Join us for our monthly seminar series on Tuesday 14th of March!
Leveraging insights from feminist geography and diverse economies and cultural studies traditions, this talk will trace the contours of underrecognized but entrenched and consequential forms of labor, value, narrative, and social infrastructure—together amounting to an expanded sphere of social reproduction—in urban space. This is a conceptualization which initially emerged from an ethnography of everyday life among residents on a few blocks of a single street in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. Published in 2020 as a book called Urbanism without Guarantees, that work explicated how ordinary people’s everyday experiences, common sensibilities, and routine practices at once reflect and buoy historically specific formations of sociality, economy, culture, and power in place. This talk will begin with an overview of core concepts from that work, then sketching out some possible ways those concepts might be made generative in and through the example of collaborative place-based oral history and critical humanities projects aimed at confronting inequitable urban development and displacement in Seattle, Washington.
Prof. Christian Anderson, is an Associate Professor of Social Thought and Action and Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell (just outside Seattle, USA). He is an urban geographer and ethnographer whose work focuses on the relationships among people, places, everyday practices, ways of knowing, and forms of social and political-economic organization.
Light refreshments will be served.
