Themes

We loosely organise our collective work around three thematic areas and two transversal concerns, or cutaways.

1. Urban ground

Inhabitation from every day of citylife. Intersection of embodied experiences, colonial, racial and gendered histories, political economies and ecologies, and translocal assemblages that are making up what it means to be alive and to be ‘human’ in today’s urban worlds. But also, enquiries around “complete urbanisation” that imagines and attempts to make anywhere as anything, regardless of situatedness, history and local realities, even as these imaginaries are never fully actualised.

Urban Grounds

2. Precarious housing

Inhabitation from every day of citylife. Intersection of embodied experiences, colonial, racial and gendered histories, political economies and ecologies, and translocal assemblages that are making up what it means to be alive and to be ‘human’ in today’s urban worlds. But also, enquiries around “complete urbanisation” that imagines and attempts to make anywhere as anything, regardless of situatedness, history and local realities, even as these imaginaries are never fully actualised.

3. Liberatory politics

Inhabitation as an emancipatory proposition from the ground of its struggle. Intersection of local organising with more prosaic forms of housing endurance, from established collectives but also from individual’s affirmations that struggle to become collective, having to do with reverberations across multiples economies of life, redefining the ‘political’ from within. Attention is spent from those forms of liberations that are not conceived to be ‘political struggle’ by Western ‘radical’ canons.

We are also interested in exploring two transversal areas of concern:

  • Methodologies of representationHow can we represent urban conflict and the uneven urban development underpinning it in non-extractive and meaningful ways for those involved in localised struggles? This cutaway explores mapping methods, the critical use of statistical data, and creative visual methodologies at large.
  • Undercommon praxisHow can members of this Lab use our epistemic and Institutional privilege to instantiate a non-extractive and redistributive praxis of research and action on housing justice? This cutaway opens ways to use the Lab’s resources to sustain radical scholarship and engagement with activists and organisers.


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