Short Abstract

This panel explores contestations to intellectual, policy-based, metaphorical, geographical and material displacement in the global city. Focusing on street-first ethnographies, we invite alternative stories of space that parallely continue with capitalist urban expansion, eviction and destruction.

Long Abstract

Rapid urbanisation has been the defining feature of the “modern, developing” city for the last several decades. Cities continue to be at the centre of migration patterns, with people moving and shaping urban spaces and thereby shifting the demographic structure of the city itself over the years. Capitalist urbanisation projects disregard the needs of a diverse indigenous as well as migrant populations and are directly linked to development-centric environmental mismanagement, displacement of marginalised communities and the state’s hegemony over space. These urban governance projects (eg; smart cities, caste-based building societies, archives of clean cities, covering up slums during international sporting events) have made public space inaccessible, changing the rhythms of everyday life for multiply marginalised populations that must continually learn to live with gentrification, eviction, and being bought out of their land and economy. This form of control is pervasive, unpredictable and all-consuming.

This panel gathers explorations on how intellectual, policy-based, metaphorical and eventually geographical and material displacement is contested by residents. Here, lived space is co-constructed, and the eurythmia of control and submission is challenged sporadically through the rhythms of civilian lives (see Lefebvre 1974). By focusing on anthropological explorations from the street up, we explore stories of space that are alternative, parallely continuing with capitalist urban expansion. What happens post-intervention and post-development? How do people continue, and do with governance, space and infrastructure as they want? Papers are invited to think about any of these themes and topics, but we are most interested in papers that engage with feminist, queer/trans, “marginalised” ways of recontestations of space including festivals, public art, armed resistance, satirical interventions, provocations, reconfigurations of technology, and so on.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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