Racial Embodiment and the Interaction Order at Berlin’s Public Pools

• In Event: Body Politics, State Power, and Resistance

Abstract

This study examines how heightened security measures at Berlin’s outdoor public swimming pools reshape everyday interactions, positioning young Middle Eastern migrant and asylum-seeking men paradoxically as both hypervisible threats and precarious security workers enforcing the very rules that target them. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that racial embodiment actively organizes the interaction order, redistributing authority, hypervisibility, and care across pool spaces. These dynamics also generate liminal interactions marked by informal solidarity and emotional validation between security workers and those they monitor. Integrating symbolic interactionism with critical phenomenology and affective economies, I advance an embodied concept of racial interaction order. The analysis reveals a constitutive tension in convivial multicultural spaces: the interactional processes that obscure ethnoracial power simultaneously create possibilities for alternative affective alignments among racialized men.

Author

• Esra Sarioglu, University of Virginia