Doctoral Dissertation Research: Channeling Politics: Activists, Waterways, and the Fluid Lines of Citizenship in 20th Century Amsterdam

阿姆斯特丹的叙述不可避免地以对这座城市历史悠久的运河系统的描述开始，注意到它的地点定义特征。这一博士论文研究项目调查了阿姆斯特丹运河与20世纪该市在住房权、安全权、财富和身份认同权方面的政治斗争之间的关系。这项研究聚焦于三个政治动荡时期：20世纪30年代要求劳工改革的社会主义激进主义，20世纪60年代反对市场主导的反文化示威活动，以及自90年代以来要求放松经济管制的保守民粹主义运动。这些年的剪报、工会档案、积极分子用具和市政报告记录了围绕就业条件、居民驱逐、金融不平等和文化压制的社会倡导激增。利用这些文件，这个项目重建了这些社会运动的空间历史。在这样做的过程中，它解释了活动家如何将历史运河作为物理遗址、经济资源和象征图标，以促进他们的公民改革运动。这项研究项目是重新思考地理领域内外的空间政治的大规模努力的一部分。该项目没有根据阿姆斯特丹运河的建设历史对其进行分析，而是阐明了码头的政治效用。这一方法使用了一个与现有社会运动社会学文献相兼容的理论框架，为政治激进主义的物质动力提供了新的线索。它还直接响应了地理学家和人类学家的呼吁，将有关土地实践的知识与城市环境中的社会变化理论相结合。这些发现有助于重要的城市规划辩论，讨论公共空间不断变化的性质及其与住房、就业、环境健康和社区健康的关系。总而言之，这些贡献有助于重新政治化空间分析，对建成景观和公民权利之间的关系产生新的见解。

Narratives of Amsterdam inevitably open with a description of the city's historic canal system, noting its place-defining character. This doctoral dissertation research project investigates the relationship between Amsterdam's canals and the city's 20th century political struggles over rights to housing, safety, wealth, and identity. The study focuses on three periods of political volatility: socialist activism for labor reforms in the 1930s, countercultural demonstrations against market domination in the 1960s, and conservative populist campaigns for economic deregulation since the 1990s. Newspaper clippings, union archives, activist paraphernalia, and municipal reports from these years document surges of social advocacy surrounding employment conditions, residential evictions, financial inequities, and cultural repression. Using these documents, this project reconstructs the spatial history of these social movements. In so doing, it explains how activists used the historic canals as a physical site, economic resource, and symbolic icon to facilitate their campaigns for civic reform.This research project is part of a large-scale effort to rethink spatial politics both within and beyond the field of Geography. Instead of analyzing Amsterdam's canals according to their construction history, this project illuminates the political utility of the quays. This approach sheds new light on the material dynamics of political activism using a theoretical framework that is compatible with the existing sociology literature on social movements. It also responds directly to calls from geographers and anthropologists to integrate knowledge about land practices with theories of social change in urban settings. The findings contribute to important city planning debates about the changing nature of public space and its relationship to housing, jobs, environmental health, and community wellness. Cumulatively, these contributions help re-politicize spatial analysis, generating new insights into the relationship between built landscapes and citizenship rights.