CITY Research Seminar Series: Anke Schwarz

"Parochial territorializations: Towards a critique of insular worldbuilding"

Abstract:

Testing the umbrella term of the parochial, this talk by Senior Visiting Scholar Anke Schwarz will address authoritarian and nativist spatial imaginations and practices as well as exclusionary territorializations. Reading the urban as a territory in relation urges urban researchers to pay attention to unequal power relations inscribed in its materiality, representations and techniques of regulation. Scrutinizing a parochial logic of exclusionary worldbuilding around territorial subjectivities and insular forms of place-based community formation, the talk outlines epistemological and ontological parochializations that come to the fore across various scales. It draws on empirical examples from Europe, namely reconstructive architecture in Berlin and Dresden, identitarian discourses around 'The European City', and moralistic othering inscribed in public order regulations from the Italian context.

About Dr. Anke Schwarz:

Dr. Anke Schwarz is a political and urban geographer who currently holds the position of interim associate professor of Human Geography at Heidelberg University. Anke obtained a PhD in Human Geography from University of Hamburg, has been a visiting researcher at UNAM in Mexico City and UNINA in Naples, and recently completed her habilitation (venia legendi) at TU Dresden, again in Human Geography. Her post-doctoral work has mainly focused on theories of territorialization, socio-territorial movements, and geographies of Speculative and Science Fiction. Anke is a founding member of the Terra-R research network, where she is co-editing the collectively written volume 'Das Ende rechter Räume. Zu Territorialisierungen der radikalen Rechten', forthcoming in 2025. Her paper ‘Territorial subjectivities. The missing link between political subjectivity and territorialization’, co-authored with Monika Streule, has recently been published in Progress in Human Geography.