Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

I knew nothing about the city of Gurgaon, India before watching this…. its current building boom…

Nonetheless, this video is a clear example of how worldwide discourses of ‘globalization’ often lack nuance. Notions of growth (w/o development) are largely unproblematized (they lead with talk of multinationals coming to the city)–as painted by interviews with urban planners, discussions of infrastructure, the problems with predatory developers, etc. the city comes across as a thing (the bourgeois project of modernity) instead of a complex organism (a la Jane Jacobs) or a human lived space (Lefebvre) (a panel member–Prof & Environmental Planner Darshini Mahadeva–voices this complaint in other words around minute 14:00-15:15).

The Spanish journal Revista Urban issue 3 is now out. It’s a theme issue on Conflicts of contemporary cities. It includes articles by Don Mitchell, Alain Bertho, Fabrizio Bottini & Maria Cristina Gibelli, Cristina Fernández & Fernando Roch, Julio Soria & Luis Valenzuela and Imanol Zubero.

The current call for papers is on Critical Landscapes. There is also a permanent call for papers on free topics.

While the journal requires subscription, I’ve been told you can contact the journal if you want to get hold of an individual piece.

[update: second link now fixed – sorry]

DOING AND UNDOING ACADEMIC LABOUR

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE 2012

Conference 2012

Doing and Undoing Academic Labour

June 7, 2012
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Learning Landscapes (MB1019)
University of Lincoln

In recent decades, a wealth of information has been produced about academic labour: the financialisation of knowledge, diminution of professional autonomy and collegiality through managerialism and audit cultures; the subsumption of higher education into circulations of capital, proletarianisation of intellectual work, shift from dreams of enlightenment and emancipation to imperatives of ‘employability’, and experiences of alienation and anger amongst educators across the world.

This has also been a period of intensifying awareness about the significance of these processes, not only for teachers and students in universities, but for all labour and intellectual, social and political life as well. And now we watch the growth of a transnational movements that is inventing new ways of knowing and…