Establishing Collective-Based Mural in Husby, Stockholm: Henri Lefebvreê Work of Artêand Scholarly Political Engagement

This article takes up Lefebvre’s challenge to apply the intellectual tools of the academy to the practical production of urban space, and discusses an effort to make use of our theories of signification in re-articulating stigmatized suburbs. Often referred to as ‘vulnerable’, ‘disenfranchised’ or ‘marginalized’, stigmatized suburbs and the people living in them are targeted by many social and economic initiatives simply because they are distinctly vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised. In so doing, initiatives interpellate and reproduce the geographical imaginary that is both the outcome and the source of their target groups’ political disadvantage. The article shows how a particular community initiative attempts to overcome the problem of interpellation. It uses Callon’s notion of ‘the qualification of products’ to understand the initiative’s efforts to transcend the objectification of the targeted groups as well as the symbolic limitation of agency. This allows us to follow the process by which the initiative attempts to re-symbolize the body and the neighborhood identified through the category of ‘the immigrant’. The article suggests that efforts to overcome the problem of interpellation must go beyond the realm of the symbolic to include, as well, social and material elements. The article ends with a reflexive note on the extent to which the engaged scholar is also caught within the interpellation paradox.