Urban Polycrisis and Creative Storytelling: A Feminist/and Decolonial Approach to Urban Pedagogies

The urban polycrisis (Madden, 2023) is at the heart of global discussions on adaptation, resilience, and transformative action. The crises of genocide, climate change, resource extractivism, shrinking economies, political upheaval, housing crisis and unequal pathways to development are increasingly manifesting across the globe and especially in cities of the Global South that carry the enduring impact of colonial exploitation. Against this backdrop, feminist/and decolonial methodologies are challenging the ways we understand, evaluate, politicise and respond to urban crises (Ortiz and Millan, 2022; Beveridge & Davidson, 2025; Coelho et al., 2025; Shafique, 2025). While these ongoing interventions offer examples of transformation that respond to polycritical cities and unsettle the conventions of academic expression, they remain largely marginal to mainstream academic production.

The objective of the panel is to build on the works of feminist/and decolonial scholars and to cultivate more public and accessible anthropological engagements with cities through visual methods (Pink, 2025). Responding to Hanson et al.'s (2020) call to “heighten the readers’ audibility” to different possibilities of knowing than “Eurocentric methodologically produced stories”, the session invites contributions that may include, films, graphic narratives, photography, soundscapes, zines, and other participatory methods, that explore, politicise, articulate and tackle facets of urban crises, offering rich, affective, and deeply political accounts of the city that depart from conventional academic formats.
Format: Open Sessions (Paper Presentation Sessions)