Author: Louise

Organising in Hard Times: Urban Informality and the Promise of Transnational Labor Activism

Speaker
Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago

Discussant(s)
Jane Wills (QMUL) and Debby Potts (KCL).

Chair
Jenny Robinson (UCL)

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Abstract

One of the perplexing aspects of the current period ofeconomic restructuring in U.S.cities has been the re-emergence and extension of forms of labor relations werethought to have been sharply curtailed, if not completely eliminated. Day labor organized through informal hiringsites located in public spaces is one example of these developments.  Elsewhere, I argue that the re-emergence of day labor is a predictable outcome of the offensive that has been launchedagainst policies and institutions that place a floor under competition in thelabor market (Theodore 2007). In the name of greater labor market flexibility, the neoliberal project has sought todismantle labor market insurance programs and job protection legislation, andto undermine trade unionism and other forms of worker collective action. Unregulated work and labor market informalityhave flourished in the economic spaces of deregulation that have been clearedby this neoliberal offensive.

But this is not the end of the story. Day laborers and workers rights organizations are actively contesting conditions in contingent labor markets through a combination of organizing, policy advocacy and the establishment of alternative labor market  institutions. This paper examines an important aspect of this politicization of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organizing strategies by day laborers, an allegedly ‘unorganizable’ class of contingent workers.  More specifically, I focus on the ways in which repertoires of contestation – based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical democracy and popular education – have defused from mass-movement social struggles in Latin America in the 1980s to street corner organizing in U.S.cities today. Through a series of in-depth interviews with day labor organizers, the paper explores how organizing approaches from the global South have been adapted and recombined to meet the challenges presented by day labor markets in the U.S. which are characterized by substandard employment conditions and violations of core labor laws

A cultural political economy of a Global City Region: The Competitiveness-Integration Order in the Pearl River Delta

Speaker
Ngai-Ling Sum, Dept. of Politics and International Relations; Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University

Discussant(s)

Nancy Holman, Dept. of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics

Chair
Hyun Shin, Dept. of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics

Abstract

This paper adopts a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to examine the role of knowledge brands (e.g., Porter’s competitive advantage diamond; Lundvall’s national innovation system approach) in mediating regional planning and economic restructuring. In the case of the Pearl River Delta (PRD), these brands have been recontextualized and hybridized on the discursive level that informs various spatial imaginaries (e.g., Greater PRD, Regional Powerhouse, Pan PRD, Mega Metropolitan Area). With the onset of the current crisis since mid-2007, the project of making of this global city region was reinforced by calls to ‘strengthen regional cooperation to build the momentum for growth’, to upgrade infrastructure as well as release a major plan —  the Outline of the Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River

Delta 2008-2020. Focusing on the Outline as a technology of power, this paper examines, in a neo-Foucauldian sense, the pastoral and governmental power that  helps to constitute the competitiveness-integration order in the region. A CPE approach would also argue that this neo-Foucauldian focus on the micro-technologies of power should be complemented by an understanding of the macro-structural and agential selectivities involved in socio-economic change. The second part of the paper concentrates on the Outline’s call for cooperation among ‘service industries’ in the region. Such “servicization” of the region is far from being ‘win-win’ once one considers the embedded materiality of the region. Drawing from this case, the paper concludes with a CPE interpretation of planning and economic restructuring in general.

Battersea Power Station: Raising the roof

Speaker
Mark Saunders

In response to the current planning applications for the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station this session will concentrate on the sad past and even gloomier future of London’s best known and loved riverside landmark.

Outdoor Advertising As Urban Vernacular: Perceiving Change in Manchester and Detroit

Speaker
Anne Cronin Sociology Dept, Lancaster University

Discussant(s)
Dr. Scott Rodgers, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck

This paper draws on ethnographic material from a study of the outdoor advertising industry in the UK and its relationship to urban space. It also uses material from photographic case studies of Manchester, UK, and Detroit, USA. I explore how advertising has a spatial relationship to certain sites in cities – areas of dereliction or areas undergoing regeneration – as the industry can most easily secure permission to construct billboards there. This articulates one form of advertising’s temporal relationship to cities as these temporary billboards are tied to the duration of the rebuilding work or the time that those areas are left in dereliction. I analyse how these spatio-temporalities provide forms of ‘urban vernacular’ that articulate in visual and material form capitalist processes and make particular understandings of these processes available to people.

Noise Of The Past – A Poetic Journey of War, Memory & Dialogue

Speakers
Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths)

Sanjay Sharma (Brunel University)

Discussant(s)

Vron Ware (The Open University)

Noising the Past: event as intervention

Abstract: Representing a disruptive noise to the performative enactment of the nation in stone, sound and ritual, it is now widely recognised that some stories and bodies have been drummed out of war and remembrance. Through co-production, the project which this paper reflect on, explored how the noise of the past can be put into play in a series of interactions that make it possible to remember and converse beyond nationalistic and militaristic consensus. The research direction set in play a cultural production that was a dynamic exchange between the researchers, artists and postcolonial generations on war and national memory.

