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

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!

Beyond Inhabitation at RC21 in Athens

I have the privilege of working with scholars who are going to mark #urban & #housing studies.

Thumbs up for the work of my postdocs Daniela Morpurgo, Rodrigo Castriota, Chiara Cacciotti, Oluwafemi Olajide, Ana Vilenica, Devra Waldman & brother AbdouMaliq Simone at #RC21Athens. They delivered great papers, with passion, care and insight.

@InhabitationLab www.beyondinhabitation.org
DIST – Dip. Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio

Indian Urban World @RC21

Join AbdouMaliq Simone & me today #RC21Antwerp for a wonderful panel with Gautam Bhan, Rupali Gupte, Ratoola Kundu, Anant Maringanti & Prasad Shetty
 
“What Difference Does a Year Make: Indian Urban Worlds. A conversation among friends”
 
2pm CEST – https://live.eventinsight.io/1677-rc21/virtualevent/# (need registration)

CfP for the RC21 in Delhi: Dwelling in the interstices

 

RC21, September, 18-21, 2019 @Delhi

CFP: Dwelling in the interstices: modes of inhabitation and common life in the contemporary city

Please submit your 250 words abstract by the 20/01/19 filling this form: https://goo.gl/forms/v1QLbEe61Mp15kLf1

Convenors

  • Dr Margherita Grazioli, Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies, Social Sciences Department, Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila (Italy)
  • Dr Michele Lancione, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK)
  • Dr Gaja Maestri, ESRC Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester (UK).

Rationale

Inhabiting the contemporary city is increasingly a matter of dwelling in its interstices. As urban spaces become privatized, securitised and governed through the logic of immediate private profit and return, urbanites worldwide organise to craft multifarious forms of urban
livings. Through this panel we are interested in attracting cutting-edge scholarship investigating the variegated practices challenging the predominant logic of bordering and governing the city.

The latter include specific devices of governance and control assembling the urban across the north and the south through privatising devices that include, among others: the marketisation of housing; gentrification; racial, spatial, social segregation; the adaptation of
urban routes to logistics movements; borders’ and mobility’s policing and securitisation. Urbanites worldwide contest these processes on a daily basis, constructing forms of dwelling at the interstices of urban space and politics. Recent scholarship has increasingly pinpointed these struggles, looking at housing squats; social centres; self-managed urban camps; co-housing and hosting; self-construction; spontaneous settlements; temporary autonomous zones (TAZs); and many others.

In this panel we are interested in exploring new forms of dwelling that articulate manifold commons within saturated and highly conflicting urban environments. The panel is not necessarily limited to the modalities listed above, and we welcome contributions that show uncanny forms of living vis-à-vis increased urban uninhabitability across the North and the South.

Key themes

We invite papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

  • What forms of alternative urban dwelling are emerging across cities worldwide?
  • How do these alternative practices unfold, and what are their modes of organising?
  • What commons and solidarities are produced through encounters in these spaces?
  • How can urban theory better theorise urban interstices and their politics?
  • What are the affects and material cultures activated at the interstices of the urban?
  • How are these forms of urban dwelling re-captured by dispositifs of institutional governance?

Submit your abstract

Please submit your 250 words abstract by the 20/01/19 filling this form: https://goo.gl/forms/v1QLbEe61Mp15kLf1. If you have any questions regarding this session, please email Margherita (margherita.grazioli@gssi.it), Michele (m.lancione@sheffield.ac.uk) and Gaja (g.maestri@leicester.ac.uk). More info on the 2019 RC21 conference can be found at this page: https://rc21delhi2019.com