A collective study lab

New publications by Lab scholars – Fall 2023

Greetings all,   

This is a recap, in alphabetical order, of Lab’s members publications in the last few months. Happy reading!

Silvia Aru 

Camillo Boano 

  • Peragine, R.L., Boano C. (2023) Understanding Emptiness, Understanding Modernity, in Edward Denison and Shahid Vawda eds. Modern Heritage Proceedings 2022, pp. 85-90 

The paper is emerging from a presentation made in a conference in UCL arguing how a set of epistemological binary dualisms of Western modernity are associated to the notion of emptiness, and how the latter is a critical aspect in the underrepresentation of alternative modernities. The paper is looking at emptiness in the northwesternmost corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina and reframes emptiness for the project of architecture and thus heritage.  

  • Mastromarino, S. Boano, C. (2023). “Makeshift borders in Porte de la Chapelle” UOU scientific journal #05, 124-137. 

The paper investigates spaces of displacement and makeshift inhabitations along the border of Paris’ Boulevard Périphérique, identifying how such a material infrastructure generates thresholds and encounters between the urgency of resistance and the political violence of rejection. 

Chiara Cacciotti 

The paper explores the long-standing relationship in Rome between socio-cultural diversity and the temporary nature of low-income housing solutions; it is an historical account of the relationship the social category known as ‘housing otherness’, which includes migrants and Italian squatters in severe housing distress, and temporary public housing in Rome. 

Rodrigo Castriota  

  • Simone, A., Somda, D., Torino, G., Irawati, M., R., N., Bathla, N., Castriota, R., Vegliò, S., & Chandra, T. (2023). Inhabiting the extensions. Dialogues in Human Geography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231168896  
  • Castriota, R. (2023) “Preservar para extrair, grilar e espoliar. Ambientalismo operacional e as unidades de conservação de Carajás” (Preserve to extract, scam and dispossess: operational environmentalism and units of conservation in Carajás). Revista Geografias, 18(2), 21-43. https://doi.org/10.35699/2237-549X.2022.40635  

Francesco Chiodelli 

The book analyses various types of “urban illegality” in Italian cities: criminal infiltration in real estate development, corruption in urban planning, illegal building construction, occupations of public and private property,  squatting. Not only ambitious and unscrupulous politicians, professionals, developers and bureaucrats  populate such illegal practices, but also criminals and social movements, marginalised subjects and religious minority groups, migrants and the poor, in a varied picture in which radically different histories, reasons and logics intersect. While offering an in-depth investigation of each of these practices, the volume suggest to read all of them through the lens of an enduring “politics of urban illegality”. 

Mara Ferreri 

  • Mara Ferreri (2023) Radical difference in ‘transitional commoning’: hidden histories of London’s squats to co-ops, City, 27:3-4, 360-376, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2023.2213123 

First longitudinal study of co-operative ‘short-life’ housing in London, drawing on archival visual and textual materials, and oral history to understand the intersectional politics and ‘hidden histories’ of the co-operative’s roots in organized squatting.  

  • Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, M. Ferreri, J. Hudson, K. Scanlon & K. West (2023) Toward a feminist housing commons? Conceptualising care – (as) – work in collaborative housing, Housing, Theory and Society, 40:5, 660-678, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2023.2247414 

The paper applies the feminist concept of care-work to lived experiences of collaborative housing as a form of housing commons. It is based on qualitative interviews and focus group discussions as part of the first interdisciplinary study on the impact of community-led housing on social isolation in the UK.

Melissa Garcia Lamarca 

The article co-authored by two members of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab offers a situated reflection on key methodological questions in militant research processes in housing justice, and on the tensions and contradictions of movement-driven research about and with squatters in Catalonia. The urgency and ethics that guided the process made it necessary to operate through methodological openness and to consider method as politics, advancing a broader agenda of movement-relevant research supporting non speculative forms of inhabitation. 

Spanish version of the book Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People, which tells the story of people living with mortgage debt in times of crisis and precarity and explores how the housing movement transforms individualised indebtedness into collective struggle. 

Margherita Grazioli 

  • Grazioli M. (2023) Eurhythmisation and organisational rites of housing squats in Rome, City, 27 (3-4): 377-393, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2023.2197551

Wangui Kimari 

Michele Lancione 

The essay offers a critical commentary to a special issue on housing justice and practices of care organised by Desiree Fields, Emma Power and Kenton Card. It highlights the entrapment of institutional care in housing justice practice, and discuss radical care in habitation struggles. 

This short book investigates the relationship between the military sector and the Academy, offering tools to unpack the problematic relationship between the two. The book is part of a wider activist anti-militarist endeavor from the author, started with the fight against an agreement signed by the author’s institution (the Polytechnic of Turin) and the EU agency Frontex. 

Emma Shaw Crane 

Emma won the Annette Kolodny Prize, which is given every year to the best environmentally-themed paper at the American Studies Association meeting. Our institute put together a small press release: https://cser.columbia.edu/news/annette-kolodny-prize-won-by-carlos-alonso-nugent-emma-shaw-crane/.

 

Devra Julie Waldman