Call for Abstracts: RC21 Conference September 18-21, 2019, Delhi/ India
Convener: Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe
STREAM 5: Roundtable and Walkshop
Engendering the City: Interdisciplinary Research on Intersectionality and Everyday Urban Practices
How we want to live and envision social and spatial futures is negotiated in cities. Equal rights to expression and access to the city are constantly struggled over in the course of transformations over time and space. As scholars of the urban, our research for the future of cities should navigate multiple scales of analysis, paired with a committed study of everyday lived experiences of urban changes.
Cities are engendered – produced and provoked – through the interaction of various contesting actors. They negotiate and continuously change culturally constructed hierarchies that determine the distribution of roles in a community and the forms of power and exclusion that operate within it.
The city is both a stage for power structures, as well as a direct actor in distributing resources and access. Urban transformation, therefore, needs contextualization within intersectional discrimination and exclusion, which is met by practices of creative resistance. Interdisciplinary research and methods allow us to unveil how uneven structures play out socially and spatially and enable us to reflect critically on our own work.
- What theoretical concepts and methodological explorations of urban transformation interdependent with intersectional issues take us beyond disciplinary boundaries?
- How can we develop interdisciplinary approaches to bridge theoretical concepts with research methods that address more comprehensively the complexity of urban everyday life today beyond North-South or West-East dichotomies?
- As part of an engaged approach in urban sociology/anthropology, etc, how can we advocate for the relevance of practice instead of grand theory, and reflect on past and and current needs of urban dwellers to open up avenues for future opportunities of engendering the city and empowering communities?
Roundtable: we invite scholars from various disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, women and gender studies, activists, and artists to join a discussion on the above questions and take our thinking and action beyond disciplinary boundaries, into communities, new urbanities and future scenarios.
Walkshop: together with the roundtable participants, we will join a local actor (scholar) in Delhi and explore one site in the city with the stream`s questions in mind. Especially for those who visit Delhi for the first time, the format of the walkshop (a portmanteau from walking/observing as ethnographic method and workshop) will enable access to the local context and serve us as an entry point for our discussion during the roundtable. Currently, the walkshop is envisioned to take up one session, but if the overall scheduling allows for it, we could also go into more depth and take up 2 session times.
In your abstract, please explain how your research addresses issues brought up in this stream (and possibly even goes beyond to raise further questions) (300 words max).
Please note: We cannot provide travel funding. We will provide letters of invitation to those accepted for the stream to support travel funding applications.
Email your abstract to aylin.tschoepe@unibas.ch and cc rc21delhi@gmail.com by the deadline:
February 8, 2019.
Urban Ethnography Lab 