Posted on

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!
Posted on

Call for Papers – ICCG Mexico 2023 – Beyond Inhabitation Lab

9th ICCG MÉXICO 2023 International Conference of Critical Geographies Mexico City, October 23 to 29, 2023 https://iccg2023.org/en/english/   Inhabiting radical housing: on the politics of inhabitation and intersectional struggles A Beyond Inhabitation Lab session, organised by: Michele Lancione, michele.lancione@polito.it, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy Daniela Morpurgo, daniela.morpurgo@polito.it, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy Chiara Cacciotti, chiara.cacciotti@polito.it, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy Rodrigo Castriota, rodrigo.castriota@polito.it, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy 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. Particular attention will be paid to works grounded in decolonial, critical race, feminist and queer approaches to housing struggles. Key themes of this session include: I. Empirically grounded conceptualisation of the contemporary struggle for housing II. Historical reconstructions of intersectional urban housing struggles III. Ethnographic account of forms of racialised dispossession and related politics of resistance   Abstract submission deadline: March 26, 2023 In this session we use English as our lingua franca, so we accept only papers and presentations that will be presented in English. In your submission, please send us a word document containing: · Title and 3-5 keywords · Your full name, affiliation and e-mail address · Abstract between 500-1000 words   Please send you abstracts to all of these addresses: michele.lancione@polito.it; chiara.cacciotti@polito.it; cigc2023@gmail.com