Keynote at ECRs Urban Studies Lisbon on the violence of the colonies of home

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing is right: settler #housing practice in #Palestine amounts to #domicide.

Yet, the destruction of the Palestinian homely by the hand of Israel is not just an aberration, but it is a foundation. Violence is not the ‘other’ of ‘home’, but it becomes the prime vehicle through which the ‘other’ necessary for the constitution of the colonisers’ home is created, in total destruction. Violence here, as Kotef would have it, becomes the object of the homely: the intimate function grounding the colonial home.

Today, I will open ECRs #urbanstudies #Lisbon on the impossible possibility of such homes, and many others.

Thanks Simone Tulumello and colleagues, for having me – https://tinyurl.com/mr3vu94w

Call for The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies (8-10 nov 2023)

With thanks to Simone Tulumello and colleagues for the invitation to join their wonderful workshop, check below for basic info on how to apply and attend. To get the full picture, please visit: https://urbantransitionshub.org/events/the-lisbon-early-career-workshop-in-urban-studies-3rd-ed-ics-ulisboa-8-10-nov-2023/

The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies

Imaginaries of inhabitation, or, the future of planetary dwelling

3st edition – 8-10 November 2023

 Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), Lisbon

Organisation:

Keynote speakers:

  • Michele Lancione (Politecnico di Torino)
  • Stephanie Wakefield (Life University)

The Urban Transitions Hub, the AESOP Young Academics Network and project “UrbanoScenes: Post-colonial imaginaries of urbanisation”, with the support of Research Group SHIFT: Environment, Territory and Society of ICS-ULisboa, will host the third edition of the Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, from 8 to 10 of November 2023. Circa 30 PhD candidates and early-career scholars will have the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects and/or findings during a 3-days event organised as a space of exchange, debate and learning.

Who can attend the workshop

The workshop is open to PhD students and early-career scholars in the fields of urban studies, planning and geography, and all the social sciences and humanities with an interest on space.

A minimum of 8 seats will be reserved to members of the AESOP Young Academics, please mention in your motivation letter whether you are a member (registration to the YAs is free and open to all early-career scholars).

Application and registration

Applications open from 15 February 2020 to 30 March 2023.

Send an abstract for your presentation (max 500 words) and a short letter of motivation to mallegra@ics.ulisboa.pt and simone.tulumello@ics.ulisboa.pt.

Decisions will be sent by 30 April 2023.

Registration by 30 June 2023.

Submission of long abstract or short paper (max 5,000 words) to be distributed among participants by 30 September 2023.

Registration fee: 200€.

 

Keynote at Malmö’s Institute of Urban Research during workshop on Evictability

I am excited to take part in a two-day event on “Evictability: Understanding the nexus of migration and urban displacements” at Malmö University, Institute for Urban Research, June 2-3 , 2022

I will be delivering one of the two keynotes (the other by Huub van Baar), followed by the screening of my documentary on forced evictions in the city centre of Bucharest, A Inceput Ploaia/It Started Raining.

At the core of this event, there is a full-day workshop with scholars working on migrations, eviction, displacement and racialised dispossession coming from all over Europe. I very much look forward to the conversation! The program is below, and here.

Thank you to the wonderful Maria Persdotter, Valeria Raimondi and Mauricio Rogat for the organising!

 

Thursday, June 2:

ABF Malmö, Stora salen, Spånehusvägen 47 (from Malmö C take bus #5 to Folkets park)

13:00-14:00 Informal lunch, location TBD (at your own expense)
14:00-14:15 Welcome and introductions
14:15-15:15 Huub van Baar (KU Leuven) – keynote address + Q&A
15:15-15:30 Break, snacks
15:30-16:30 Michele Lancione (Polytechnic of Turin), keynote address + Q&A
16:30-17:45 FILM: A început ploaia/It started raining: Fighting for the right to housing in Bucharest
17:45-18:00 Break, snacks
18:00-19:30 City walk: Local social movement history, Pål Brunnström and Fredrik Egefur
9:30 Pizza-dinner at Far i Hatten, Folkets park (https://www.farihatten.se/)
These events are open to the public

 

Friday, June 3:

Malmö University (Niagara building, 4th floor, Room A0407), Nordenskiöldsgatan 1 (nearest bus stop: Anna Lindh’s plats)

9:00-10:00 Workshop Session 1 (3 papers)
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-11:45 Workshop Session 2 (4 papers)
11:45-12:45 Lunch
12:45-13:45 Workshop Session 3 (3 papers)
13:45 -14:00 Break
14:00-15:00 Workshop Session 4 (3 papers)
15:00- 15:30 Break
15:30-17:00 Final group discussion
18:00 Informal dinner and drinks, location TBD (at your own expense)
NOTE: The workshop sessions are not open to the public.
Photo: Jenny Eliasson, Malmö Museer.

