Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2026
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program
Political Science
Advisor
Celina Su
Subject Categories
Other Political Science
Keywords
Cultural policy, political ethnography, critical urbanism, Wales, infrastructure, democracy
Abstract
This thesis argues that under present conditions, everyday political-aesthetic life is not only about resistance or reproduction but about holding: the work of keeping people, practices, and attachment present and oriented as conditions change. Holding takes the form of care and maintenance; as practices of making, assembling, and imagining; and as the work that keeps open the possibility of renewed attachment to public things and to each other. In the field, this was named as ‘a sense of the sea’, an affective register characterized by wariness, attunement, attentiveness, orientation, and endurance. I am calling this a fragile infrastructure of survival - fragile because the load falls unevenly and those bearing it are being used up; infrastructure because it comprises people, things, places and the fabric that holds them together; survival because it keeps cultural and democratic practice alive without the promise of transformation. The method is political ethnography - eleven interviews, observation and documentary sources across six weeks in 2026 - attending to the aesthetic, the material and the affective together. The six sites are in Swansea, Cymru, a post-industrial city where austerity, contested cultural recognition, and neoliberal governance converge with clarity. I find a politics of differential load, where the criteria that determine what counts as valuable generate uneven burdens then frequently render them invisible; that ruination is constitutive rather than merely destructive; and that the political and aesthetic openings, produced by the work of holding, are not resolved, absorbed, or closed, but recur and are maintained, their significance not settled in advance. This is an account of a local and specific urban interregnum, and how people stay oriented towards one another within it.
Recommended Citation
Clark, Katy, "‘A Sense of the Sea’: Grassroots Culture, Care, and Endurance in Swansea, Cymru" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6873
