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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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CfP RGS-IBG 2022: Housing and inhabitation: situated geographies of intersectional struggles (abstract by 22/03)

Housing and inhabitation: situated geographies of intersectional struggles

Organised by: Abdoumaliq Simone, Oluwafemi Olajide, Daniela Morpurgo, Michele Lancione, and Chiara Cacciotti

Three interlocking processes are redefining what it means to inhabit the planet and its cities: Rising and expansive urbanisation (+2.8 billion people living in cities by 2050); widespread unequal access to decent and secure dwellings (1.6 billion people currently living in inadequate housing, and millions violently evicted every year globally); and responses by local communities in the face of these processes (in struggles that often include intersecting racial and gender injustices, violent bordering practices, problems of climate change and its management, and other paradigmatic challenges of our time). In this session, we are interested in hosting cutting-edge contributions confronting these processes and questioning the intersection of ‘housing’ and ‘inhabitation’. How are urbanites re-doing inhabitation through mundane struggles against historical and contemporary forms of dispossession?

We are particularly keen to hear from scholars who transcend the remit of conventional ‘comparative’ urban approaches, and those who go beyond the rubric of Western literatures and approaches for registering and understanding ‘housing struggles’ (Lancione, 2020; Simone, 2018; Oswin, 2020). To discuss and appreciate the propositional politics of struggles tackling housing as a gateway for wider forms of liberation, a situated understanding of history, power-geometries and longitudinal forms of dispossession is required (Massey, 1994; Roy, 2017; Rolnik, 2019). We welcome contributors who propose works that are both grounded empirically and historically/geographically, and we will give prominence to those writing from the margins of Anglophone academia. Particular attention will be paid to works grounded in decolonial, critical race, feminist and queer approaches to urban and housing struggles.

Key themes of this session include:

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

Session organisers will work toward the preparation of a special issue on these themes for a leading international journal in urban geography. To this end, and to facilitate meaningful conversation among participants, contributors commit to sending us full draft papers at least two weeks in advance of the conference. We offer help to non-native English speakers for production of their full papers.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with the title, author names and whether you plan to attend in person or virtually by March 22, 2022 to Professor Michele Lancione (michele.lancione@polito.it) and Dr Daniela Morpurgo (daniela.morpurgo@polito.it). We welcome any questions or requests for assistance.

Sources cited.
 Lancione M (2020) Radical housing: on the politics of dwelling as difference. International Journal of Housing Policy 20(2):1–17
 Massey D (1994) A global sense of place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
 Oswin N (2020) An other geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(1):9–18
 Rolnik R (2019) Urban Warfare. Housing Under the Empire of Finance. New York: Verso
 Roy A (2017) Dis/possessive collectivism: Property & personhood at city’s end. Geoforum 80:A1-11
 Simone A (2018) Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. Cambridge: Polity press