期刊名称：Collegium : Studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
印刷版ISSN：1796-2986
出版年度：2012
卷号：13
出版社：Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
摘要：Using the case of a four-year ethnography of a tenants' association in an underprivileged district of Montréal, Québec, Canada, I show how workers use artefacts to translate the built landscape – the physical characteristics and issues of buildings – into language. This translation, I contend, is necessary to ground the association's calls to city of ficials for intervention as legitimate and necessary. In turn, those calls , as they are recirculated, open up or deter programs of action. In other words , ac tion is transformed into language which in turn calls for further action – and the distinction between action and language fades. This is not only a theoretical stance but also a preoccupation of participants themselves, whose daily work consists of ef fac ing their own inter vention and of presenting their calls for repairs as genuine demands from the district 's built landscape itself. This is especially important in a district where gentrification and other physical changes have a growing impact on poorer c itizens. As researchers , we need to keep in mind that pitting materiality against language, or action against its descriptions , is unproduc tive from a pragmatic point of view and fails to account for the way in which community workers – among others – work and at tempt, discursively, to shape their environment while presenting that environment as s peaking "by itself."
