The second mode of space-making, the Web of Gardening, emerges in-between people and plants, branching out to and evoking presences, memories and practices from multiple elsewheres.
The Integration Grid evolves around managed space in the association, arising through and enforcing a Dane–foreigner binary. The article “Cultivating Integration’? Migrant space-making in Urban gardens” (Chapter 3) focuses on Integration Gardens, a user-driven association that aims to combine organic urban gardening and “integration.” The article discerns and analyzes two distinct modes of migrant space making. Based on analysis of fieldwork encounters, I conceptualize passing (as Danish) as a material, discursive and affective process and discuss gradations of proximity to Danishness. As a researcher, I was never asked “where I came from” or assessed as a migrant in ways that I noticed. Starting fieldwork in Nordvest in 2014, I found myself passing as Danish. In the subsequent years, I increasingly passed as a well-integrated, desired migrant more proximal to (Western) Europeanness and Danishness. Having moved to Denmark from Latvia in 2004, I became a young, uneducated Eastern European love migrant of limited value. The article “Recruited into Danishness? Shifting Researcher Positions in Racialized Spaces” (Chapter 2) examines my passing as Danish in the capacity of ethnographer, drawing on autoethnography and memory work. Each article can be conceived as an optical device, a prism, that sheds and breaks different kinds of light on various spaces, presences and social processes in Nordvest. This thesis revolves around four research articles. I set out to examine how everyday social spaces in Nordvest constrained and shaped inequalities, processes of in- and exclusion, and processes of majoritization and minoritization, in particular pertaining to racialization, class, and Danishness. Nordvest was known, sensed and experienced as, among other things, “diverse” and multicultural socially disadvantaged a “municipality garbage bin” an up-and-coming, gentrifying area and peripheral and outside, or not quite “Copenhagen.” These modalities of knowing and experiencing Nordvest were mutually interlinked and emotionally polyvalent. I came to know Nordvest as an area undergoing multiple changes. This thesis emerges from an ethnographic study of Nordvest, a district in Copenhagen.
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