Papers by Panos Bourlessas
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022
Military geographies have engaged with the subject of nonhuman nature in diverse and fruitful way... more Military geographies have engaged with the subject of nonhuman nature in diverse and fruitful ways, mainly under the analytics of environment, landscape, territory (and terrain), and the more-than-human. Despite the diversity of contexts studied, spaces of displacement have not drawn scholarly attention within this literature. Starting from the position that human-nonhuman relations are emplaced, we offer an exploration into the natures of forced displacement during war. Specifically, we show that by extending our vision to spaces of displacement, we can see militarized nature under new, including more hopeful, lights. Drawing empirical material from the published memoirs of women and men displaced to the islands of the Aegean archipelago during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), we make a twofold case. First, spaces of displacement should be seen as key in the study of militarized geographies, as they explode the ways militarized nature is understood to be reproduced. Second, nonhuman nature, in the context of the spaces of displacement, can act as a vector of emplacement, resistance, resilience, and reworking against the violence of the post-World War II liberal state.
Bourlessas, P., Cenere, S., & Vanolo, A. (2021). The work of foodification: an analysis of food gentrification in Turin, Italy. Urban Geography, 1-22. doi:10.1080/02723638.2021.1927547, 2021
Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail ge... more Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail gentrification. Theoretically, it suggests that food, together with its spatialities, can produce a “displacement atmosphere” throughout retailscape by enabling privileged consumers to achieve distinction. Empirically, it draws from Porta Palazzo, Turin’s historical neighbourhood and marketplace, where the opening of a branded food hall reveals food’s role in the area’s early-stage retail gentrification. Attending to both the food hall and smaller emerging spatialities, the “work of foodification” is analyzed through three constitutive elements: discourse, materialities, practices. Within the city’s wider geographies and ongoing transformations, the synergy of these elements reveals that the work of foodification is the convert of Porta Palazzo into a device that, first, fixes a displacement atmosphere onto the local retailscape and, then, allows for the gentrification frontier to proceed. The paper responds to calls for re-conceptualizing displacement, contributing to emergent research on marketplaces as gentrification’s frontier spaces.
Bourlessas, P. (2020). Thick skins in place, thick skins out of place: re-placing homeless bodies in spaces of care. Social & Cultural Geography, 1-19. doi:10.1080/14649365.2020.1837214, 2020
The ‘homeless body’ has been largely constructed in scholarship as a ‘discursive body’ while it h... more The ‘homeless body’ has been largely constructed in scholarship as a ‘discursive body’ while it has been inadequately grounded in empirical space. Drawing from ethnographic research, this article attempts a twofold, gradual re-placement: a conceptual replacement of the ‘discursive homeless body’ as material bodies, which shape homeless subjectivities; and a spatial re-placement of these bodies in Athens’ formal spaces of care, where homeless subjects respond to the provided care through a personal body work. The re-placement is conceptualized through ‘stigma dialectic’, namely, the continuous embodiment and emplacement of the homeless stigma within these spaces. There, the stigmatized as ‘dirty’ homeless subjects achieve a geographical-social ordering as visceral practices of cleanliness make homeless bodies ‘in place’, closer to the non-stigmatized staff and volunteers. At the same time though, and while ‘in place’, homeless subjects try to make their bodies ‘out of place’, away from other, stigmatized homeless bodies. Informed by literatures on geographies of care, visceral geographies, and by performative approaches to homeless geographies, the article suggests that the personal body work might have significant implications for a neoliberalizing ethic of care, the spaces it structures and is enabled through, and the homeless subjectivities it structures, especially in times of welfare restructuring.
Bourlessas, P. (2019). Janus in the viscous field: A reflexive account on researching homelessness through institutionalised spaces of care. Area, 0(0). doi:10.1111/area.12592, 2019
Given the scarcity of methodological reflections by geographers studying homelessness, and drawin... more Given the scarcity of methodological reflections by geographers studying homelessness, and drawing from ethnographic research in Athens, this article provides an empirical reflexive account of the complexities of practising homelessness research through ‘spaces of care’. Emphasising the institutional nature of these spaces, it highlights the role of institutions, such as NGOs and public authorities, in shaping certain local contexts for geographic research. Precisely, the circulation of specific homeless-related discourses throughout spaces of care shapes the ‘viscous field’ of institutions, wherein research moves become difficult and subject positionings are set a priori. Therein, the twofaced figure of Janus becomes the metaphor for the geographer in the viscous field, who embodies simultaneously two faces-roles: of researcher and volunteer. Afterwards, a focus on bodies highlights the emotional and performative aspects of the encounters with research participants. Eventually, four-plus-one ethical pro-positions for practising geographic research on homelessness are given in place of conclusions. Overall, the article is an empirical contribution to institutional geographies, their methodologies, and the difficulties, complexities and negotiations for researchers-volunteers. For the ‘trouble of institutions’ may also be a methodological trouble for geography practitioners in research sites such as spaces of care, where researchers-volunteers, participants and institutions become entangled with one another.
The paper relates homelessness to the 'new mobilities paradigm' by highlighting mobility's consti... more The paper relates homelessness to the 'new mobilities paradigm' by highlighting mobility's constitutive character in homeless geographies, and the politics involved in the making of mobile homeless subjectivities in central Athens. Ethnographic material demonstrates that, within the city's institutional and material context, a specific sense of mobility prevails, which may reflect broader mentalities of managing the poor in times of austerity. The case of a night shelter exemplifies how this institutional sense materialises, whereas crucial frictions are involved in the city's homeless geographies. Yet it is the homeless subjects that embody, experience and make these mobilities and frictions meaningful and political.
