Subaltern Solidarity in Academia: How Area-based Urban Studies can Build its Strength by Working across Boundaries, Disciplines and Generations?
Despite the calls to expand the production of theory beyond the Global North, regions that are small, non-Anglophone and relatively resource-poor remain underrepresented in urban theory-making. Yet instead of focusing on structural challenges of area-based urban research, in this session time we’ll use the example of Central and Eastern Europe and strategize how to leverage the features of a small, area-based research community to build strength. Following Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s idea of ‘undercommons,’ we’ll discuss, for example, how the small size of our community and the relatively low degree of professionalisation of Eastern European academia can foster transdisciplinary research, as well as combining critical perspectives with the engagement in urban practice.
The IJURR panel discussion was moderated by sociologist Joanna Kusiak (University of Cambridge, UK), with the participation of anthropologist Martha Lampland (University of California, San Diego, USA), geographer & urban historian Erika Nagy (Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary), and economist, political scientist & development studies scholar Abel Polese (Dublin City University, Ireland).
The Cities After Transition – 9th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference (Budapest, 27 June – 1 July 2022) was organised by the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary; the Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest, Hungary; the Committee on Social Geography, Section of Earth Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary; the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Norway; and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR).
The video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2n74_-Rhxk
You can find more information about IJURR and CATference here: https://www.ijurr.org/lecture/2022-ijurr-catference-roundtable/