Keynote at the RGS-IBG Urban Geography conference with Veda Popovici (18 Nov)

This Friday, with my beloved sister, comrade and friend Veda Popovici, we will give one of the keynotes at the 2021 RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group Annual Conference ‘Cities of Hope’.
I am thrilled to share the floor with the amazing Gautam Bhan, Loretta Lees, Verónica Gago and their partners.
With Veda we are going to talk on “The false symmetry of research-activism. Towards accomplicenship and undercommon praxis”.
Friday 19th, from 10am UTC.

The false symmetry of research-activism. Towards accomplicenship and undercommon praxis, Michele Lancione in conversation with Veda Popovici.

Academia and activism have long been exploring their intersections, overlaps and tensions. Going beyond a reductive “make academia more activist” slogan, we propose to start by exploring the false symmetry of academia vs activism from epistemological, material and geopolitical perspectives. With these in mind, we raise the questions: what is the starting point of a shared space between organising and the academy? What kind of epistemological change is needed in academia to work with organising? How can we work with the academia’s privileges for political struggle? We propose the concepts of accomplicenship and undercommon praxis to anchor a politics of duplicity (as opposed to one of authenticity) committed to radical redistribution and movement sustainability.

Keynote on Planning for Social Justice at DASTU, in Milan w/Oren Yftachel

Tomorrow I will be delivering one of the keynotes at the “Planning for Social Justice” event DAStU – Politecnico di Milano, at 9:30am CET

I am excited to share the floor with my City – Analysis of Urban Change, Theory and Action comrade, the wonderful Oren Yiftachel

The event is also online, info: https://www.eccellenza.dastu.polimi.it/2021/10/25/planning-for-social-justice-conference-02-11-2021/

I will be presenting on Inhabiting Racialised Dispossession in Bucharest, Romania

Below is the full event’s poster.

Keynote in Berlin on dispossession and minor activism

After a long time of no-travelling, and a very tough couple of years, I now have the privilege to travel to Berlin (by train!) to take part in a very interesting event put together by my good friend Piotr Goldstein titled Migrant and Minority Activism: Between protest movements and everyday engagement.

I am excited to deliver the keynote at the end of the first day, where I will try to link together years of research in Bucharest, Romania, around racialised dispossession, radical housing and activism. The title of my talk will be, Inhabiting dispossession in the post-socialist city: storylines, embodied struggles, and emplacement

The event is organised by ZOiS Berlinand the EASA Anthropology of Social Movements Network. More info on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/834122970514959/?active_tab=discussion

Keynote @EUGEO on Lessness: Recentering the politics of home

Today I will open the 7th EUGEO Congress in conjunction with the 51st Conference of Irish Geographers, here in the west of Ireland – Galway City. The theme for the 2019 conference is Re-Imagining Europe’s Future Society and Landscapes.  This is one of the largest gathering of Geographers in the world, alongside the RGS-IBG (UK) and the AAG (USA).

In my keynote I will situate my grounded critical approach to homelessness, as I have developed in my research it in the last 10 years. This is essentially a call to de-instutionalize our approach to the matter and to cease seeing ‘homelessness’ as in opposition to idealized notions of ‘home’. The latter needs to be re-thought in their entirety in order to tackle the root of housing precarity, and of the trauma associated with it. These are key themes that I am developing at the Urban Institute, through the Life at the Margins research theme.

Thank you to Kathy Reilly (Galway) for the invitation and support. The abstract of my intervention can be found below.