Centrally the project innovated methods of exchange and collaboration using the dialogicmode of call-and-response. Methodologically activating a multiculturalencounter, ‘Noise of the Past’ publicly conversed with multi-sensory modalitiesof poetry, historical documents, music and visual art. This collaboration unleashed tension and incommensurability to produce new configurations of open-ended belongings to the nation. A new film titled Unravelling (17 min, 2008, dir K. Powar) was produced by the project with a new and original scoreby the composer Nitin Sawhney. In addition, Francis Silkstone score andconducted Post-colonial War Requiem. Both pieces were launched in Coventry Cathedral on 8th November, as a major public intervention in accepted codes of national remembrance. In an exploration of how to imaginatively engage with everyday life, as aural and visual participants, the installation moved between the dissonance of ‘noise’ to the imagined purity of the nation. It operated with discrepant and yet intertwined chords of sound, visual texture and stone to prompt how encounters can be brought into a tactile play of the past in the present.

For further details see 

http://www.gold.ac.uk/methods-lab/noise-past/ 

Aesthetics, Ideology and the City

Speaker

Mustafa Dikec (Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Discussant(s)

Engin Isin (Politics and International Studies, Open University)

How can we think of ideology as an aesthetic affair?  My paper engages with this question through an examination of the rise of the so-called ‘securitarian ideology’ in France roughly within the last decade.  I first visit the debates surrounding this seemingly old-fashioned notion of ideology to spell out some of the difficulties surrounding it.  Despite these difficulties, however, I argue against the abandonment of the notion and point to its significance as a critique of social closure and alleged self-evidence of facts that allow for such closure.  Building on Jacques Ranciere’s notion of ‘sensible evidences’, I present an interpretation of ideology as an aesthetic affair; that is, ideology not merely as a collection of discourses or a system of ideas, but as the reconfiguration of the very space in which these are described and articulated.

Abandoned Images: The Cinema of Los Angeles’ Broadway

Speaker
Stephen Barber (Visual and Material Culture, Kingston)

Discussant(s)
Mark Shiel (Film Studies, KCL)

The Broadway avenue of downtown Los Angeles holds an extraordinary collection of twelve once-luxurious and now abandoned film-palaces, built between 1910 and 1931.  In most cities worldwide, such concentrations of cinemas have been long-demolished, but in Broadway, the cinemas’ buildings survived the end of film-projection intact, some of their interiors ruined and gutted, others transformed and re-used as churches, nightclubs and storage space for digital artefacts.  This research project develops the preoccupations of my earlier book, Projected Cities (Reaktion, 2002), with the intricate relationship between film, the space of cinemas and urban space.  How does the distinctive aura of film – with its particular corporeal and sensory implications, and its power over cultural memory – survive when its architectural space has been comprehensively overhauled, and even erased?  And how does the urban landscape around such concentrations of cinemas respond to their presence and eventual disintegration?  The original signs and marquees of the cinemas, designed for prominent visibility from pedestrians and traffic, have also all survived, but are often meshed with contemporary hoardings and graffiti inscriptions.  Those facades, together with the dilapidated interiors of the cinemas, have been momentarily glimpsed in such city-films as Blade Runner (1982), Mulholland Drive (2001) and In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2008): does the space of cinemas, like urban space, exert its maximal impact on its spectators when it is seized in fragments?

Borrowed Light: A Journey through Weimar Berlin

Speaker
Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL)

**This is an inaugural lecture – please ensure that you register your interest with Valerie Viehoff at v.viehoff[at]ucl.ac.uk**

The lecture will explore emerging cultures of nature in Berlin with particular emphasis on the planning and architectural legacy of Martin Wagner and the cinematic representation of everyday life in the film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1929).

Iqualit, City of Sovereignties

Speaker
Prof Rob Shields (Sociology/Art and Design, University of Alberta)

Discussant(s)
Alan Latham (Geography, UCL)

How is a city on Baffin Island, an arctic capital even, changing Arctic sovereignties? Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, in Canada’s high Arctic, is a point of contact between traditional circumpolar Inuit mobilities and newer global flows and knowledge constructions.

This talk considers the emergence and impact of Iqaluit as a cultural and political centre for notions of sovereignty and metropolitan visions of the Arctic as a white wilderness.

The Architecture of Colonialism

Speaker
Eyal Weizman (Research Architecture, Goldsmiths)

Discussant(s)
Discussant: Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL)