Call for abstracts of the V Midterm Conference of ESA RN37 (Urban Sociology)
Chairs
Sonja Lakić (CY Cergy Paris University, France, sonja.lakic@gssi.it)
Graça Cordeiro (ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, graca.cordeiro@iscte-iul.pt)
Patricia Pereira (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal, ppereira@fcsh.unl.pt)
Panel format
Traditional with a variety of contribution formats (see the summary)
Summary
This panel calls for an understanding of human lives in urban environments that are undergoing different forms of transition – i.e. post-disaster, post-industrial, post-colonial, post-socialist cities, and/or “instant cities” (Agier, 2020) – and invites authors to examine the dynamic/interchangeable relationship between material and social dimensions of change through the perspective of “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007). The latter, hereby understood as “a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life” (Stewart, 2007)
encourages studies that come into contact with real people and their socio-spatial practices, operating from and within “the scale of the everyday” (Tonkiss, 2013). We call for contributions that blend human experience with the alterations of the built fabric and/or shed a light on “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2004), as well as those related to the politics of reciprocity and solidarity within research (and research/activism).
We look forward to different portrayals of tactics and strategies of doing the urban and exercising the right to the city, and are interested in both traditional formats of presentations, as well as other than conventional contributions. We encourage authors to take different urban scales into account and bring to light diverse (methodological) approaches, while being particularly open for contributions based on a wide variety of creative approaches and visual methods. We, therefore, welcome research papers, as well as research-based videos and short films (up to 15mins), research-based commented photo essays and/or performances, as well as activists’ diaries, biographical narratives, storytelling, comic books etc. The topics may include but are not limited to: practices of homemaking and experiences of home life, different forms of informal and extra-legal spatial appropriation, urban imaginaries, urban assemblage, buildings as living archives, cultural production of space, grassroots / DIY / self-organisation and bottom-up initiatives, urban memory, identity and citizenship, urban classifications, naming processes and urban lexiques (Topalov, 2017).
References
Agier Michel (2020). “Utopie, dystopie, non-fiction. Faires ville, faire communauté”.
Availableat:https://formes.ca/territoire/articles/les-instant-cities-villes-reimaginees-sans-histoire-sans-avenir; accessed on 01/02/2022.
Simone AbdouMaliq (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in
Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), pp. 407-429.
Stewart Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.
Tonkiss Fran (2013). Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Topalov, Christian (2017) “Comment se produisent les classifications urbaines? Le cas des
espaces stigmatisés” Mots. Les langages du politique [En ligne], 114:
http://journals.openedition.org/mots/22860 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/mots.22860,
accessed on 01/02/2022.