ciao bell hooks
when I did my PhD this book allowed me not to feel ashamed about my working-class self-made ‘culture’
and it allowed me to see the power of feminist thinking
and of black culture and power at large
in ways I never had experienced before.
reading your writing on the margins as a site of resistance
on the power of love
on your liberatory envisioning of a differential kind of home,
had been foundational.
thank you for that, and for all you have taught. peace!
The Life at the Margins and Urban Human research group at the Urban Institute invite you to our new seminar series, “Dwelling in Liminalities: Uncanny conversations”, which I am organising with my colleague AbdouMaliq Simone.
The series will start in Spring 2020, and will include 5 seminars with ten scholars coming from Geography, Visual Studies, Sociology and Anthropology Departments from both sides of the Atlantic. This amazing – and uncanny! – cohort of people will come to Sheffield to discuss with us around issues of marginality, urban entanglements, race, hustling methodologies, techno-imperialism and more.
You can find the program below as well as here: http://urbaninstitute.group.shef.ac.uk/dwelling-in-liminalities-uncanny-conversations/
Please feel free to distribute the news around, and of course feel free to join us when the time comes!
PRECIS
What is the meaning of dwelling in liminalities? In urban times when life becomes reconfigured by all sorts of densities and calculations, new and old forms of liminalities intersect to produce spaces of inhabitation that encompass traditional notions of margins, exclusions or expulsions. These processes become reconfigured in the larger restructuring of what urban life is and means in today’s machinic cities.
We have invited scholars working through a number of critical approaches, and we have asked them to provide their reading of the economies of inhabitation in uninhabitable times. What is the political in rethinking life through the liminal assemblage of the urban?
This emerging conversation will cut across geographies and fields of enquiry to provide an orientation to our collective critical labour.
PROGRAM
On hustling, density and tracing
with Tatiana Thieme (UCL) and Colin McFarlane (Durham)
Wednesday, 5th February, 2020
3-5PM, ICOSS Boardroom (Portobello St)
On pathology, sounds and the black radical tradition
with Dhanveer Singh Brar and Ramon Amaro (Goldsmiths)
Wednesday, 4th March, 2020
3-5PM, ICOSS Boardroom (Portobello St)
On bordering
with Suzi Hall (LSE) and Antonis Vradis (Loughborough)
Wednesday, 1st April, 2020
3-5PM, Geography Building, Teaching Room 2 (Winter St)
On techno-imperialism, race and the value of life
with Erin McElroy (NYU) and Andrea Gibbons (Solford)
Wednesday, 20th May, 2020
3-5PM, Geography Building, Teaching Room 2 (Winter St)
Of past lives and displacement
with Caroline Bressey (UCL) and Katherine Brickell (RHol)
Wednesday, 3rd June, 2020
3-5PM, ICOSS Boardroom (Portobello St)
Together with my good friends and colleagues Tatiana Thieme (UCL) and Elisabetta Rosa (Université Catholique de Louvain) we have just published a very exciting special issue in City: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. The special issue is about the challenges of ethnographic research at the urban margins and contains contributions from Silvia Aru, Maurizio Memoli & Matteo Puttilli; Tung-Yi Kho; William Monteith; Yimin Zhao; Kavita Ramakrishnan; Tatiana Thieme; and also a paper co-written by myself and Elisabetta (abstract below).
Download the introduction to the special issue here. The same goes for the paper I wrote with Elisabetta, which is available here.
Going in, out, through. A dialogue around long skirts, fried chips, frozen shacks and the makeshifts of ethnography
In this paper, we shift from conventional academic writing toward something similar to a dialogue, an encounter, a few hours spent in a virtual cafe´where we chat and systematically try to excavate our respective ethnographic endeavours. Such experimentation in format is needed, we argue, in order to re-approach the questions characterising in-depth ethnographic work from a different, possibly fresher, perspective, and to communicate those more directly and freely. Rather than embedding our doubts, fears and wishful thinking in academic formalism, we spell those out aloud, as a composite and unfinished flow that touches upon relevant literature but is still raw and grounded in our current and respective fieldwork. Relying on our differentiated works with Roma people in Italy, France and Romania (2004– ongoing), in our dialogue we talk about the challenges of positioning; the construction of new (self)identities; the building of relationships of trust, care and affect, and their break; the role of ethnographic knowledge in activist work; the risk and the certainty of failure; the difficulties associated with entering and leaving the field. The aim of our dialogue is not to offer answers to questions that have been at the centre of the ethnographic discipline since the start, but to open a space of incremental and reciprocal learning that may serve as an inspiration for other young ethnographers like us.
The new edited book by Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías has now been published by Routledge: Urban Cosmopolitics. Agencements, assemblies, atmospheres. Colin McFarlane and myself have written a chapter for the book, on infrastructual becoming and sanitation at the margins.
Relying on our ethnographic works with homeless people in European cities and informal settlement residents in Indian cities, in this chapter we explore the everyday makeshifts of sanitation at the margins implying the notion of ‘infrastructural becoming’ and framing our discussion in terms of Stengers and Latour’s ‘cosmopolitics’. How is urban life (un)made on the margins? How are bodies, infrastructures, and urban geographical processes brought together – and pulled apart – in the constitution of everyday life? How do vulnerable groups cope with and react to urban conditions that make for them precarious, unreliable possibilities?
The book contains numerous other exciting contributions that explore ‘how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. You can read our chapter here.
Since one year and a half I’m a Fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation. The USF is a great and somewhat ‘old-school’ institution: they give genuine and consistent support to early career scholars without asking for any neo-liberal matrix to be filled in return. Can you actually believe it?! I invite all early careers to consider the Post-Doctoral scheme of the USF and to attend the events organised by them.
The above video shows the presentation that I gave at the USF in April this year (and here you can find those of my colleagues). The video is a summary of some of the stuff stuff I have been working on in the last year. The presentation is not very exciting – when I delivered it I was in the mist of my 9 months ethnographic fieldwork Romania (namely: exhausted). It offers, however, a good overview of my reasoning around extreme cases of urban marginality, subjectification and the nexus between politics and academia. Now that the fieldwork is over it is time for me to start thinking about the things I have experienced and observed, and to write about them. It’s time, in other words, to turn the USF’s support into something tangible and meaningful (both for them and for my research informants). Let’s hope to make this right – and to keep on rolling!
I have recently been to Marseille, for a very nice workshop on Marginality organised by Elisabetta Rosa. I did not have much time to experience the city, but I have to say that even in such short time Marseille captured me: amazing light, people, food, wine. I hope to go back there pretty soon! Below some pics.
