Lecture details

Steal away, steal away home, I ain't got long to stay here

Many of today's urban dwellers often face sorrow with the loss of their homes, work and everyday life. Similar to the plantations that used African slaves, the spread of contemporary mega-developments continues to expand standardised social and economical interactions without really changing their form or function.

At the same time, efforts made by residents in major cities of the world, such as Sao Paolo, Jakarta, Mexico City, or Delhi, reveal what the city has largely been all along - a place where materials can be taken out of their usual contexts, uses, and meanings, then pieced together to produce unforeseen and not readily controllable outcomes.

Through this Knowledge Works lecture Professor AbdouMaliq Simone will examine the urban processes of various modern cities highlighting how they function and how they create specific ways of existing, thinking, seeing, claiming, affecting, informing, and making that are bound to no one, yet bound everyone.

Sorrow thus becomes the tactic: belong nowhere and everywhere.

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with a particular interest in emerging forms of social and economic intersection across diverse trajectories of change for cities in the Global South.

Presently he is Research Professor at the University of South Australia's International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, Research Associate at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, Oxford University, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.

Professor Simone's key publications include, In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan, University of Chicago Press, 1994, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, Duke University Press, 2004, and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads, Routledge, 2009.

www.unisa.edu.au/knowledgeworks

свернуть