11 Counter-archiving as a decolonial pedagogy of collective care

Maybe like us you have turned a corner, entered a city square and encountered an official monument, memorial or structure, and felt erased? Or maybe encountered there a marker, that may be for some insignificant, but that for you is a potent reminder, of other collective histories, presence, contributions?

This chapter explores how we – three academics moving and living in the Nordic countries and the West Coast of the US – have engaged in embodied practices of walking and talking to challenge a colonial public archive. With colonial public archive we mean the ways that public space is marked by official commemorations (for example, statues, names of streets, squares and buildings) which reinforce the hegemony of colonialism and erase the ways the past and present continue to be shaped by colonial projects. Public space is where specific historical events and memories are celebrated and privileged, while others are erased (Mbembe, 2015). Indeed, since the early 2020s, public archives and commemoration have increasingly been a site for communities’ critical re-engagement with specific colonial histories and the ways they form memory and belonging (Moulton 2021; Katz Thor, 2021). They have focused on legacies of injury, violence and death inaugurated through colonial projects and their racist knowledge systems. Here, overlapping communities of academics, activists and artists around the world have united in their localities to create practices and forms for challenging the coloniality of the public archives and the historical events and memories they preserve, as well as the injustices and struggles they bypass. This is an embodied practice where history is being re-engaged and creatively edited, as counter-narratives are formed which re-centre and re-tell colonial relations (Sawyer and Osei-Kofi, 2000; Kamaly, 2021, 2022–2023). These counter-archiving practices are not only about the past and present, but also provide a vision for the future (Rumsey, 2016; Periç, 2018; Fischer 2022).

Walking and talking with others can be a powerful way for generating collaborative and critical understandings of shared place in relation to locality, self and community (Middleton, 2018). Following Yoon-Ramirez (2021), we suggest that centring the sensory experience of walking through public space engages us in recollecting how the legacy of colonialism continues to have an impact on our being in place. Walking and talking together is a slow practice of collectively ‘curiously thinking together’, a decolonial practice that blends and generates new webs of meaning as it knits together seemingly disparate sites, spaces and histories, thus challenging historical erasures and distortions (Springgay and Truman, 2017; Savransky and Stengers, 2018). This is a practice that can be appreciated as decolonial in that colonialisms past and present are explored collaboratively and de-constructed and re-worked through an activity which acknowledges the violence of erasure of histories and communities (Bhambra, 2014). Through walking and talking together, the mind, soul, body and the senses combine to activate a more holistic embodied form of knowledge-making challenging colonial mind-centred forms. We argue that these practices can be understood as a pedagogy that is also a form of collective care and healing (Fischer, 2022) and that resists the Whitewashing and erasure of diverse histories (Ware, 2017).

This chapter aims to add to understandings of embodied and collaborative forms for connecting with public archives. Our work contributes to a growing literature which address the transformational potential of critical embodied engagements with the public archive (for example, Livholts, 2022). These methods have potential to develop decolonial social work education because they open up questions of power, social justice, marginalisation and social change. We argue that engaging with the public archive can be a form of collective care with transformative potential because through critically addressing the past we are also re-envisioning the future (Fisher, 2022). As an illustration of this argument, we share two such experiences of collaborative embodied walking and talking practice. This is where public space, its coloniality and erasures were critically collectively re-thought to create alternative histories in the cities of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Fresno, California, US.

We approached our two different cityscapes (Gothenburg/Fresno) as spaces entangled in the deep roots of local contexts of coloniality. Collective memory and sites of commemoration in our cities are buttressed by narratives and representations that elide and erase the contributions, sacrifices and suffering of marginalised peoples. This erasure contributes to the creation of a national, regional and local social memory with a skewed and incomplete understanding of the past, and which perpetuates structural oppression and dehumanisation in the present. In centring the subaltern knowledges in each of our everyday landscapes through our two different city walks, we sought to counter-archive the dominant stories of place.

