All past events

Zoom* Compulsory registration Coloniality of Migration & Moving Difference: Brazilians in London & Africans in São Paulo Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this presentation examines how Brazilian colonial and post-colonial histories and legacies differentially shape the migration experiences of Brazilians in London and Sub-Saharan Africans in São Paulo. It argues that critically interrogating how the constitution of the so-called Global Colonial World continues to influence the experiences of contemporary individuals on the move—or those striving for mobility—can help us challenge homogenising categories of “the migrant,” including categories such as the transnational migrant and the “modern slave.”   By […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration First Nations foundations: cities and the infrastructuring of settler colonisation The infrastructuring of First Nations land into cities is a central project of settler colonisa- tion. In the lands now known as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, settler-colonial myths of ‘uncultivated’ territory justified English invasion and settlement. These myths continue to inform contemporary infrastructure development and discourse which resist First Nations’ sovereignties and self-determination even as the latter unsettles settler-colonial infrastructuring. This chapter offers a predominantly theoretical account of how urban infrastructuring is a constitutive feature of settler colonisation and how settler-colonial urban imaginaries […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration An Amphibious Urbanism What might the urban become if one challenged the proposition that cities are equated with land? How might urban theory be done differently if wetness was brought into centre stage in the politics of habitation? Starting from Guwahati, a city of 1.2 million people in northeast India that constitutes the South within the Global South, this talk furnishes the outlines of an amphibious urbanism: a recalibration of urbanicity by interrogating life (bios) from the wet surrounds (amphi-). Three cuts into the amphibious are presented: 1) plotting, rather than planning, as the idiom of city-making; […]

Zoom* and Room C900, 9 rue de la Chaise, 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Faith and Crime: The Complex Interplay Between Evangelicalism and Drug Trafficking in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas In this talk, I examine the intricate interplay between Evangelism and criminality in the favela of Cidade de Deus, Rio de Janeiro. Based on two years of immersive fieldwork in a church deeply connected to former drug traffickers, I analyze these dynamics through three distinct sociological scales.
 At the macro level, I investigate the cultural and symbolic transformations in Rio de Janeiro’s peripheral communities, with Cidade de Deus as the focal […]

Zoom* and Salle Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Municipal Housing and Community in Cape Town: Lessons from the Bloemhof Flats In this talk I explore how experiences and memories of a Cape Town municipal housing project sustained people who were forcibly displaced from that project under apartheid in South Africa.  Archival study of the Bloemhof Flats in Cape Town’s District Six, and group interviews with its former residents, inform an exploration of the relationships between municipal housing and community formation, and its impact on people’s lives, both under apartheid and in its wake of material hardships.  Against […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration Presentation of the book ” The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow” We are living in one of the greatest periods of urbanisation in human history, with more cities in the world today than ever before. But is this definitely a positive thing? Are cities actually good for us? And what would the city of the future look like if we tried to make one that definitely was – would anyone want to live there? This book is about the fascinating and sometimes strange world of the people asking these […]