Posted on

My first book: Rethinking Life at the Margins

Rethinking life at the margins_Cover

After two years of intense work with 13 exceptionally talented scholars, my first book is finally out for Routledge! Rethinking Life at the Margins. The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics is not a definite statement around marginalisation but an exercise in post-categorical and processual thinking. Beside my theoretical introduction, where I lay out the assemblage-approach that drives my research around the urban margins, the book is packed with in-depth ethnographies of life at the margins from the Global North and the South, the city and the rural, the body and the virtual spaces of the web. I am proud of this book and, most of all, proud of the people that wrote for it.

The book has been positively reviewed by Colin McFarlane and Edgar Pieterse, whom I thank very much for their kind assessments:

This excellent collection brings a new focus to an enduring and vital question: how is urban marginality produced, lived and contested? […] An important contribution to debates on urban life and inequality’ Colin McFarlane, Durham University, UK

‘This impressive volume, with its masterful introduction, is illuminating and essential reading for urbanists determined to rethink and remake the city anew.’ Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town, South Africa

To have a look at its content, you can click here. If you want to purchase a copy, please follow this link and insert the code ‘ASHGATE230’ to receive a 50% discount on the hardback price. For anything else, including reviews or queries, feel free to write to me at ml710[at]cam.ac.uk . Finally, here you can download a promotional flier of the book. Enjoy!

Content (running heads): (1) Michele Lancione, The assemblage of life at the margins; (2) Kavita Ramakrishnan, Grand visions fizzle on the margins of Delhi; (3) Francesca Governa and Matteo Puttilli, After a revolution: Tunis; (4) Mark Tirpak, Tasty vehicles: San Antonio; (5) AbdouMaliq Simone, Cities that are just cities; (6) Tawhanga Mary-Legs Nopera, Under heartbeat city’s golden sun; (7) Tatiana Thieme, Hustling and belonging in Nairobi slums; (8) Gaja Maestri, From nomads to squatters in Rome; (9) Jean-Baptiste Lanne, The machine and the poet; (10) Francisco Calafate-Faria, Marginal attachment and countercycling; (11) Eszter Krasznai Kovács, The ‘differentiated countryside’; (12) Elisabetta Rosa, Marginality as resource?; (13) Cheryl Gilge, Citizen participation as microfacism; (14) Darren J. Patrick, Between the Fool and the World.

Book reviews

 

Posted on

New Chapter in Deleuze and the City

41JxcWg6xRL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_

A new book has appeared in the Edinburgh University Press’ series ‘Deleuze Connections’: Deleuze and the City, edited by Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger. I am lucky enough to be part of this excellent volume that tries to (re)think the city through Deleuze and Guattari’s work on assemblages, affects and multiplicities.

My chapter is entitled ‘The city and the homeless: Machinic subjects‘ (click on the title to download it). The chapter revolves around two points. First, it contains a sketch of the vitalist take on the urban margins that I then further developed in my forthcoming solo-edited book on Rethinking Life at the Margins (Routledge, 2016). Second, it offers an introduction to the kind of analytical and methodological approach that I have developed in my PhD thesis an in recent publications around homeless people’s everyday experiences of homelessness. At a more personal level, this chapter signs a transition moment from my usage of a strict deleuzian-guattarian jargon in my ethnography of the urban margins (such as the one implied in this work) and things I am working on at the moment, which are more ‘relaxed’ in that regard. Beside my work, this volume contains chapters by scholars like Ian Buchanan, Jean Hillier, Ignacio Farias, AbdouMaliq Simone, Mark Purcell and many others — it is an honor to be among them!

Here is a short description of the book from the back cover:

Defining the lives of a majority of the world’s population, the question of ‘the city’ has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time – uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute ‘the city’ today. Dispelling the old question of what the city is, this collection provides a nuanced mapping of situations emerging in concrete urban settings across the globe, ranging from the ‘laboratory urbanism’ of an Austrian ski resort and a ‘sustainable’ Swedish shopping mall to the ‘urbicidal’ refurbishments of Haifa.