Our exploration of walking, listening and talking in city spaces has been inspired by Yoon-Ramirez’s (2021) pedagogical conception of walking as a sensory and relational experience. As Ramirez (2021: 118) writes, walking-sensing enables ‘critically examining how embodied experiences and everyday sense of being have been shaped by coloniality … walking-sensing can open up new and liberatory possibilities for thinking, being and sensing’.

Diverse decolonial theorisations have also informed our notion of counter-archiving in a context of coloniality, invisibility, hegemonic Whiteness and anti-Blackness (Ware, 2017; Daigle and Ramirez, 2019). Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concept of ‘wake work’ resonated with us during this process. ‘Wake work’ is a concept which theorises and centres the everyday collective and individual practices of care created through Black survival, navigation and recognition of each other’s lives within racist systems that perpetuate and erase ongoing Black death. She argues collective care is performed through collecting the evidence of Black survival and the myriad of everyday resistances, a practice which Sharpe calls ‘wake work’. This is where our caring and mourning for the living and dead is grounded in a context where the past, present and future are fundamentally and continuously shaped by the aftermath of transatlantic slavery. Wake work as a concept resonated in understanding our practices of walking and talking in public space (Gothenburg/Fresno). Through critical and collective engagement with public archives, we created care when we recognised our own and our communities erased yet ‘carried’ histories (Puwar, 2021).

Sharpe’s methodology of everyday collective resistances, such as through counter-archiving, are necessarily both embedded within unequal power relations but also contain potential for self and community witnessing, affirmation and healing. And it is with these perspectives in mind that we introduce you to some of the ways we have been inspired to explore and engage with our two (Gothenburg/Fresno) walking pedagogies that trouble meaning making in city space.

Gothenburg is a city on the western coast of Sweden that celebrated its 400th anniversary as a city in 2021. It is also Sweden’s second largest city with over 600,000 inhabitants in 2023 (WPR, 2023). Both historically and today the city remains one of the largest and most important Nordic ports for trade, industry and seafaring. City street names and buildings bear witness to this long history and centre not only Swedish monarchs but also commemorate and centre the city’s transnational economic relations. They showcase names of central trade goods (such as iron ore, cereals, herring, sugar), capital investing economic families (such as Carnegie and Carlander) and give value to particular seafaring routes (Amsterdam, Jylland, London and North America). Workers’ labour for the extraction, processing and transport of such goods, and the destruction of the lands in terms of communities and relations between animals, plant life and humans are erased or smoothed over in the historical public archive of the city.

Commemoration of the city’s and nation’s economic participation and role in the transnational global economy encounters often polish over the ways violence, exploitation and racial knowledges were central to imperialism and colonialism. For example, near the city seaport stands ‘The Delaware Monument’. The original statue from 1938 is said to have been in Christina State Park in Wilmington where it was presented as a ‘gift’ to the state of Delaware, while its ‘sister’ statue has rested on the dock in Gothenburg, Sweden, since 1958 (after being moved from the capital city of Stockholm). The statue is a commemoration of the 1638 establishment of the New Sweden, a Swedish colony (in the now US states of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland). This is where Swedish, Finnish and Dutch colonisers met and traded with the Indigenous Lenape and Susquehannock peoples. The statue bears images of harmonious trading contact with Indigenous peoples who generously trade land for guns and is a good example of how the genocide is actively erased in public archives such as this monument.

Significant to understanding the erasure of Sweden’s various actors and their forms of participation in the violence and dehumanisation of the transatlantic economic enterprise is how the nation has branded itself as exceptional and innocent in relation to European coloniality (Keskinen et al, 2009; Habel, 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012). Only recently has the city’s coloniality begun to be reconsidered and re-told (Berg, 2004; Rönnbäck, 2010; Katz Thor, 2021). A movement of Afro-Swedes, Sámi, racialised minorities and other minoritised communities have been critically re-mapping and counter-archiving Gothenburg in recognition of its key role in the transatlantic trade, specifically through the production and export of iron ore from settler colonial Swedish mines, as well as through the processing and consumption of material from the Americas. This is where Gothenburg’s role in a more general aspirational European imperial project of world domination is being re-traced and more publicly acknowledged.

