (Un)Making Europe. Capitalism, Solidarities, Subjectivities » — Location: Athènes, Panteion University (29.August.2017)

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The attempts of this paper is to develop some observations over the issue of the disorders and conflicts occurring from social interactions in urban public spaces, on the basis of an ethnography conducted during a period of three months among a team of social mediation professionals whose a significant part of the job consists in the spotting of social disorders, current or in the making, and reacting in order to find solutions and end the problem. My paper will focus on the Belgian “gardiens de la paix” (peace keepers), who are not “law enforcement officers” but are parts of these new professions created during the last twenty years in Western Europe and Canada to ensure prevention and social mediation. They act at the local level by walking, providing a visible presence supposed to be reassuring and trying to discuss with the population, in order to prevent and solve conflicts, to “create social links,” to “reduce insecurity”, etc. I followed different teams on the field, wandering through territories and various temporalities, collecting their testimonies and analyzing a corpus of 800 reports (two full years) by which these peacekeepers reported to their superiors some events they considered as being problematic. By combining these methods, I was able to access both the ordinary dimension of experience (by participating in their walks) and the rather exceptional events which play an important role in the way these actors define their role. Acting on the basis of the identification of disturbing events, they are particularly concerned with the upkeep of the conditions necessary for the Goffmanian “interaction order”, both “moral” and “public” order, they seek to guarantee.
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Francou, L. (2017). Spotting emerging disorders and conflict management in urban public spaces. 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA) « (Un)Making Europe. Capitalism, Solidarities, Subjectivities », Athènes, Panteion University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/72705