Choreographies of Diversity

Migration and urban diversity is (re)shaping sociality in and across France and the Nordic countries. The mobility of tango provides an original and analytically generative entry point to think critically about such social dynamics. Migration and urban diversity are historically at the core of Argentinian tango as a particular cultural form. It has developed in Buenos Aires and transnationally, with France as a European nodal point, and with a strong presence in France and the Nordic countries today.

With an innovative focus on both migratory and aesthetic features of tango, the project will explore how tango creates affective urban spaces in which everyday diversity and belonging is mediated through embodied interaction. Tango practices create temporary, mobile, and intimate forms of urban encounters - choreographies of diversity. Such encounters are conditioned by the urban landscapes in which they unfold, formed by socio-economic dynamics, urban inequalities, local politics, processes of commercialisation and gentrification.
This project unpacks how urban contexts inflect the social and emotional life of tango scenes, and how these reflect or reconfigure broader urban dynamics in the embodied affective city. The project will shed light on the affects that arise within tango communities, highlighting how these influence feelings of belonging or exclusion and their function as affective nodes in urban life: places where strangers connect through bodily encounters across boundaries, tensions are mediated, and feelings of inclusion or exclusion emerge.

The project brings together Nordic and French expertise on migration and urban diversity. A comparative approach will identify how particular modalities of identity and alterity are created in French and Nordic contexts, and how these are shaped by e.g. migration policies, nationality laws, kinship and gender, socio-economic inequalities, and cultural imaginaries. The comparative empirical focus includes Paris, Marseille, Copenhagen, Malmø, Oslo and Bergen.

The project combines methods such as participant observation and interviews with multi-sensory approaches in exploratory ethnographic fieldworks. It will result in joint peer-reviewed publications, a Franco-Nordic research network on mobilities and diversity related to the circulation of cultural forms, a mobile exhibition and a plan for future competitive research applications of high excellence.

Project coordinator

• Christine M. Jacobsen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, specializing on migration, gender and diversity.

Network members

France

• Melissa Blanchard is Senior researcher at Centre Norbert Elias, CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/Avignon Université, specializing in migration, citizenship and gender.

Denmark

• Tina Gudrun Jensen is lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, researching migration, everyday diversity, and urban sociality, including through ethnographic film-making.