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