Assembling Life at the Margins – USF’s presentation

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!

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