Collaborations between artists, activists, researchers, educators and students in the city have started to make visible some of the city’s colonial history. One example is a re-writing and counter-archiving in the space where Gothenburg’s Court of Appeals lies, as historically it used to be called ‘The French Plot’ because it was on a piece of land given to France in ‘exchange’ for the slave-trading Caribbean Island of Saint Barthélemy. At the height of the trade in enslaved peoples, Sweden controlled the island and gained economic benefit from their exploitation. In 2021, as part of the Gothenburg Art Biennale GIBCA, extracts from the powerful poem ‘Zong!’ (Phillip and Boateng, 2011) were placed on the walls outside the Court of Appeals as a counter-archival intervention resisting the erasure of this history and the violence of its presence in this city space. Indeed, fragments of colonial presence are scattered throughout the cityscape of Gothenburg. Our counter-archiving work in Gothenburg can be understood as one effort to contribute to a larger movement that aims to begin to challenge and fill in the silences in public space with alternative histories and perspectives (Sawyer and Osei-Kofi, 2020).

During the last three years, we (Nana and Lena) have been exploring Sweden’s public sphere in relation to coloniality as well as to our own locations and beings. We both have a relationship to Gothenburg: we have walked the streets and encountered spaces many times in our everyday paths (Nana grew up there and has often visited because she sees this as one of her ‘homes’ in the world; Lena moved there in 2011 where she remains). Our work has been an organic process, and intuitively informed. By this we mean that we did not start out knowing we would eventually write and create an arts-based performance, and later record a multimodal film performance. We did not know that this process would connect us with a dynamic Swedish, Nordic and more global community of artists, activists, researchers, educators and students also interested in creating alternative pedagogies in relation to coloniality.

Our process began in 2018 by walking and talking with each other in the city and thinking together about alternative ways to communicate knowledge. As we walked together through Gothenburg we shared our own histories, our families, our own stories of migration and Black and African disaporic living and survival, as well as our own experiences of racism and commitments to overlapping and divergent feminist and Black communities in Sweden and abroad. We also felt frustrated with what we experienced to be some of the boundaries of academic life and knowledge production. During these walks we often found ourselves stopping in front of a particular statue, named ‘Järntorgsbrunnen’, otherwise known as ‘The Iron Well’, which stands prominently in the city square called The Iron Square.

‘The Iron Well’ (Figure 11.1) is a 1923 bronze statue by the artist Tore Strindberg, located in a public square in the centre of Gothenburg. It contains a Swedish ship, water flowing downwards and five crouching naked women with their backs to one another. It is a public commemoration of what is called ‘Sweden’s Age of Greatness’, when Sweden produced most of the iron ore exported to other European powers during the 1700s (and which is still true today). The five female figures represent the world based on racial hygiene concepts of racial types.

During our time with the statue, we both shared our ambivalent feelings about it; its representation of Sweden, as well as the racialised ‘types’ of women, who crouched naked as part of the statue’s base. We found ourselves drawn to and standing near the representation of an African woman. We both said we wanted her to have a name, and, in this way, our counter-archiving practice started.

We began to think about ‘The Iron Well’ statue and public commemoration in relation to conversations going on in other spheres and we drew connections to what we felt in relation to the statue as we tried to create a language to talk about this with each other. In particular, Black feminist historian and theorist Tina Campt’s (2017) concept of ‘listening’ as a powerful methodological approach for engaging with gaps and silences in historical archives began to resonate with our own practice. Like Sharpe, Campt is also theorising a methodology of care in a context of anti-Blackness and asks us to be present through listening for the alternative histories of humanity and complexity that we feel when encountering state archives of Black life. Campt’s work engages a method of embodied listening with official passport photos and prison-intake photos of Black people and analyses them as forms of state surveillance that attempt to ‘capture’ – that is, to dehumanise – Black life, living, humanity and complexity. She invites us to turn to feeling, and asks us to hear the alternative stories, which she argues vibrate in us, yet on another frequency, and which tell another story than that which the creator of the image wanted to tell. It is through Campt’s beautiful methodology of ‘listening’ that we began to understand and form a methodology for understanding and creating knowledge about ‘The Iron Well’. We listened: to each other, to the historical moment of the wake in which we exist and navigate, and to what had at first appeared to be disparate actions around the world in relation to public space.

