Feminising Urban Struggle Seminar

In partnership with academic institutions in Brazil, Tanzania and the Netherlands, CUBES organized the online international seminar titled Feminising urban struggle: bodies, territories and politics in women’s production and reproduction of peripheral spaces on 6-8 November, 2023.

The three-day online international seminar brought together over one hundred scholars and three keynote speakers, Verónica Gago, Faranak Miraftab and Adriana Allen, to debate critical feminist urban research and explore new epistemologies at the intersection of gender, women’s urban struggles, and the production of peripheral territories. 

Recordings of the on-line seminar are available on the YouTube channel of LabCidade, including the keynote sessions of Verónica Gago, Faranak Miraftab and Adriana Allen.

The seminar’s proceedings are available here.

The November seminar event initiated a larger Urban Studies Foundation-funded  Seminar Series exploring the urban struggles of marginalised women in transforming their peripheral territories in different contexts of the Global South, particularly, Southern Africa and Latin America. Organized as a scientific seminar, it aimed at strengthening a critical feminist urban research agenda, advancing new theoretical approaches and methodological aspects in the scientific and technological dimensions, in different countries.

Between July and August 2023, we issued a call for papers, inviting researchers from different areas of knowledge to submit abstracts exploring critical feminist research and epistemologies at the intersection of gender, women's urban struggles and the production of peripheral territories, in different contexts of the Global South, particularly Southern Africa and Latin America.

The call included the following themes in relation to theoretical and empirical work:

• The construction of new critical feminist epistemologies, through analytical framings that consider intersectionality, transdisciplinarity and diversity in relation to gender and identities in space production
• The relationship(s) between multiple forms of feminist struggles in producing, transforming and (re)claiming peripheral territories, focusing on women’s activism and production(s) of spaces, in urban as well as rural contexts
• Explorations of different forms of (gradual) dispossession due to forced eviction, as well as their associated struggles, insurgencies, (re)constructions and potentialities
• Practices of care and circuits of solidarity as response to different forms of social, political and spatial marginalisation, and how these practices shape spaces that women occupy
• Feminist approaches towards social and political organising, urban struggles and spatial transformation
• Case studies of urban production at different scales through feminist practices, such as, community gardens, community-based health system, including, as response to the Covid-19 sanitary crisis, among others proposals.

We approached the notion of peripheries in relation to marginalisation from state, society and market developments, which can happen in spaces at the centre and the border of cities.

Abstract Selection

In response to our call for abstracts, we received 181 abstracts of high quality, pointing to the interest and potential of this thematic. The submissions involved authors from different countries around the globe, demanding the composition of an international scientific committee to select the work. The selection sought to include as much regional diversity as possible, observing thematic groupings. 

Selected videos were presented during the event and can be accessed now on platforms and on YouTube in a LabCidade FAUUSP playlist.

COORDINATION: Priscila Izar (Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies – CUBES, School of Architecture and Planning – SoAP, University of the Witwatersrand), Paula Freire Santoro (Sabbatical Program IEA/FAU-USP), Elinorata Mbuya (Institute of Human Settlements Studies – IHSS, Ardhi University, Tanzania) and Carolina Lunetta (Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies – IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands).