ABSTRACT
In the chapter I trouble the idea of tolerance, and in particular how tolerance is mobilised in public and political discourses about living with difference in cities. The chapter questions established conceptual terrains where tolerance is understood either as a political ideal or norm that acts as a baseline in dissensual politics, or as a discourse of power and mode of governmentality. Bringing writing on tolerance in political theory into dialogue with research in geography, sociology, and anthropology on urban encounters, the chapter shifts theorisations of tolerance in novel directions by paying attention to the ethnographic details of multicultural places, and the messy, lived realities of everyday spaces of tolerance. The original contribution of the chapter lies in the development of a ‘spatial grammar’ through the concept of infrastructures for living with difference that is concerned with the taking place of politics, and how encounters and situations might be understood as political. The idea of infrastructure is used to shift our orientation to the world as one that is ‘almost-always-falling-apart’, and to highlight processes of holding together that involve repair, improvisation, invention, fixing, and reassembling. Adopting this orientation to spaces of tolerance provides space for examining how social norms and entrenched habits of (racialised) sense-making are negotiated, suspended, and remade. The chapter focuses on a makeshift memorial assembled in response to the March 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch and You Get Me? – a portrait project by photographer Mahtab Hussain’s – to illustrate how everyday practices and experimental social projects build infrastructures for living with difference that highlight the concrete acts and contexts of social collaboration to disrupt racisms, produce engaged publics and nurture a ‘situated ethics of conviviality’ (Back and Sinha, 2016).
