New PhD Course by IUR- Urbanism: Perspectives from the Global South (7,5 ECTS)

The discipline of critical urban studies within the Anglophone world has seen a “Southern” turn in the last decades, guided and led by postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist work. The “southern urban critique”, as Lawhon and Truelove (2020) broadly call it, has not only reinvigorated debates about how we should study and understand cities in the global South – a location outside Euro-America (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012) – but has also questioned the very foundations of urban scholarship. Powerful interventions have encouraged us to postcolonize the discipline of urban geography (Robinson, 2003) by putting to work “new geographies of imagination and epistemology” (Roy, 2009). Scholars such as Tariq Jazeel, Mary Lawhon, Helga Leitner, Susan Parnell, Sujata Patel, Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, and Eric Sheppard have questioned how a field that is constructed around the experience of a few cities in the West can give us the tools to analyze multiple forms of urbanities and urbanization across the globe. Despite differences in theoretical starting points, what could be broadly referred as Global South Urbanisms, seeks to dismantle the production of urban knowledge that is carried out through Eurocentric lenses by engaging with the global South (and other margins) through an approach that acknowledges historical difference, embodied knowledge, and the existence of a pluriverse of epistemologies (cf. de Sousa Santos, 2014; Grosfoguel, 2011; Kimari, 2023).

The southern turn in critical urban studies now offers a variety of entry points for rethinkingthe location, theories, and practices of the field by engaging with the “overlooked” (Ruszczyk et al., 2021), the “ordinary” or “off the map” (Robinson, 2002, 2006), the peripheral (Caldeira, 2017) or the “postcolonial city” (Yeoh, 2001). These conceptualizations are complemented by strategies such as decolonizing (Schwarz and Streule, 2016), provincializing (Sheppard et al., 2013), subalternity (Jazeel, 2014; Roy, 2011), new comparative approaches (Robinson, 2016; Streule, 2023), and worlding practices (Ong, 2011; Simone, 2001). While this theoretical richness is cause for celebration, work remains to be done. Scholars have highlighted how the southern turn has tended to ignore secondary cities (Ruszczyk et al., 2021), warned of the risks of understanding the global South as a geographical location and not a relation (Parnell and Robinson, 2012), and argued that there is a need to clarify “the precise objects and objectives of the southern urban critique” (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020). Alongside this is scholarship that reflects how the “postcolonial condition” exists beyond the global South (Shin, 2021; Tlostanova, 2019), interrogates if we can even speak of a “south” perspective in urban studies (Patel, 2014) or goes further to question if urbanization in the global South is “fundamentally different” (Randolph and Storper, 2023).

Against this background – and while addressing the fundamental question of what the urban is – the course seeks to reflect on where and how we should come to understand the urban condition through a “southern urban critique” lens. With this, the aim is to prompt a discussion of how we can a) address asymmetries in knowledge production, b) present the geographies of the global South and other peripheries in more grounded ways, and c) pluralize the field of urban studies through the contribution of a multiplicity of urban experiences, strategies for theory-construction, and comparative approaches.

The course will focus on five themes that seek to explore the potentials and limitations of:

1.     Engaging in knowledge production through the global South framework

2.     Operationalizing paradigms enunciated from the margins to dislocate centers

3.     Applying concepts and categories from the global South within other contexts such as the global North or global East

4.     Carrying out comparative work in South-South constellations as well as South-North

5.     Developing new methods to engage with actors outside of academia and disrupt traditional forms of knowledge production

Planned to be held in the Spring of 2025, we invite PhD students to a series of activities that will take place in Malmö, Sweden on the following dates:

·       13 February. Seminar and lecture with Wangui Kimari, American University Nairobi

·       20 March. Seminar and lecture with Madina Tlostanova, Linköping University

·       24 April. Seminar and lecture with J. Miguel Kanai, University of Sheffield

·       8 May. Seminar and lecture with Tariq Jazeel, University College London

·       26-27 May. Seminar and lecture with Kavita Ramakrishnan, University of East Anglia (day 1). A “postcolonizing walk” where we will use a southern critique lens to reflect on local context  (day 2).

This is a pass/fail course. Students who wish to be considered for the 7,5 ECTS credits that this course offers will need to submit a final 4000 to 6000-word research paper at the end of the course. The course examiner is Hoai Anh Tran.

How to register: Apply by sending an email to the course coordinator Claudia Fonseca Alfaro (claudia.fonseca@mau.se). Please include your full name, contact details, university and an abstract of your PhD project. If you have a Swedish personal number, please include that. If you are admitted as a doctoral student at a foreign university, please attach a copy of your passport and certificate of admission. There is a limited number of spots and candidates will be chosen on a first come, first served basis.