Negotiating racialised, gendered and classed borders within urban political movements
Conveners: Dr Matina Kapsali and Dr Maria Karagianni (both at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Sponsorship: Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the RGS-IBG
Over the past few years, a wave of urban political movements has sprang out in many cities around the world. These movements range from anti-austerity urban mobilisations and grassroots initiatives that create material and immaterial solidarity structures to refugee solidarity initiatives such as self-organised refugee squats. Urban geographers stress that these political movements nurture radical political imaginaries and construct spaces of urban commoning by expressing discontent with the existing order and experimenting with new ways of being and living in common (García-Lamarca, 2015; Roussos, 2019; Karaman, 2013; Montagna and Grazioli, 2019). These urban political movements differ greatly from the urban social movements that sprung out over the past three decades (Karaliotas and Swyngedouw, 2019). They are deeply political, insurgent and imaginative but they are also much more heterogeneous internally. They emerge through the mobilisation of a heterogeneous population that forges multi-faceted alliances and solidarities: precarious workers, low-income people, students, queers, women, refugees and so on (Butler, 2015). This process of solidarity-building is characterised by multiple and shifting borders; borders that produce hierarchies and unevenness within the communities that struggle and emerge through the underlying cultural, gender, political and racialised differences of their participants (Noterman, 2016). In this context, borders are not conceived solely as territorial but also as social, cultural, political and economic (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).
This session aims to critically examine how gender, racialised, class, political and other types of differences create borders within urban political movements and solidarity spaces and the ways in which these borders are negotiated, re-enforced and/or blurred. In other words, the session seeks to shed light on the tensions, minor hierarchies and conflicts that characterise political spaces of solidarity. In parallel, it asks if and how these borders can be deconstructed and these differences bridged. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited, to one or more of the following themes:
· How are heterogeneity and difference made present and negotiated in political practices and common spaces?
· What borders are created in political common spaces and how and why are they created?
· How are these borders deconstructed through processes of collective political subjectification and urban commoning? Through which practices are existing differences in subject positions bridged and privileges questioned?
· What are the challenges and limitations that urban political movements face, given the heterogeneity of their participants? Which tensions and conflicts emerge?
· Can heterogeneity and difference constitute a dynamic element of urban political movements and under which conditions?
The session is organised in two parts. The first part lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes and includes 5 paper presentations (15 minutes each). The second part lasts 25 minutes and is organised as a world café with short inputs (3 minutes). This part will enable the more active participation of presenters, convenors and the audience in the discussion and will provide room for networking.
Please send abstracts up to a maximum of 250 words including a proposed title and your affiliation to Matina Kapsali (skapsali@arch.auth.gr) and Maria Karagianni (mkaragi@arch.auth.gr) by Monday 3 February 2020.
Further information about the RGS-IBG 2020 conference can be found here: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/
References
Karaman, O. (2013) Defending Future Commons: The Gezi Experience. Available: http://antipodefoundation.org/2013/08/27/intervention-defending-future-commons-the-gezi-experience-by-ozan-karaman-2/ [Accessed 12/01/2015].
