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New paper in EPD with Simone

With my brother AbdouMaliq we recently published a paper in EPD: Society & Space, titled: “Dispossessed exposures. Housing and regimes of the visible“

You can download it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02637758241274636

Abstract

Literatures and organising show us how, in contemporary racial financial capitalism, housing is formed through dispossessive histories and geographies. Here, we query how these enter into play in the visual regimes through which housing is seen and experienced. For if the visual realm is as much a construct as any other housing matter, finding a grammar to tap into its workings might become handy when its violent outcomes come to the fore. What is reproduced in the visual regimes of housing? What is offered and taken anyway? What might never be seen, and by whom? The article offers a tentative analytical approach to questioning what we call dispossessed exposures: the (en)visioning of homely futures that are deprived, already in the social construct of seeing with the house, the possibility of radical care for and of habitation. These ideas are unpacked through reflection on two films: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine. We offer these reasonings as a contribution to ongoing conversations in the renewed field of housing justice scholarship.

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Lab’s urban school keynotes in Turin: Gilmore, Osbourne, Thieme (reg open to all)

The Beyond Inhabitation Lab & Urban Transitions Hub’s Urban School is happening in Turin on 23-26th September. We are welcoming 15 selected international postdocs who will engage in collective study with Lab and Hub’s members and with our fantastic keynote instructors. 

Keynote lectures are going to be open to all:

  • Tatiana Thieme (23th September, 6pm CEST)
  • Ruth Wilson Gilmore (24th September, 6pm CEST)
  • Alana Osbourne (25th September, 6pm CEST)

Registration for online and in-person attendance for the keynotes is available on the posters below and more details are available at this page: https://beyondinhabitation.org/urbanschool/

Please help us to disseminate further, thank you!

Keynotes’ lectures in Turin

The keynotes are free and open to attend for anyone, both online and in person. Registration is required and links are available in the posters below.

Tatiana Thieme, 23th Sept 2024

Ruth Gilmore, 24th Sept 2024

Alana Osbourne, 25th Sept 2024

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CFP – ISA/RC21 in Rabat, 6-11th July 2025 – Deadline Oct 15th

With AbdouMaliq Simone we are organising a panel at the forthcoming ISA Sociology-RC21 conference in Rabat, Morocco.

Below you can find the call for paper. Abstract submission will close on October, 15th 2024 and it is done directly on the ISA website, at this page: https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/forum/rabat-2025/5th-isa-forum-call-for-abstracts

Geographies Beyond Inhabitation. Urban grounds, housing struggles, and the everyday political

Michele Lancione, Polytechnic University of Turin (michele.lancione@polito.it)
AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield (a.t.simone@sheffield.ac.uk)

In light of extended capacities to enclose, surveille, pre-empt, and capitalise upon the improbable, what constitute viable performances of generativity beyond production? In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished, and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, how is inhabitation re-imagined from those spaces where only the uninhabitable seems to be? Taken together, what does it mean to think beyond inhabitation, in a world where every inch of the possible seems to have been colonised by the extractive and expulsive makings of contemporary racial capitalism?

In this session we invite contributions exploring the unannounced propositional politics of urban habitation. We want to engage with works those focus is on specific manoeuvres through which different geographies and peoples navigate the tensions between translocal and embodied dispossessive processes, enduring valuations imposed by the colonial, the gendered/heteronormative and the racial. We are particularly interested in situated works approaching the themes of the session using ethnographic, geneaological, speculative, visual and geopoetics methods.

Our goal is to incite a conversation on thinking beyond current modes of inhabiting our contemporary global urban world by focusing on three themes:

· Inhabitation from the standpoint of every day of city life. What does it mean to be alive and to be ‘human’ in today’s urban worlds?

· Inhabitation from the gateway of housing precarity and its struggles. What does housing do at the intersections of violent forms for dispossession related to lands and to bodies, financialised multi-scalar assemblages, heteronormative forms of homing, criminalisation of houselessness and bordering practices?

· Inhabitation as an emancipatory proposition from the ground of its struggle. How can one give room to forms of liberations that are not typically conceived to be ‘political struggle’ in Western ‘radical’ canons?

