The Urban as Political Terrain: Mobilization, Research and the City
Sophie Oldfield
Universities across the world are grappling with ways in which to make knowledge production more robust and democratic. In post-liberation and post-colonial southern contexts this work is critical and urgent, framed in debates that critically interrogate the limits of traditional practices of university-based research and teaching. This book and associated workshop explore transformative approaches to research and teaching done in collaboration with institutions and actors across cities, based particularly in neighbourhoods and communities. In these types of contexts knowledge production is deeply entangled with everyday lives, relationships, and creativity through which meaningful and vibrant knowledge making and its ever-evolving translation and re-articulation into struggles becomes possible. Through documenting alternative types of teaching and research practice, the project contributes to critical theorising on epistemological, pedagogical and political issues that help us work in contextually relevant forms. The project argues that these approaches offer provocative ways to address urban inequality and to build transformative urban knowledge.