Working in this way, at first, we mostly heard the violence of Swedish coloniality in the statue and the women represented there. But through time and an embodied listening, talking and thinking together we began to hear and see in the statue spaces open for counter-narratives of resilience and refusal. We heard possibility amid the fragments, and were drawn to alternative stories and different possibilities the archival facts presented. Here we were inspired by Saidya Hartman’s (2008) concept of ‘critical fabulation’ which she describes in relation to meeting archives of coloniality where silences are acknowledged and fragments pieced together through one’s own knowledge, desire and aspirations. For example, we saw the African woman’s hanging toe suddenly as a sign of potential. She was kneeling, taking the knee, and ready to leap! We began to see in the statue possibility, resistance and a future (see Figure 11.2). We realised that she was not forever fastened to this space set in time. We held in her possibility for movement.

We began to hear the statue tell us other stories and ways of knowing, and we began to feel the presence of ancestors in the water flowing on and through the statue but also nearby in the port sea of Gothenburg. The sea which binds the continents, our stories and histories, and as such we began to intuitively photograph and film the ocean, the sound and image of water. In this way as we embarked on this form of knowing, we felt the presence of the ancestors with us. And as we began to prepare a gender conference presentation, we felt it important that water was part of what we called our paper performance. We brought water into the space, poured libations, called the ancestors to be with us and asked the public to join us as we created another story of the statue. Later, as we became more in contact with different art communities and activist communities, we were offered the chance (due to COVID restrictions) to film our performance, and it changed into another form, a video installation.

We turn now to discuss our reflections on, and analysis of, this exploratory collaborative practice of counter-archiving in relation to the coloniality of Gothenburg’s public archive as an object lesson in how walking and talking pedagogies are a decolonial endeavour, and a practice of care. We argue that through creating a pedagogy for embodied knowledge practice we were able to critically assess Swedish colonialism and understand and even make a leap from more positivistic and colonial embedded methods of enquiry.

Ours was a decolonial practice in that we critically assessed the coloniality of the statue through our embodied and ‘carried’ knowledge (Puwar, 2021), and created a pedagogy for counter-archiving its erasures. This is a practice which led us to feel the powerful presence of our African ancestors in water; the water flowing through the statue, the sea waves moving in the harbour nearby, and which we poured as libation when we brought them into the room with us. All of these actions linked the past, present and future of Black survival and death. We understood this pedagogy to be a form of care as it encourages people to listen to affect and feeling in relation to public space and commemoration, and to each other: to witness, learn, listen to each other’s memories, histories and understandings of place in relation to colonialism.

In this section, Kris discusses how she used city walking as a decolonial pedagogy of wake work with social work students in Fresno, California, between 2009 and 2017. To orient the reader, she first outlines the local history to give a context of the place and then discusses why she developed city walks as a decolonial change-oriented pedagogy for macro practice. The experience of the walks became wake work as students learned about the hidden fragments of multi-ethnic local history. This section concludes with a discussion of the sensory experience of walking through public space as a collective and relational decolonial pedagogy that counter-archives the city (Kowalewski and Bartłomiejski, 2020).

Fresno is a sprawling metropolis of a half million residents situated in the territories of the Yokuts and Mono people in California’s San Joaquin Valley of California. Once a complex ecosystem of wetlands and habitat of migratory waterfowl that was stewarded by the Indigenous peoples of the region, the San Joaquin Valley became the site of large-scale cattle grazing operations for hides and tallow in the 18th century. As the Spanish colonial mission system collapsed and California became part of Mexico in 1822, a rancho system emerged where vast tracts of land were owned by a handful of rancheros while Indigenous people worked in virtual peonage. In the mid-19th century, the Mexican-American War and discovery of gold in Sacramento coalesced with the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which viewed the total conquest of North America by White colonisers as the will of God, producing a systemic campaign of genocide against the Indigenous people of California (Atkins and Bauer, 2021).

