This event will be hybrid in Niagara C0826 and on Zoom (link here).
Please join us in welcoming our newest addition to IUR, visiting researcher Lisa Björkman! Lisa will be at IUR for a one-year FORTE-funded project entitled “Malmö’s Many Heritages,” working with community-engaged digital mapping and working-life history.
In this seminar, Lisa introduces an experiment in comparative urban research: a collaborative book project titled Napoli Navigators (Berghahn Books, 2027) which takes as its methodological and conceptual point of departure the findings and formulations from another recent collaboration, Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press 2021). Bombay Brokers is a compilation of 36 essays (each authored by a different Bombay researcher) about people who act as bridge builders, brokers, translators, or connectors of various sorts, and whose urban expertise is indispensable to the processes and practices that are the focus of our research in the city (how migrants procure documents; how young families find housing; how access to markets is achieved). Bombay Brokers takes the paradoxically fraught yet indispensable character of certain kinds of knowledge and labor as a methodological and analytical jumping-off point for exploring broader, even global-level transformations (economic, technological, political, socio-material, ideational), bringing into focus some of the frictions and contradictions of the global contemporary. Napoli Navigators applies the insights gleaned from Bombay, asking these ‘Bombay questions’ in the southern Italian city of Napoli: What does the ‘broker’ broker? What gaps need bridging and why? Who is able to do this mediating work? What are the stakes and who are the stakeholders? The seminar introduces the Bombay project, the comparative methodology, and some ethnographic material from Napoli.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.