Abstract submission will close on Octtober, 15th 2024 and it is done directly on the ISA website, at this page: https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/forum/rabat-2025/5th-isa-forum-call-for-abstracts

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Book launch and sessions at the RGS-IBG conference, London, 28th-30th August 2024

I am going to be involved in a number of sessions at the RGS-IBG conference in London this week, including discussing books from my friends Colin and Erin, as well as presenting my own book (For a Liberatory Politics of Home). Here are the sessions:

Thursday, 29 August

11:10am – Author Meets Critics: Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Colin McFarlane) Venue – ICL — SALC (Sherfield Building) Room 5 (In-person only). Organised by: Michele Lancione, Claire Mercer, Matthew Gandy, Paula Meth, Colin Marx, Alexander Vasudevan, Colin McFarlane, and Tatiana Thieme

Friday, 30 August

9am – Paper: Housing, The unfulfilling relation (Michele Lancione), Venue – ICL — SALC (Sherfield Building) Room 7 (In-person only) Organised by: Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler

2:40pm – Author Meets Critics: For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Michele Lancione), Venue – ICL — Royal School of Mines Room 301c (In-person only) Organised by: Colin McFarlane, Katherine Brickell, Ben Anderson, Erin McElroy, Victoria Okoye, Saanchi Saxena, and Michele Lancione

4:50pm – Author Meets Critics: Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Erin McElroy), Venue – ICL — Sir Alexander Fleming Room 120 (In-person only)
Organised by: Kavita Dattani, Erin McElroy, Ryan S Powell, Gillian Rose, and Michele Lancione

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In Melbourne: research workshop, book talk & seminar

I am happy to be in #Melbourne for a number of things, thanks to the wonderful Alison Young – Deputy Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cities.

On Wednesday, I will be in a full-day workshop to celebrate and discuss Alison’s latest research project on Spatial Justice & the City. Many critical housing and urban scholars will be there, and I look forward to the conversation.

On Thursday morning, I will give a seminar for ECR researchers, and in the afternoon, I will present For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press) at the Melbourne School of Design. The talk will be online too. Details: https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/events/informal/politics-of-home-homelessness

Thanks, Alison & colleagues, for having me here.

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Freedom School “Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property” in Los Angeles

It was a privilege for me to participate in the Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s Freedom School “Insurgent Ground: Land, Housing, Property” in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

A collective of old and new friends and comrades, doing housing justice work across geographies. We spent so much time sharing generous scholarships and organising at UCLA but also at Union de Vecinos and with my good friends at the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

One of the best moments for me was sharing reflections with Elizbeth Blaney and the inspiring, wonderful Lisa ‘Tiny’ Gray-Garcia on her poverty scholarship work. Her writings and insights are really meaningful.

I also have some time to plot future things with Ananya, who has done an amazing job, together with Terra Graziani and their colleagues, to set up the School. Watch out for the open-access volume that will be produced with all the contributors!

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Beyond Inhabitation Lab at the RC21 in Santiago, Chile, July 24th – 26th, 2024

The Beyond Inhabitation Lab has hosted a tripartite session at the RC21 conference in Santiago, Chile, this July. The session was organised by our members Ana Vilenica, Margherita Grazioli and Michele Lancione.

Under the title “Housing and inhabitation: situated geographies of intersectional struggles“, we hosted 11 scholars from a number of geographies, to explore the intersection of ‘housing’ and ‘inhabitation’. How are urbanites re-doing inhabitation through mundane struggles against historical and contemporary forms of dispossession?

Key themes of this session included:
I. Empirically grounded conceptualisation of the contemporary struggle for inhabitation
II . Historical reconstructions of intersectional urban housing struggles
III . Ethnographic account of forms of racialised dispossession and related politics of resistance

We thank all participants to the collective conversation that ensued, and we look forward to more of the same at future gatherings!

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Starting my visiting time at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China

I arrived yesterday in Shanghai and I look forward to being based here and in Suzhou for the next five weeks, as part of my visiting time at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU).

I will spend time with colleagues at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Urban & Culture research group, to discuss our shared interests in homing, housing and urbanity. I am thankful to Liu Cao for the invitation and to Lei Yuan for the help in putting this visiting together.

For now, just a view from the balcony in Putuo.

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Keynote on liberatory homing in Brussels today, remembering Nakba & celebrating Pride Day

I am happy to join the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven today for their Spatial Justice UULP day, which is dedicated to PhD candidates and their projects. I will be offering one of the two keynotes (the other by Beatrice De Carli) on my recent book, For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press, 2023).

Here in Brussels is #Pride Week – a great moment to join the city as a non-binary person & discuss #homing beyond heteronormativity & beyond the violence of settler colonialism, thinking of #Nakba

The lecture is open to the public, details are in the poster below. Thanks to Luce Beeckmans and Jeroen Stevens for having invited me!

UULP_DOCTORAL-SEMINAR_PROGRAM_4Download