These historical forms of colonisation gave rise to land monopoly, instead of small freeholds, which continues to be the main form of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley today (Pisani, 1991). The emerging large-scale agricultural industry at the turn of the 20th century drew a multi-ethnic labour force to Fresno. From the very start, following the racial capitalism model derived from the transatlantic slave trade, Whites in Fresno strongly lobbied to maintain racial segregation in town planning with an 1874 town meeting decision to locate ‘other ethnicities and disreputables to the west side’ of the soon-to-be-incorporated city, making the railroad tracks the ‘racial pale’ of the new city (State Commission on Immigration and Housing, 1918). Chinese bachelor labourers, who made up half of Fresno’s early population, came to Fresno in search of work after the completion of the transcontinental railroad seeking a safe place after being driven out of many towns in California (Pfaelzer, 2008). They settled in the central district west of the railroad line, which came to be known as Chinatown. Chinatowns throughout California emerged in cities as liminal spaces where Chinese, who faced legislative and racial discrimination, were concentrated in areas where tourism, vice and inter-ethnic mixing flourished separate from more strictly regulated and segregated residential and commercial neighbourhoods (Voss, 2020).

By the turn of the century, Fresno’s Chinatown had become a vibrant multi-ethnic neighbourhood known for its nightclubs, gambling and opium dens with a police force rumoured to be on the take (Guzmán, 2012). The rough-and-tumble mentality of the emerging city produced a reputation as a ‘wide-open town’ with Chinatown at the epicentre of the action (Chacon, 1988). Yet, Chinatown also was home to many families with a variety of faith-based and community organisations such as the Buddhist Temple, the Mexican Baptist Church, Chinese benevolent associations, Japanese and Chinese cultural schools, youth boxing clubs and cinemas. Chinatown was one of the only places in Fresno that people of colour could shop for clothing and other goods. The first African American doctors and lawyers set up offices in Chinatown next to the street where labour contractors regularly picked up farm workers. The Chinatown District was thus a mosaic of diverse communities, cultures and social classes closely interconnected in place.

Post-war disinvestment in American cities as the role of the automobile as the primary means of transportation pushed suburbanisation. In the 1950s, Fresno Mayor Gordon Dunn, who promoted the enlargement of the police force, targeted Chinatown for demolition, viewing it as a centre of crime as he pushed for slum clearance. Within ten years, Fresno had one of the largest urban development projects in the nation through the federal Model Cities programme. A freeway was constructed between Chinatown and the residential neighbourhood of West Fresno, cutting off foot traffic to the district which affected business. Long-standing neighbourhoods rich in social capital and local history were razed and the city was reconfigured for cars as public transportation diminished with the untrammelled sprawl of the city to the north. Poverty became increasingly concentrated in West Fresno as ethnicised Whites, such as Italians and Armenians, and middle-class people fled to the newer areas of Fresno. City funding was directed to the new suburban developments as the city centre was gradually abandoned, except for government offices, and became a silent and empty place after business hours, though recent efforts at revitalisation have begun to reverse this. Nonetheless, as the oldest district of Fresno, Chinatown still retains a gravitational pull in the local imaginary as a lost collective space where nine major ethnic groups (Armenian, African American, Basque, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mexican and Portuguese) lived closely together in community. This can be seen in the many efforts over the years to revitalise the area even though much of the physical history of the district is in fragments and people have scattered far and wide.

I tell this long story about Fresno because it is one that is rarely known by local students in the San Joaquin Valley. The ‘tale of two cities’, as one Fresno mayor once described the distinct spatial divide between the local extremes rich and poor, is often dehistoricised and not understood to be the result of deliberate structural policies by the ruling elite to invest resources in the wealthy areas of town, while the poorer and more ethnically diverse areas gradually deteriorated (Simmons, 2006). Today, there is more than 20 years’ difference in life expectancy between the older and newer areas of Fresno, which shows how the disparities built into the original plan to keep ‘disreputables’ to the west of the growing city continue to live in local bodies (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2012).

Along with the Black Lives Matter movement and public history such as the 1619 Project, there has been growing awareness in Fresno of the need to uncover the layers of buried history and rectify historical injustice. Community members, activist groups, history teachers and media outlets such as uSpark, Community Alliance and Fresnoland have driven a reassessment of local history (Community Alliance, 2023; Fresnoland, 2023; uSpark, 2023). Several sites have been renamed in Fresno after the revelations about the anti-Semitic and racist backgrounds of the people who were had been honoured. These acts of remembering peel away the facade of Whiteness, layers of ideologies and colonial mindsets, and open up the complex historical roots of many of the deep injustices that Fresnans continue to endure.

Between 2010 and 2017, I organised city walks as part of my macro social work practice course at California State University, Fresno. I was struck by how little local history had been preserved and passed on to younger generations. Fresno felt as segregated as when I was young, but there seemed to be less historical knowledge of the reasons Fresno developed the way it did because so many of the local narratives have been silenced, lost or never recorded. The extremes of poverty and wealth continue to be striking in Fresno with concentrated poverty, the lack of services and transportation, high rates of unemployment and need for benefits, poor schools and environmental injustice among the many social issues. A culture of blame, low levels of philanthropy and a mindset of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ still prevails, while layers of unacknowledged historical trauma and structural violence continue to drive patterns of addiction, intergenerational injustice and deprivation. Most of the Fresno State social work students came from impoverished local communities of colour and planned to practise in the Valley. Yet, they (like myself) were educated in a school system that privileged stories of the Spanish missions and local agricultural barons, with very little information about the histories of multi-ethnic communities in the Valley. The goal of these walks was therefore to explore and experience the physical and spatial landscape of the city and to collectively peel back the stories behind the disparities between neighbourhoods, and to validate the complex and hidden histories of the many diverse communities in Fresno.

Macro practice is a required course for undergraduate social work students. The goal of the course is to teach students about the larger context of social work in terms of programme development, community-based initiatives, grant writing, policy analysis, administration, organisational leadership and development. When I started teaching at Fresno State, there was a template for the syllabus that focused on these skills but had very little content on the local community. Macro practice was taught theoretically rather than experientially. I developed the city walks to bridge the gap between theories of structural injustice and lived experience.

City walks were organised on Saturdays in the autumn when the weather was not so hot, and they were open to students as well as their friends and families. We would meet in a neighbourhood at noon and walk for an hour. The neighbourhoods spanned diverse social classes and ethnicities. The idea of walking in a city generally traversed by car due to sprawl was to slow down time and to be physically present in different neighbourhoods. We usually walked with a resident from the area or a local activist. We were invited into one resident’s home for coffee and got a spontaneous tour of a local fire station by enthusiastic fire fighters. The walks were an immersive and sensory collective experience of a specific neighbourhood.

I discuss the community walk in Fresno’s Chinatown in detail because it was always the first walk of the series and sets the stage to understand how the city developed. Though it was a vibrant and crowded neighbourhood up until the 1950s, the vicissitudes of Chinatown are evident in its forlorn and empty buildings where there are currently only about 100 residents who live in the district and a large amount of unhoused people. Nowadays, there are efforts to gentrify Chinatown and some buildings are beginning to be renovated as office buildings as newcomers begin to buy up real estate.

Very few students had ever been to Chinatown, let alone heard of it, even though it lies at the heart of the city. We often had to spend some time in class to clarify where exactly it was and still several students got lost, sometimes requiring many text messages to locate them. Usually, about 8–10 students turned up curious and a bit nervous as they waited on the corner of Kern and F Streets, once the bustling centre of Chinatown, but in the 2010s was rather empty and desolate. The silent streets and boarded-up buildings of the area contributed to a sense of vulnerability.