Abstract for EUGEO conference
On Lessness: Recentering the politics of home.
Michele Lancione
m.lancione@sheffield.ac.uk

Homelessness is one of the strongest cultural signifiers of the contemporary urban age. It works as a machine intersecting structural economic inequalities with cultural stigmatisation, on top of which a whole assemblage of personal traumatic experiences, institutional policing, and charitable interventions flourish. Despite its pervasiveness, homelessness is still framed as a ‘phenomenon’, a social ‘issue’ amongst others to be dealt with: homelessness as the negation of ‘home’. But what if homelessness is not the exception arising from the lack of shelter, but instead the full and most quintessential representation of what ‘home’ is within capitalistic modes of organising and being? In other words, what if ‘homelessness’ cannot be solved, unless one is ready to fundamentally alter the parameters of ‘home’? This keynote address ‘homelessness’ as a socio, cultural and economic process configured within an exclusionary understanding of ‘home’ and assembled through a number of governmentalities, which are identified with the notion of ‘lessness’. Through several ethnographic vignettes, the fundamental relationship between ‘lessness’ and ‘home’ is showed, revealing the impossibility of any reconfiguration without radical change. The latter is addressed through a number of propositions around a new politics of ‘home’.

Relevant works in relation to the theme of the keynote:

  • Lancione, M. (monograph in preparation). On Lessness: Recentering the politics of home
  • Lancione, M. (2019) Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the Making of Home in Underground Bucharest. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43.3, 535–50.
  • Lancione, M. (2016a) Racialised dissatisfaction: homelessness management and the everyday assemblage of difference. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.4, 363–75.
  • Lancione, M. ed. (2016b) Rethinking life at the margins: the assemblage of contexts, subjects and politics. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London ; New York.
  • Lancione, M. (2016). Beyond Homelessness Studies. European Journal of Homelessness, 10(3), 163-176
  • Lancione, M. (2014c). The spectacle of the poor. Or: ‘Wow!! Awesome. Nice to know that people care!’ Social & Cultural Geography, 15(7), 693–713.
  • Lancione, M. (2014b). Entanglements of faith: Discourses, practices of care and homeless people in an Italian City of Saints. Urban Studies, 51(14), 3062–3078.

Keynote @HSA on Radical housing: On the politics of dwelling as difference

On Friday the 12nd of April, 2019, I gave my plenary speech at the Housing Studies Association Conference in Sheffield. The conference, organized by Ryan Powell (Sheffield) and Jennifer Hoolachan (Cardiff) was centred around themes of housing precarity, activism and resistance. The level of discussion and the quality of the papers presented was of a very high standard and the all event was a huge success.

My keynote was sponsored by the International Journal of Housing Policy, with the incredible support of Dallas Rogers (Sydney) and Emma Power (Sydney). The paper will be soon published as the first of their new series of essays around ‘Housing Future’. This was an incredible opportunity for me to think around some of the key themes in my research, from homelessness to housing resistance and everything in-between.

Below you can find the abstract of my intervention at the HSA.

Abstract for HSA conference
Radical Housing: On the politics of dwelling as difference
Michele Lancione
m.lancione@sheffield.ac.uk

In their modes of organising and fighting housing injustice, radical housing movements demand more than ‘just’ housing. Across the urban north and south, they bring to the fore profound critiques of dominant economic, cultural, and societal inequalities. Scholarship investigating these grassroots efforts is copious but still limited: it theorises ‘radical’ struggles mostly from a Western tradition; it largely fails to bring resistance into dialogue with new modes of theorising the city; and it is still too cautious in its theorisation of the political. More and better can be said to grasp how millions of urbanites worldwide change their cities and lives through their fight for decent housing. The paper advances a new epistemological orientation to tackle these questions, expanding on decolonial, vitalist and processual approaches to urban studies. It proposes to rethink the politics of urban precarity from the ground of dwelling, as a historical and generative assemblage that needs to be traced in its unfolding to appreciate its unconventional politics. The paper contributes to scholarship interested in a critical understanding of embodiment, politics, and housing resistance beyond established conventions of ‘radical’ practice and theory.

Keynote at an ethnography conference @LSHTM

I am delighted to be part of this exciting workshop for early career ethnographers @LSHTM. In my keynote tomorrow I will develop ideas on ‘minor ethnographies’ starting from a conversation around Cindy Katz’ work to which I have contributed to in EPD: Society and Space last year (https://bit.ly/2xRDqRV).

In Minor ethno-graphies and the activist mode of existence I will speak of the first core of ethnography (encounter) and the second (representation) as fuelled by a specific intellectual politics (activism) which encompasses various domains of life. The aim is to conceive those beyond un-helpful distinctions of ‘research’ and ‘action’ (mode of existence).

Thanks to Charlotte Kuhlbrandt for organising and inviting me!