Book Reviews by Panos Bourlessas
Bourlessas, P. (2021). Book Review: Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place. Rivista Geografica Italiana – Open Access, 0(1), 118-122.
Book Review: Athens and the War on Public Space: Tracing a City in Crisis by Klara Jaya Brekke, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis, 2019
Book Review: Book Reviews The battle for the high street: retail gentrification, class and disgust, 2019
Books by Panos Bourlessas
Bourlessas, P. (2019). Mettere il cibo in scena: Nuove pratiche di consumo al Mercato Centrale di Torino. In A. Toldo, A. P. Quaglia, & I. Vittone (Eds.), Atlante del Cibo di Torino Metropolitana. Rapporto 3. Torino: CELID Edizioni (ISBN: 9788867891702), 2019
Bourlessas, P. (2019). An epilogue for the in-between/ Un epilogo per quanto è nel limbo. In S. Orfanidou, Pendulum. Athens: Kotsopoulos Printing SA (ISBN: 978-618-00-0856-2), 2019
Balampanidis, D., & Bourlessas, P. (2019). Ambiguities of vertical multiethnic coexistence in the city of Athens. Living together but unequally… Between conflicts and encounters. In R. Van Kempen, S. Oosterlynck, & G. Verschraegen (Eds.), Divercities (pp. 165-186). Bristol: Policy Press., 2019
In this book chapter, the Authors focus on vertical multi-ethnic coexistence or the socio-spatial... more In this book chapter, the Authors focus on vertical multi-ethnic coexistence or the socio-spatial dynamics of segregation and social mix in the same residential building. They focus on a residential apartment building in Athens, Greece. Over the last twenty-five years, Athens has become increasingly ethnically diverse. Athens is characterised by low levels of spatial segregation and high levels of ethnic mix both on the neighbourhood level and within residential buildings. However, for the Authors, living together does not mean that inequality disappears. In their analysis they focus explicitly on the link between diversity and inequality, since this link is missing all too often from urban analysis. Indeed, on closer inspection, in Athens vertical social differentiation within buildings seems to offer an alternative to neighbourhood level segregation, with quite a strong correlation between ethnicity and floor of residence. In the studied building, the Authors observe relations of tolerance, solidarity and friendship, but also, despite the vertical spatial proximity, social distance, lack of contact and racist and xenophobic attitudes between different ethnic groups. The Αuthors therefore characterise vertical coexistence within the building as ‘living together but unequally’.
Thesis Chapters by Panos Bourlessas
Bourlessas, P. (2018). Rubbish Stuff, Thick Skins, and Drifters: Making Homeless Geographies in Athens City Centre. (Ph.D. thesis), Scuola Universitaria Superiore Gran Sasso Science Institute & Scuola Superiore Universitaria Sant'Anna, L'Aquila, Pisa. , 2018
Starting with an ethnographic vignette and after a brief description of the dissertation's centra... more Starting with an ethnographic vignette and after a brief description of the dissertation's central arguments and overall structure, this introductory chapter attempts to draw three lines that, either intersecting one with another or shaping a vague frame, are essential for the homeless geographies to be later performed. Precisely, first, a ‘contextual line’ sketches the local, Athenian context wherein this research has been conducted and therefore seeks to respond to. Second, an ‘epistemological-ontological line’ clarifies the fundamental starting positions behind this work and explains the form of the text as well as the pivotal role metaphors play in it. These two lines intersect with each other and penetrate together the rest of the text. Finally, a third, thin ‘conceptual-imaginative’ line, which frames the whole work and gets diffused in it, introduces the concept of homeless stigma and invites the readers to attune their imagination to stigma while wandering in this work’s geographies and while encountering the therein subjectivities.
Book chapters by Panos Bourlessas
Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities, 2022
Clouds are common elements in everyday life. Cloud physics and the science of clouds provide answ... more Clouds are common elements in everyday life. Cloud physics and the science of clouds provide answers to questions about their formation, their characteristics, and their movement in the atmosphere. Yet clouds are also multifaceted elements in popular cultures as well as atmospheric geographies, which evoke various ideas of materiality and movement. And a cloud today is also a key technological concept, related to ubiquitous access to shared pools of data, resources, and services. The aim of this chapter is to develop a tentative geography of clouds and their variegated movements by engaging with different conceptual approaches. Merging perspectives from cultural geography (particularly post-human and atmospheric geographies) with ideas on physics and computing technologies, the chapter aims to transgress conventional epistemological and discursive boundaries, in order to stress the need for geographical understandings of movement that embrace the multitude of spatialities, ontologies, and epistemologies associated with the movement of non-human objects.
Final version published as:
Bourlessas P., Vanolo A. (2022) “Clouds and movements”, in N. Cattan and L. Faret (eds), Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities, Routledge, New York, pp. 76-93.
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Papers by Panos Bourlessas
Book Reviews by Panos Bourlessas
Books by Panos Bourlessas
Thesis Chapters by Panos Bourlessas
Book chapters by Panos Bourlessas
Final version published as:
Bourlessas P., Vanolo A. (2022) “Clouds and movements”, in N. Cattan and L. Faret (eds), Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities, Routledge, New York, pp. 76-93.
Final version published as:
Bourlessas P., Vanolo A. (2022) “Clouds and movements”, in N. Cattan and L. Faret (eds), Hybrid Mobilities. Transgressive Spatialities, Routledge, New York, pp. 76-93.