RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Contentious cities
Because cities represent concentrations of material and symbolic resources, they are also strategic arenas of contentious political exchanges between different actors. The contentious struggles that arise in cities spill over and feed into wider political battles. From uprisings in the French banlieues to struggles against displacement by South-African shanty town dwellers, from struggles against fascism to revanchist mobilizations against immigrants or the homeless; conflicts in cities are many, complex and diverse. What are the specifically qualities of cities that make them into strategic spaces for incubating contentious relations that inform and drive broader political struggles? How are cities generative spaces of claims, discourses, and political imaginaries that help frame political mobilizations? What urban specific factors help explain successes or failures of social movements to achieve their goals? Scholars from various disciplines – notably sociology, political science, and anthropology – have developed a range of theoretical and methodological tools to answer these questions and have generated a wealth of data. However, we contend that the role of space in general and of cities in particular remains underexplored. We know that certain cities, and certain neighborhoods within cities, show very different levels and forms of contention than others. Incorporating these geographical differences into our theories and empirical research may drastically improve our ability to map and explain contention.
For these reasons, this session focuses on the city as a site of conflict. We invite papers that examine the role of space in the articulation and dynamics of conflict. More specifically, we are looking for
- historical and comparative work that explains why certain types of identities, claims and issues appear in certain places and at certain times;
- papers examining how local factors contribute to and mediate national or global movements;
- theoretical accounts of how space factors into contention (as opposed to only considering space as a background or canvas); and
- papers that do not consider cities in isolation but focus on how certain mobilizations in different places are connected
Session Organizers
Dr. Walter Nicholls, Sociology, University of Amsterdam, E: w.j.nicholls@uva.nl
Dr. Justus Uitermark, Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, E: justusuitermark@hotmail.com
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