Late in December 2021, EPD: Society & Space published a special issue curated by our co-directors, Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone. This is a project that speaks directly to the Lab’s concerns and theorising. Michele and AbdouMaliq are thankful to Natalie Oswin for steering it, for colleagues at the Urban Institute in Sheffield to grant them space to initiate the conversations underpinning it (thanks to Beth Perry in particular) and of course, they thank all the authors.

The issue includes contributions by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, Ammara Maqsood and Fizzah Sajjad, Yaffa Truelove, Sharad Chari, Asha Best and Margaret M Ramírez, Jaime Alves, Nadia Gaber, Tatiana Thieme, Neferti XM Tadiar.

In our directors’ intro – ‘Dwelling in Liminalities: Thinking Beyond Inhabitation’ they discuss the driving question of their exploration with this special issue—and of the workshops that preceded it, which they hosted at the Urban Institute in Sheffield from 2019 to 2021, and our Lab at DIST in Turin. The central question about the politics of inhabitation that they engage with is about what is made uninhabitable? In light of the relegation of the marginalised, impoverished and racialised to both objects of extraction and purveyors of liminality, what constitutes viable performances of generativity beyond production? What goes beyond the crisis, if not staying close to interstices through which one has perhaps the only chance to prefigure inhabitation beyond itself? What kind of urban geographical narration—in the literal sense of writing form and style—can convey the tensioned politics of dwelling in, across and through liminalities?

You can find an overview of each contribution here: https://www.societyandspace.org/journal-issues/volume-39-issue-6