JS-88
Looking at Urban Centres As Sites of Power. Part II

Saturday, 21 July 2018: 12:30-14:20
Location: 701A (MTCC SOUTH BUILDING)
RC57 Visual Sociology (host committee)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development

Language: Spanish, French and English

Part II: Power of Infrastructures and Planning

Cities do not merely provide a background for social action but they are, rather, the most complex form of human interdependence, as well as an environment consisting of specific infrastructuring processes. Nonetheless, these often occur in exclusionary forms, which are more or less visible, and invite researchers to explore how social actors and the spaces are in constant interaction with each other and, also, how visual experiences are mediated by the “discursive contexts in which they appear" (Jay 2002).

We invite contributions on the different power relations which are shaping the cities of the global North and global South and how different social groups and various institutions introduce and reproduce, visions and representations of urbanity, and exert their power - visually, spatially etc. - through tools and practices such as planning and policy making. This might include responses to the governance of urban and peripheral spaces as well as the influence of economic world-system upon these contexts.

Particularly we welcome papers discussing technologies and infrastructures of power and surveillance that might operate in or between these zones or how these spaces may be the sites of dissent, collective mobilisation, and/or how these spaces can be read as a web of complex geographies, enclaves and control systems.

This session consists of 5 presentations and the intention is to publish papers from it. To this end full papers or extended abstracts (1000-2000 words with references) must be submitted by 1 June 2018 to session organizers.

Session Organizers:
Dennis ZUEV, Nurtingen-Geislingen University, Germany, Gary BRATCHFORD, The University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom and Valentina ANZOISE, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, Italy
Chair:
Valentina ANZOISE, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, Italy
Discussant:
Dennis ZUEV, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
Oral Presentations
The Inaccessible City: Impaired Bodies in Urban Spaces
Nandini GHOSH, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, India
Cities As Representations and As Manifestations of Power
Göran THERBORN, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom