Elena Hernández M.A.

Since October 2021, I have been working as a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the project B04 “Sorting with Care: Human Differentiation in Contact Zones of Support.” Together with Heike Drotbohm and Elena Reichl I am interested in those forms of human differentiation that are made relevant in contexts of support and solidarity. My research is focused on the greater Lisbon area in Portugal. Previously, I completed my master’s degree in urban studies in Lisbon, through which I gained a deep acquaintance with the city. My fascination with urban issues can also be found in my research perspective. I ask how and which kinds of distinctions are embedded in the city and how these emerge and continue in contact zones of support. In particular, I am interested in the spatial arrangement of human differentiations, for example in informal forms of housing.

In Portugal, informal forms of assistance are geared towards absorbing the ongoing consequences of national austerity policies and overlapping crises. As such, they are part of the debate about welfare state assistance that is perceived as absent. The focus of my research is on participant observation in an activist network that campaigns for the right to housing and in two different neighborhoods that want to contribute to more social participation through food distribution and leisure activities. I am interested in the relationship between normative ideas and deviance in dealing with urban poverty, symbolic and constructed boundaries and the (self-)understandings of people who differentiate and hierarchize one another through practices of support.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich