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

 

 

Dwelling in Liminalities: Thinking Beyond Inhabitation. New special issue in EPD with A Simone

Late in December last year, EPD: Society & Space published a special issue I curated with my dear friend AbdouMaliq Simone. This is a project that took years in the making. We are thankful to Natalie Oswin for steering it, for colleagues at the Urban Institute in Sheffield to grant us space for it (thanks to Beth Perry in particular) and of course, we thank all our authors.

The issue includes wonderful contributions by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Ammara Maqsood and Fizzah Sajjad, Yaffa Truelove, Sharad Chari, Asha Best and Margaret M Ramírez, Jaime Alves, Nadia Gaber, Tatiana Thieme, Neferti XM Tadiar.

In our intro – ‘Dwelling in Liminalities: Thinking Beyond Inhabitation’ we discuss the driving question of our exploration with this special issue—and of the workshops that preceded it, which we run at the Urban Institute in Sheffield from 2019 to 2021, and the Lab that will follow it at DIST in Turin. The question is around the politics of inhabitation in what that is made uninhabitable. In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, what constitute viable performances of generativity beyond production? What goes beyond the crisis, if not staying close to interstices through which one has perhaps the only chance to prefigure inhabitation beyond itself? What kind of urban geographical narration—in the literal sense of writing form and style—can convey the tensioned politics of dwelling in, across and through liminalities?

You can find an overview of each contribution here: https://www.societyandspace.org/journal-issues/volume-39-issue-6

Dwelling in Liminalities – A lecture @CriticalUrbanisms

Since the beautiful people at the Critical Urbanisms lab in Basel recorded it… let me share.

In this lecture I try to make sense of underground inhabitation, and the propositional politics of the uninhabitable in contemporary Bucharest. This is work I started in 2003, and it continues to evolve, at its own tempo. The main aim is to encompass the colonies of home/homelessness and think about the margins as site of resistance (hooks) and as site of otherwise dwelling assembled through praxis of radical care. The latter is not there to accept the status quo – it ain’t resilience. Instead, it signals more profound and radical challenges to the entrenched violence of our anti-ecological, racist, gendered and extractive ideals of ‘home’.

Beyond the stuff I’ve published around the tunnels in Cultural Anthropology and the IJURR, there is a now under-review book for Duke on the politics of home(lessness). And then, of course, the work of many others who have inspired mine, the struggle of my comrades Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, and this small video above. Avanti!