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Images of Broomhall, Sheffield: Urban Violence, and Using the Arts as a Research Aid

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08949468.2010.508996

1545-5920

Susan Hogan,

Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

Abstract This article is a walking interview in an urban area of Sheffield, in which there has been considerable violence between Somali and Afro-Caribbean males in 2009. Photographs were taken at the significant stopping-points. The article elucidates how a short walk can reveal local issues and concerns. There is also a parallel discussion of the usefulness of visual methods and walking interviews which is contained within endnotes, along with further information. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Eilish Hogan-Douglas for helping to select the photographs. Thanks to Jenny Blain (an anthropologist) and Steve Spencer (a sociologist) who use photography in their research and who have inspired me, along with Sarah Pink (a visual anthropologist) for our ongoing debates about the subject. Especial thanks to Farzad for his fascinating tour. And fantastically helpful feedback was forthcoming from the anonymous critical reader: thank you. Notes Marcus Banks [2009] has talked about the value of using images in research projects to create "a parallel argument" or a "parallel discourse" to the written text. The images reproduced here represent points where the walkers actually stopped walking, a pause in our movement. In this particular example there were definite stopping-off points that had different discourses attached to them. I also like the use of endnotes to contain supplementary material that enriches the overall discussion of the walking interview. (Ideally I'd have preferred footnotes so that the reader could move more easily from the main narrative to the discussion within the notes, to thus build an experience of multiple narratives.) This walking interview used still photography. Some advantages of using video have been elaborated by Pink: "the use of the video camera encourages research participants to engage physically with their material and sensory environments to show the ethnographer their experiences corporeally" [Citation2009: 105]. I think this is also the case for walking interviews, in that we were able to see Farzad duck through a broken fence at one point, for example, with a facility which suggested he often negotiated his environment in this way. (For a further detailed discussion of the methodological implications of using art techniques in participatory research, see Hogan and Pink Citation2010.) The fatal shooting in Broomhall took place on 1 July 2009. The "skirmishes" were described as "riots" by the local paper and by local residents. The newsletter makes no mention of ethnic groups, referring simply to "young people." Sheffield is a city of about 513,000 situated in Yorkshire. Broomhall, an interesting part of Sheffield, has established Afro-Caribbean, Chinese and Pakistani communities. Sandwiched between Sheffield Hallam University and Sheffield University buildings, there is also a high proportion of student housing in and around Broomhall. The Somali population in the area is a more recent addition. Brunswick Street comprises mainly brick-built terraced housing, much of which is run-down. The area used to be a prostitution hot-spot until the 1990s. Brunswick Street runs into Collegiate Crescent, a broad, rather elegant street of imposing stone-built houses, which was formally the main thoroughfare for "curb-crawling" (the colloquial term for men cruising slowly in cars past female or transsexual prostitutes standing on the curb). As will be highlighted, there is still a considerable amount of drug-dealing still occurring in the area. The prostitution has moved to a slightly more central location. Andrew Clark [Citation2009] and others have spoken about the usefulness of walking tours of local environments to elicit information from local residents, the route being determined by the resident rather than the researcher. Clark identifies a number of advantages: he argues that these can help the researcher "understand the spatiality of neighbourhood and community," and one interesting aspect of this walk was that though the stopping-points represented distinctly different parts of the neighborhood they were geographically all very close (no more than a 6–7 min. walk between the furthest points). Clark elucidates other advantages of walking interviews, that they can "reveal the importance of place in participants' biographies of everyday life" and that they can reveal "how places are made through everyday practices, in part influenced by memories, previous activities, and wider discourses about neighbourhood spaces." This idea has also been elaborated by Crang and Cook [Citation2007], who discuss how memory and place are connected, and how indeed different aspect of an individual are stimulated by different locales and interactions. As Clark puts it, walking interviews can "demonstrate the degree to which the biographical, temporal, and day-to-day connectedness of life is bound through place." This creates a powerful argument for the use of walking interviews. Identity, as Crang and Cook point out is "a complex assemblage of thoughts, ways of doing things, relationship to possessions, feelings, memories, obligations," which is "always in flux" [Crang and Cook Citation2007: 10]. Our selves are also reflected in our relationships with others, "memories may be evoked by various belongings or locales associated with different facets of people's identities" [Rowles Citation1983; Crang and Cook Citation2007: 10]. It is also important to emphasize that people live out their lives between different locales, which emphasize different aspects of their identities [Crang and Cook Citation2007; Valentine Citation1993; Van der Ploeg Citation1986]. In other words, our identities are mobile. Ways in which we make sense of ourselves and our worlds result in interaction with different groups; events are interpreted through "discussions and debates with different groups of people as events are reported and interpreted socially through hearing about them from others, or even thinking about what someone else has said or would say about them. Therefore, not only is the place where the researcher and her/his 'subjects' meet important to any study, but also the social relations of research that are (re)arranged there" [Crang and Cook Citation2007: 10]. How far this complexity can be captured in interviews is open to question, but it would seem fair to ask questions to draw out the importance of different milieux in creating a subject's ideas, yet to be willing to acknowledge contradictions and incongruities. I attended one of these community meetings, but it was clear that a professional mediator (or conflict-resolution specialist) and Somali translators would be required for it to be more effective in terms of allowing the parties to communicate with each other usefully; and neither was present. The meeting was predominantly attended by women (mothers), and few if any of the young people involved in the disputes were there. Terraced housing in Sheffield tends to be brick-built for working-class families. The houses in Brunswick Street, for example, are larger and slightly grander than much Sheffield housing stock and with three floors rather than two; however, most of the houses are now run-down and used for multiple occupation (as shared houses or bed-sits), with students in many of them. They are in private ownership, and it is clear from the condition of the properties that many landlords are not conscientious in maintaining their properties well. The small front gardens are mostly overgrown or covered in concrete, and the iron railings, which must have been an attractive feature of the street once, were removed as part of wartime austerity measures to build weaponry, and never replaced; the stumps of the railings are still evident in much of the street. Big black municipal rubbish bins and blue paper recycling bins sit ostentatiously in most of the front gardens (or on the pavement), as few residents can be bothered to wheel them into the gennel or back-garden area. In Gloucester Street the housing is newer and in good order; it is social housing for poor families, with a mixed community living there. As Marcus Banks has eloquently pointed out, social research has got to be an engagement, not simply an exercise in data collection. That engagement, he argues, "is bound to be partial and bound to include elements of serendipity: contents; events and social alignments that could not have been predicted or foreseen" [Banks Citation2001: 179]. He asserts: "Swooping god-like into other people's lives and gathering 'data' (including visual 'data') according to a predetermined theoretical agenda strikes me not simply as morally dubious but intellectually flawed" [Banks Citation2001: 179]. I do care about this neighborhood, and I wish to give voice to these people who do not normally get heard, with their agenda articulated, not mine … It is not just a question of these people providing the researcher with her livelihood (as Taussig [Citation1980: 104] put it). Although I am a local resident, in gang warfare terms, I am definitely a "civilian," and apart from the unlikely event of being caught in cross-fire I feel safe here. This is the first of several scheduled walking interviews in the area which together I hope will create the kind of complex picture I discuss as desirable at the end of this piece of writing. Visual methods have been used to provide information for "front-line services" which have a harm reduction remit in a survey of drug users' "public" and "semi-public" places for injecting heroin and crack-cocaine. Video cameras pan around the sites from the position in which drugs are used [Parkin 2009]. "Horseplay" tends to be a mild form of wrestling, usually between males, but it could include misuse of play equipment, pushing and shoving of adults on the equipment, etc. Costcutter tends to service the local alcoholics, and a nearby local shop sells khat to local Somalis who turn up looking anxious to ask if it has arrived yet. Khat is the leaves and shoots of a flowering shrub (Catha edulis) containing cathinone, which is native to Somalia and Yemen and has amphetamine-like effects leading to feelings of euphoria. It is the recreational drug of choice for local Somalis, many of whom eschew alcohol. The