Happy new year and welcome back!
We’d like to start the year looking forward to all the incredible offerings coming up in the migration and urbanisation space. From conferences to documentary films, books and articles, the discipline is growing in every direction and we’re here to be your guide.
Sadly, we couldn’t possibly list all the amazing things coming up this year. However, we’ve done our best to narrow it down to some of the things we’re most excited to see.
So, without further ado, here’s our list of 10 book and non-book things to watch for in 2022!
Books/Issues
- Remaindered Life (July 2022) by Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practises of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending.
- Against Borders: the case for abolition (August 2022) by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha tells what should by now be a simple truth: borders do not solely materialise at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. Borders are everyday and everywhere; they follow people around and get between us, and disrupt our collective safety, freedom and flourishing.
- Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings (June 2022) by Reyna Grande, Sonia Guiñansaca and a chorus of undocumented or formerly undocumented migrants, Somewhere We Are Human is a journey of memory and yearning from people newly arrived to America, those who have been here for decades, and those who have ultimately chosen to leave or were deported.
- Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (March 2022) by Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.
- The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture (June 2022) by AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Working at the intersection of Black studies, urban theory, and decolonial and Islamic thought, Simone centres the surrounds—those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention.
- Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations, Transformations, and Sustainability in the Global South (2022), edited by Deljana Iossifova, Alexandros Gasparatos, Stylianos Zavos, Yahya Gamal and Yin Long, presents a nuance argument for the ethical positioning of infrastructuring in research and practice in order to enhance infrastructural sustainability in the face of intersecting environmental, social and economic crises.
Non-Books
- Challenging Mobility Governance: As part of a new collaboration between the University of Oxford and University of the Witwatersrand, the Mobility Governance Lab will be hosting a conference exploring the labs’ core research themes. Including but not limited to: scales of mobility governance; inscribing the self and others; the emerging urban. An interdisciplinary endeavour, the conference will cover perspectives and methodological approaches from across the social sciences.
- Ordinary Cities in Exceptional Times (RC21 Conference): As the theme suggests, this years RC21 connects the emerging spatial lens of so-called ordinary cities to the idea of exceptional times. Looking to subvert the historical emphasis on exceptional cities, RC21 engages with the way “new hybridities of ordinary or even ‘banal’ exceptions reconfigure and reshape the broad terrain of the urban”. The call for abstracts is still open until January 31st.
- Speaking History: This African Futures Institute initiative includes a documentary series, conferences and workshops exploring African oral history. The initiative is pitched as a response to the misconception of Africa, and the rest of the “non-European world”, as ahistorical. A misconception predicated on the perceived supremacy of writing as a form of knowledge production and dissemination. Keep up with everything the AFI is organising via their socials.
- Barbershop @ Horniman’s Hair exhibit: Running until June 2022, this installation by the Migration Museum in the Horniman Museum’s Hair exhibit explores our complex relationship with hair both on and off, our heads. Including the implications of race and gender on how hair is perceived, worked and reworked everyday. Weaving in local as well as global stories, featuring the work of artists, film makers, designers and members of the public, the exhibit is both intimate and fresh.
Is there anything you’re looking forward to that we missed?
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Cover image credit: Bennett Tobias via UnSplash