Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Citizenship Without Community

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

change train
Creative Commons License photo credit: Oliver Huizinga

Last week I took part in an extremely interesting workshop at the British Library. Citizenship Without Community was hosted by the Open University in collaboration with the BISA poststructural politics working group. The workshop examined ideas concering citizenship, begining ith thoughts from Engin Isin (The Open University) and closing with a paper by Étienne Balibar (University of California, Irvine. In between there were a number of thoughful contributions on the nature of contemrpoary citizenship from Vicki Squire (Open University), Angharad Closs Stephens (Durham University), Joe Painter (Durham University), Jonna Pettersson (Lund University), Andrew Schapp (Exeter University), Cindy Weber (Lancaster University), Rutvica Andrijasevic (Open University), Claudia Aradau (Open University), Umut Erel (Open University), and Jef Huysmans (Open University).

For those who weren’t able to be at the workshop podcasts of all of the day’s contributions are now online along with photos of the event. You can find them here.

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Imagining urban cataclysm

Monday, November 16th, 2009
On Thursday and Friday (19th & 20th November) I will be at the World Politics and Popular Culture conference organised by Newcastle University Politics staff Simon Philpott, Matt Davies and Kyle Grayson. The conference will explore the manner in which

popular culture become[s] a series of sites at which political meaning is made, where political contestation takes place and where political orthodoxy is reproduced and challenged

I will be giving a paper entitled Zombies and flesh eaters: imagining urban cataclysm in the era of metropolitanisation.

The paper will discuss the relation between the politics of global urbanisation and representations of urban cataclysm in the film 28 Days Later, video game Resident Evil; and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. I argue that novels, films and games are textual artefacts embedded in complex assemblages of things, signs, meanings and affects. As such they are mutually imbricated with the dynamics of delineation and contestation we refer to as ‘politics’.

The paper discusses two particular ideas arising from a reading of these texts:
28 Days Later Poster
Cormac McCarthys The Road

(more…)

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Radicalisation and the urban environnment

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Mirror_mediator_flyerToday sees the opening of an exhibition based on the ESRC-funded research project The urban environment: Mirror and mediator of radicalisation? The exhibition has an excellent website outlining the various strands in the research project: www.urbanpolarisation.org

The project is based at the University of Manchester and Ralf Brand is the principle investigator (with Jon Coaffee as co-investigator and Sara Fregonese as Research Assistant). Overall the aim of the project is to explore the interrelation between the urban environment and  socio-political polarisation. Polarisation is assumed to have links with political violence (including radicalisation). You can read more about the project here.
(more…)

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The City and Community, Durham University 18th November 2009

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

In mid-November I will be giving a paper at The City and Community workshop at Durham University. This workshop will focus on the twin questions of the nature of urban community and the role of the city as distinctive site of politics.

Further details including a program for the workshop can be found here. Speakers will include Michael J Shapiro, Ash Amin, Joe Painter, Angharad Closs Stephens, Martin Coward, Steve Graham, Vicki Squire, Jennifer Bagelman and Delacey Tedesco.

The event is being jointly organised the Politics-Space-State research cluster, Durham University & the BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group. Angharad Closs Stephens is the main organiser, with additional assistance from myself, Louise Amoore, Michele Lancione and Eduardo Neve-Jimenez.

Places at the workshop are free but limited. Please contact Angharad Closs Stephens if you would like to know more and/or are interested in attending.

My paper will be entitled ‘Agonism, community, urbanity’. (more…)

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Update: Urban Securitisation and Climate Change

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Crisis Forum have posted some of the resources from the workshop on climate change and violence held last week (9th October 2009). These resources include (or will include in the near future) videos of most of the presentations as well as power-point slides.

You can find the notes for my presentation at the workshop here. Please note that these are rough notes prepared for speaking at this event. They are not an academic paper. As such they do not include the usual references and acknowledgements that would be expected in an academic paper. If you want further details about the sources referred to in the notes, please contact me.

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Urban Securitisation and Climate Change

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Later this week I will be going to London to a workshop hosted by the Crisis Forum as part of their ‘Climate Change and Violence‘ series. The workshop is entitled ‘Securing the State: Domestic Agendas‘ and examines what we can learn from existing security regimes about the way in which governmental authorities may respond to the violence(s) generated by climate change.

I will be talking about what we can learn from the contemporary securitisation of the urban environment. You can find my abstract as well as those of other speakers here. It promises to be a very interesting event.

Although there are many possible themes to investigate regarding climate change and security/violence, I want to explore two in particular: (more…)

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Urbicide Syposium

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

CTLab is currently hosting a virtual symposium on my book Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction.

The symposium runs until March 13th and can be found here (with an index of postings here)

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