We started the walk by looking at the small memorial to Chinese labourers, who built many of the downtown buildings, which is not especially easy to find. It is a marker that commemorates China Alley and is constructed on the same bricks that Chinese labourers used to build downtown. The plaque reads (see Figure 11.3):

In 1874, 600 people moved to what is now Fresno. Of those, 200 were Chinese, who made the brick and helped start the building of Fresno. A short time later, they were persuaded to settle west of the train tracks. They built an area of shops, which catered to all ethnic backgrounds. It was a thriving area that offered goods, services, and ‘entertainment’ day and night. It was the cosmopolitan area of Fresno for many years and to this day this area still has influence on the city. The brick used here came from an eighty-plus year-old church torn down in the 1970’s and is thought to have been made by the Chinese settlers.

The memorial asserts the significance of the Chinatown district by pointing to its vibrancy and diversity, though it is difficult to locate it because it is hidden between a bush and parking lot. The text bypasses the issue of enforced segregation by claiming that Chinese ‘settlers’ were ‘persuaded’ to live to the west of the railroad tracks. We stopped here as a group and breathed in the loneliness and seeming insignificance of the small plaque. We talked about who actually built this city, the physical hardship of being a hod carrier and what it must have been like to be elders in this place after a lifetime of labour.

Much of the legacy of these men, who usually lived in single-room occupancy housing and were often prevented from bringing over families due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, has been erased through time. The Chinese cemetery to the west of town has been long neglected and largely destroyed. At the height of Chinatown, there were nine Chinese benevolent associations that provided social support, entertainment and funeral expenses. Only a few were still standing, though they were largely abandoned. One bore the sign that it would be renovated as part of historical preservation by the state of California, but that never happened, and it eventually burned down. Underneath Chinatown runs a series of interconnected basements known as the tunnels that were used for the storage of goods, brothels, gambling and opium dens. Allegedly, this system of underground tunnels extended all the way to city hall, though no one has ever properly mapped it. Sometimes we were able to go down into the basements by descending the steps of Ofelia’s barber shop. The tunnels were dusty and empty, but we could examine large solid doors that had peepholes and cavernous rooms. Kathy Omachi, a community activist who sometimes joined us, described how women trafficked into brothels would have to work 16–18 hours per day in small cribs underground to pay off debts incurred through migration. Many died by suicide, she said, and most could never pay the loan, though some escaped and made new lives. Here, Kathy shut the lights off and we stood silently. She encouraged us to feel the spirits of these invisible women’s lives, imagine what it would be like to be trapped living in these circumstances, bear the weight of despair.

After the tunnels, we re-emerged to the street and strolled to the Azteca Theatre, built in 1948. Arturo Tirado managed the theatre and was the only venue in the San Joaquin Valley to have regular showings of Spanish-language films. It was also a venue for the leader of the United Farm Workers union, Cesar Chávez, who organised rallies at the theatre and read the ‘Plan of Delano’, a document written by union activists calling for the liberation of farmworkers (Historic Fresno, 2017). Next to the theatre was a nightclub known as ‘La Fiesta’ with an unlit vintage neon sign. At one time, there was a key shop next to the Azteca which operated as an informal social service agency and first stop for new arrivals from Mexico seeking work and housing. We discussed what it would feel like to arrive in this strange place and be directed to this little shop. What stories would the owner have and what a vast social network was situated in this small space. The fading colours of the façade and the vibrancy of the ageing neon conjured up a time of joy and interconnectedness.

We also visited the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple, which was just down the street from the Azteca and China Alley, which was watched and preserved by neighbours during the Second World War. We saw the Scandinavian dairy factory, the oldest fire station in Fresno known as ‘The Rock’, the Mexican Baptist Church where Cesar Chávez held meetings and the Paris Cafe which was famous for its food. We also stopped in front of the Bing Kong Association (Figure 11.4), a Chinese community centre built in 1900. It had unique architectural features that California Governor Gray Davis promised to preserve during his term in the early 2000s, but it burned down in 2022 after being left vacant for over 20 years. We studied the many unlit neon signs that pointed to the time when, as a former resident once said, the streets were hopping until 4 am. The city walk helped students to consider the fragments of evidence of the multi-ethnic communities that breathed life into Chinatown. We discussed how these social connections were so important for wellness, solidarity and mutual aid. They were also able to see their own roots in these communities that were so rarely publicly honoured and recognised.

