Geographies Beyond Inhabitation. Urban Grounds, Housing Struggles, and the Everyday Political (Part II)

Friday, 11 July 2025: 11:00-12:45
Location: ASJE016 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development (host committee)

Language: English

In light of extended capacities to enclose, surveille, pre-empt, and capitalise upon the improbable, what constitute viable performances of generativity beyond production? In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished, and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, how is inhabitation re-imagined from those spaces where only the uninhabitable seems to be? What does it mean to think beyond inhabitation, in a world where every inch of the possible seems to have been colonised by the extractive and expulsive makings of contemporary racial capitalism?

We want to engage with works focusing on how different geographies and peoples navigate the tensions between translocal and embodied dispossessive processes, enduring valuations imposed by the colonial, the gendered/heteronormative and the racial. We are interested in situated works using ethnographic, geneaological, speculative, visual and geopoetics methods.

Themes include:

· Inhabitation from the standpoint of every day of city life. What does it mean to be alive and to be 'human' in today's urban worlds?

· Inhabitation from the gateway of housing precarity and its struggles. What does housing do at the intersections of violent forms for dispossession related to lands and to bodies, financialised multi-scalar assemblages, heteronormative forms of homing, criminalisation of houselessness and bordering practices?

· Inhabitation as an emancipatory proposition from the ground of its struggle. How can one give room to forms of liberations that are not typically conceived to be 'political struggle' in Western 'radical' canons?

Session Organizers:
Michele LANCIONE, Italy and AbdouMaliq SIMONE, Germany
Oral Presentations
Archives Beyond Inhabitation
Somaiyeh FALAHAT, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
From Occupation to Inhabitation. Trajectories of Vacancy and Commoning in Cape Town, Dublin and Vienna
Judith LEHNER, TU Wien, Austria; Cian O'CALLAGHAN, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Andreas SCHEBA, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa; Suraya SCHEBA, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Kathleen STOKES, Ireland