Beyond Inhabitation @ICCG 2023 in Mexico City
The week of 23-28 October Beyond Inhabitation Lab’s members moved to Mexico City to attend the 9th International Congress of Critical Geography.
Lab members, Michele Lancione, Chiara Cacciotti, Daniela Morpurgo and Rodrigo Castriota, organized the panel Inhabiting Radical Housing: on the politics of inhabitation and intersectional struggles asking for contributions questioning the intersection between ‘housing’ and ‘inhabitation’ to discuss the propositional politics of struggles tackling housing as a gateway for wider forms of liberation, power-geometries and longitudinal forms of dispossession. The two sessions proved extremely rich in content and debate, with scholars from a number of geographies offering nuanced analysis and theorisations of housing and its intersecting forms of injustice (and related struggles).
Other Lab members, Mara Ferreri and Ana Vilenica together with other members of Radical Housing Journal, organized the panel Lexicons of Housing Struggles challenging and questioning the dominance of English language in “internationally valued” academic practice around housing, and fomenting processes of linguistic decolonization, internationalism and counter-generalization.
Along with the organisation of the panels, each one presented individual papers in different panels. Michele Lancione presented a paper on the colonies of ‘home’. Chiara Cacciotti presented on the etymological politics of the lexicon of evictions. Daniela Morpurgo on the challenge of qualitative ethnographic research. While Chiara Iacovone and the former member Devra Waldman presented their work in the Lab’s panel respectively on the peripheral housing financialization in Eastern Europe and on housing-driven extended urbanization in Noida, India. Ana Vilenica presented as Radical Housing Journal collective a choral restitution of what the journal had achieved within emerging solution of radical resistance in the narrative of housing crisis, while Francesca Guarino presented her doctoral work on migrant people practices of repression and hospitality in the context of Palermo, Italy.
The conference was extremely productive and well organised: congratulations to the ICCG team for having provided an excellent moment of scholarly and activist encounter for us all!