AUSTIN WORKSHOP: February 28, 2006

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Shehr network, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Urban Geographies of Conflict

From war-torn to defiled cities our vocabularies have strained to capture the everyday life of urban landscapes in many parts of the contemporary Middle East, South Asia and Africa. The promise of the modern city is giving way to ethnic, religious, economic violence. Be it the product of externally or internally authored conflict, much of the language of urban geographies of conflict is a priori premised on a notion of abnormal space that can only be remade into a canonical modern city. This workshop seeks to explore these arguments from the location of the "troubled" or "perverse" urban geographies of the Global South by pursuing a number of questions: If what Chatterjee (2005) calls the bourgeois city always already has a fractured history, then how might this inflect upon our understanding of the violent unmaking of urban projects? With the collapse of welfare economies and state sponsored employment, and the postcolonial national ideologies that gave rise to them, how do contemporary transnational flows of ideas and resources shape responses to contemporary forms of deprivation and marginality that are specific to these histories of the forever non-bourgeois city? How might we think of the everyday life of cities not as transitions between conflict, crisis and normality, but rather as cities with histories of different intensities? What new forms of subjectivities, notions of public socialities are produced in cities that are the site of incessant violence?

Program