Abstract :
[en] this chapter, I endeavor to explore how a grassroots collective of rural workers engage in the constitution of mediation arrangements to produce “various spatial scales” of visibility of their actions, of their claims and of their identity” (Bleil, 2005). I will show how a collective of people struggle for visibility and recognition and for the alteration of social hierarchies or to what Butler has called the changes and struggles in “regimes of appearance” (Butler, 2015). These regimes may be seen as part of a struggles for the legitimate ways for people to appear in public space, to decide on whom can become “a subject of appearance”, Hence, following Arendt and Butler, one should attend to the struggles for the legitimate forms of appearance or attempts at altering the “regimes of appearance” (Butler, 2016), implying a differentiated or more or less inclusive politics of recognition and of citizenship. Therefore, the question I am interested in is not so much what spaces are invested by collectives of migrant youth, but rather to focus on a range of organizational practices and mediation processes through which collectives of workers shape spaces of interactions, of engagements, of shared emotions and collective performances, both physical and virtual . Following Martin, I conceive of cultural practices as embodied practices linked to social hierarchies and as fundamentally marked by ambivalence, polysemy and, most prominently as to this chapter, as carrying the potential to foster pleasure and connect people, as well as to embody emotions (Martin 2000). Hence, how do grassroots collectives of rural workers foster the constitution of communities of “interpretation and emotion” (Chartier 1989)? To tackle these questions, I rely on the concept of mediation as defined by Voirol for whom mediation always implies the issue of totality in that it re-inscribes social facts into the socio-historical conditions which engendered them. Voirol highlights that mediation processes are standing at the heart of symbolic and material struggles for representation and for definitions of social orders (Voirol 2005 : 20, 56-57). More precisely, I am interested in mediation or arrangements of mediation in that they enable to bridge meaning with organization and people (Beaud, 2005). The object of research in this chapter is more organizational than semantic. Instead of focusing on people’s consciousness or subjectivities, I draw from De Nora’s concept of “aesthetic agency” to look at how “the production of knowledge, talk, organizational regimes, and embodied practice is seen to emerge from within a matrix of social relations and things” and is closely related to embodiment and materiality (De Nora and Atkins)
