CFP - African Urbanisms conference in JHB October 2024
Nancy Odendaal
Dear All,
Anna Selmeczi (UCT) and I are putting together a session at the African Urbanisms conference taking place at University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 23-26.
If you are interested, please consider submitting a paper for our panel:
Panel Title
Knowing the City: Transformative Theoretical Practices of African Urban Scholarship
In Africa and elsewhere in the global south, urban scholars are necessarily embedded in multiple relationships with state actors, non-governmental organisations, local and transnational social movements, and donors. The twin challenge for urbanists in and of
the south is to generate locally sensitive evidence of urban dynamics while also deploying theoretical frameworks that have local relevance and practical application (Parnell 2007). How scholars and practitioners (and scholar-practitioners) navigate this challenge
and what questions they ask is shaped by shifting ‘problem spaces’ (Scott 2014). As the Knowing the City (Oldfield, Selmeczi and Barnett 2024) project showed us, tracking these problem spaces in the body of South African urban scholarship of the last five decades
makes visible how deeply interwoven more conventional registers of scholarly expertise and critique are with practices of engaging beyond academia. Indeed, aside from being located geographically, socially, and politically, urban theorising in the south is
embodied, personal, and relational.
To continue and broaden the work of Knowing the City, this panel seeks to facilitate a dialogue about the theories and practices of both social inquiry and urban transformation as deeply lived commitments of multiple generations of scholars in Africa and beyond.
We invite papers that reassess the geographies and commitments of African urban studies by paying attention to scholars' distinctive forms of engagement and the problem spaces that have shaped urban scholarship. The panel seeks to serve as a site for collective
reflections on the various forms and contexts of the generation of ideas and knowledge practices in urban studies on and beyond the continent.
If you are interested in joining the panel, please submit your abstract here by the 21st April: https://www.urban-sdg-school.org/african-urbanisms/session-8.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Best,
Sophie
--
Sophie Oldfield
Chair and Professor
City and Regional Planning
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
Cornell University
106 W. Sibley Hall
Ithaca, N.Y. 14850, USA