chronic abuse of khat can lead to a deterioration in mental health. The Hanover estate comprises low-rental social housing built in the 1960s. Sheffield City Council provides housing to around 49,000 tenants in Sheffield. The estate is very close to the city center, making it sought after. Housing many deprived people together in estates can make them potentially explosive and dangerous, though this particular estate is neither. Most dress extremely modestly, as Figure 1 illustrates; many are studious and do well academically. Farzad said he was pleased there was a light drizzle at the time of our walk as it meant that most people were indoors. He did receive one friendly greeting from a youngish Somali man at this point in our walk. Some of the younger Somali boys are over-exuberant on the school bus, making the journey frankly frightening and stressful for others commuting to Silverdale School. Bus drivers are often not willing to intervene. My 12-year-old daughter reports almost daily incidents—things being thrown, jostling, wrestling and so forth. Some of these residents were repatriated from a nearby mainly White "problem" estate called the Manor, an estate unwilling to accommodate these newcomers. In 1992 The Star newspaper reported, "For months now, there have been reports of verbal abuse, attacks on black people's houses, and even sexual assaults" on members of the Somali community [The Star July 9, 1992]. However, this repatriation has now impinged upon the established Afro-Caribbean population of Broomhall and new tensions have been created. Today the Somali community in Sheffield (some 5,000 people) is dispersed, but with a Somali-dominated estate next to the Gell Street playground which is on the other side of the ring-road, just a few minutes' walk away from my house. Although a small Somali population has existed since the 1930s the numbers were swelled by the civil war in 1988, so the majority of migrants are fairly recent. Somalis only constitute some 2.5 percent of the non-EU migrant community in Sheffield, so are a fairly small community overall [White Citation2006]. Indeed, ICAR (The Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees) noted that a study conducted in 1999 found that 91.9 percent reported that they had come to the UK as refugees, and 35.8 percent had been in Sheffield for five years or less, so it would seem that this is a very newly established community. Though the study only surveyed a fraction of the total Sheffield population, it is notable that 60 percent of those surveyed acknowledged literacy problems. The same survey found very high rates of disability in the community with a third of Somali men and a quarter of Somali women having health problems or disabilities. How many of the community are traumatized and how that affects their children has perhaps to be fully ascertained. "It is difficult to overstate the Somali government's brutality towards its own people, or to measure the impact of its murderous policies. Two decades of the presidency of President Said Barre have resulted in human rights violations on an unprecedented scale which have devastated the country. Even before the current wars the human rights of Somali citizens were violated systematically, violently and with absolute impunity" [Searle 2006: 1]. Horseradish was a very popular postwar austerity food, as it grows easily. It tends to be my parents' generation who still eat it, especially as a sauce. Situated behind a petrol station at the end of Ecclesall Road, Sunnybank is a Wildlife Trust nature reserve. It tends to be used as a shortcut to the main road to catch the bus, or to the supermarket Waitrose which houses the nearest pharmacy, so I am not sure how many of the locals notice the foxes, hedgehogs and pipistrelle bats which the Trust assure us inhabit this small stretch of land (I certainly see the bats at night). There is considerable overcrowding in some of the flats, especially among Somali families. Farzad is saying this as someone born in Britain. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on immigrant housing experiences notes that Somali respondents in Sheffield often referred to the benefits of living in ethnically diverse neighborhoods (shared information, assistance, support and security, and more prosaic things such as the availability of familiar foodstuffs), and that this was more important in their choice of settlement location than other attributes of a local area such as crime levels, the quality of local schools, the physical environment or the existence of parks [Robinson, Reeve and Casey Citation2007: 52–53]. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan Hogan SUSAN HOGAN is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Derby, and lives in Broomhall, Sheffield. She has research interests in the history of medicine, and has written extensively on the relationship between the arts and insanity, and the role of the arts in rehabilitation. She is also keenly interested in the treatment of women within psychiatry and in ante-natal care. Her books include Healing Arts: The History of Art Therapy. Dr. Hogan has also undertaken training in social science research methods in sociology and social policy, and has developed an interest in visual methodologies.