PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST DUE TO A CLASH WITH THE UCT MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR THE LATE PROF BONGANI MAYOSI.
ACC is excited to invite you to the first Urban Humanities Seminar Series. Prof Sophie Oldfield will be presenting a paper entitled ‘High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Collaborative Urban Theory’.
ABSTRACT: High Stakes, High Hopes creates urban theory in the political and physical realities of everyday southern city life. This work examines the high stakes at play in a decade-long research and teaching partnership, which has brought this university and the neighbourhood’s civic organization in Cape Town to research the city together to collaboratively build urban theory. In narrating the project and partnership, this lecture will explore collaborative forms of urban theory, immersed in the registers, inspirations and meanings of everyday struggles and learning across the city. This approach brings together multiple voices, registers and accounts, shaping urban theory in shared spaces across the city. In this context of extreme urban inequality, this approach to theorising infuses the personal, political, and public struggles through which urban theory is generated, expertise opened up, and solidarity and commitment built.
BIO: Sophie Oldfield holds the University of Basel–University of Cape Town Professorship in Urban Studies, based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Her research is grounded in empirical and epistemological questions central to urban theory. Focusing on housing, informality and governance, mobilization and social movement organizing, and urban politics, her work pays close attention to political practice and everyday urban geographies, analysing the ways in which citizens and organized movements craft agency to engage and contest the state. She has a track record of excellence in collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between “university” and “community.”