Social work macro practice is about advocating within larger social systems to make social change and to reimagine ways of emancipatory social work practices. Because institutions and policies are deeply rooted in the historical experiences of communities, it is essential for social workers to have knowledge of the local context of lived experience and place. City walks with the macro practice class were a way of centring local students in encounters with the public space of Fresno, sometimes in neighbourhoods they had rarely visited but which also often validated their own communities as having deep historical roots in the place of Fresno. These walks also opened up the past social justice struggles and creative ways that marginalised communities supported one another through stories. Many students reported having discussions with grandparents after these walks where elders talked about their own childhood memories of Chinatown bringing out previously untold stories of community joy, cross-cultural sharing and resistance to the various manifold levels of structural oppression in Fresno. This pedagogy allowed students to grapple with place, their own identities and how the legacy of segregation continues to have an impact on diverse communities in complex, structural ways.

Our exploration of a sensory and relational practice of walking, listening and talking together was situated in city spaces. We used a method of listening deeply and sharing and witnessing one another’s histories in a context of ‘the wake’ through an embodied encounter with historical fragments and/or public commemorations (such as plaques and statues) in our city spaces. If, according to Sharpe (2016), wake work entails a practice that remaps the traces of our ongoing and collective resistance to the erasure of histories and existence, then our efforts to walk through our city spaces collectively looking and listening for traces of resilience and resistance in the public archive are a practice that re-politicises the local.

In this chapter we have explored counter-archiving, as a re-mapping practice, in public spaces within the city of Gothenburg and Fresno. By moving collectively through city space, we encountered public art, monuments and various geographic locations through dialogues, aiming to make visible the everyday salience of colonial history. In the case of Gothenburg, Sweden, this is a counter-archiving which challenges arguments that suggest that Sweden’s involvement in colonialism was minor compared with nations such as Great Britain and France, and therefore doesn’t really ‘count’. We also illustrate through spatial mapping that correlating the degree of colonial power with the degree of colonial mindset of a people is a flawed view of accounting for how dominant world views of societies come into being. Sweden might not have been the largest colonial power, but the mindset of its people was no different from that of other European nations when it came to views about European superiority and the quest to gain power and control over people and resources in what we know today as the Global South.

The fragments that students encountered on city walks in Chinatown counter-archive the dominant narrative of Fresno, which is often narrowly confined to a narrative of White pioneers discovering an empty land. By walking and being present in the ruins of a once vibrant area, students were able to engage in the wake work of recognising and feeling the presence of ancestors and their structural oppressions by experiencing the space of Chinatown collectively. Following Julia Aoki and Ayaka Yoshimizu (2015), the city walks in Fresno were used as a ‘spatialised, lived, sensually experienced deviations from (the absence of) abstract historical narratives’. When cities are traversed solely in automobiles with windows rolled up, there is little opportunity to engage with the lived space of the neighbourhood and the spatial-social memory of thriving districts, beloved buildings and intertwined communities. By walking through Chinatown, students were doing wake work through a decolonial pedagogy of being present in counter-archiving the local stories.

As we knit together seemingly disparate archival fragments of space and re-filled them with our own histories of these spaces and their significance, we engaged in an intimate form of social care. This is a practice of care that is relational and links communities, such as those between academic disciplines, civil society organisations and activists. We found that these kinds of pedagogical forms have potential to bring together people within cities where connections can be fragmented. This has particular relevance for the field of social work, but also other disciplines, as it shifts spaces and places for learning from inside the university to embodied engagement with the city spaces and communities. It highlights the fact that learning comes from reflecting on our collective being in specific local spaces in the world we share.