Short Abstract

Cities are places where multiple polarisations become visible and tangible. This panel welcomes ethnographically grounded contributions exploring how diverse, creative, uncanny, imaginative and experimental forms of dwelling can recompose and challenge multiple polarisations.

Long Abstract

Urban anthropology has long described cities as places where multiple polarisations—cultural, social and economic—become visible and tangible. Centre and periphery, attraction and expulsion, horizontality and verticality, culture and counterculture, to name just a few, all shape the urban environment. Along these binary oppositions, people experience the city in multiple and uneven ways: visible and invisible borders, drawn along classed, gendered, racialized, ethnic, and ableist lines, may render urban space unwelcoming, threatening, or uncomfortable for many. Yet, urban space can also offer unexpectedly safe, alternative and creative spaces for experimenting with ways of inhabiting and imagining the city otherwise. As a method and a practice, ethnography is particularly well suited to capture the diverse ways in which creative, uncanny, imaginative and experimental forms of dwelling can (re)stitch urban spatialities and socialities. How can we leverage anthropological and philosophical epistemologies to reimagine the city holistically, without losing its particularities? What practices and imaginaries challenge polarised conceptions, perceptions, and experiences of urban space? In increasingly fractured cities, what grassroots modes of care and repair can be imagined and enacted to make the built environment of the city a lived space? Can such practices of care and repair help us inhabit and recompose the fractures crisscrossing the city, further political action, and overcome binary thinking? We welcome ethnographically grounded contributions that focus on the relational dimensions of urban territories (Lefebvre 1974) and explore how urban space can be concretely done (Agier 2015).

This Panel has 5 pending paper proposals.
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