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| Semester | spring semester 2019 |
| Course frequency | Every spring sem. |
| Lecturers | Sophie Oldfield (sophie.oldfield@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | The Urban Everyday in Southern Cities engages provocations of ‘the everyday,’ immersing students in scholarly work that explores the city through ethnography and close examination of the particular, the ‘concrete’ ways in which we engage with, act in, and study the city. The course engages with literature built on deep description, thick ways of narrating and analysing cities. We draw on writing on methods and narrative strategies to engage students in questions of method and the politics of urban knowledge production. Discussion is a large part of the course and learning in it. Seminars are intended as safe spaces to experiment with debating literature and building our own techniques and confidence in critical reading, debating and writing skills. Through reading and research, we will explore ways in which this mix disrupts binaries of the formal and informal, the material and the socio-political, as well as the planned and the unplanned. The course draws this work together to reflect on the productive tensions in and between structural forces (the state, capital and so on) with ordinary forms of agency (citizenship, collective movements, and ordinary acts of encroachment) and to think through the ways the everyday locates and disrupts theorising southern cities. |
| Learning objectives | Over the course of the semester we will explore literature and debates on the Urban Everyday, anchored in a weekly three-hour seminar throughout the semester. The course introduces ‘the urban everyday’ as a perspective and entry into on city building. We will track forms of agency that locate citizens and ordinary city dwellers as well as the state in space and time, in questions of subjectivity, belonging and identity that meet in varied ways rights, policy, state techniques and process driven and shaped by the city and state. Built around narratives of agency such as engaging and participating, resisting and protesting, as well as waiting and the varied encounters with the city and state these practices shape. By the end of the seminar you will be able to engage with the literature on the urban everyday and the diverse forms of agency in these forms of everyday city building, reflect on the ways in which this lens on southern cities works productively with structure and agency, particularly with the ways in which ordinary everyday readings of the city help theorize powerful structures such as the state and capital, feel confident with building writing and analysis through close reading of scholarly articles on the urban everyday and be able to locate contemporary urban theory debates in the urban everyday as a site of theory and practice. |
| Comments | This course takes place at the University of Cape Town and is only accessable to the students of the MA Critical Urbanisms. |
| Admission requirements | Only open for students of MA Critical Urbanisms. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
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No dates available. Please contact the lecturer.
| Modules |
Module: Urbanisms from the South (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | Pass/fail |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | as often as necessary |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |