In September 2024 several of our team members participated in The Common City Conference at Uppsala University. The conference revolved around questions of how the common city of the future is to be produced, created, built and imagined and the role of urban commons. Struggles for the right to the city, and for housing and urban justice were placed at the core of urban communing and the conference was divided into three strands: Urban struggles for the right to the city and urban commons; Activist research: methodological reflexivity and practical experiences; and Housing and Urban (In)Justice in Global North & South contexts. Researchers, activist researchers and activists took part in the conference.
Our team presented a talk on the ‘Kitchen work’ of collaborative research. It was a part of the ‘Activist research’-strand. We followed the discussions in this strand closely and we were happy to see that the ‘kitchen work’ metaphor was inspiring and was referenced in the discussions. Activist researchers from all over Europe, but also North and South America presented their work, focusing on housing, urban planning, community work, and right to the city, but also the usefulness of tools of counting and mapping. Reflections on the epistemologies of activism and research and their interconnections, on methods used in both activism and research, ethical issues arising in this kind of research practice and the benefits that research and researchers can bring into activism and social change.
Interesting discussions were held on the character of the activist research dividing between inward activities, working with for instance disadvantaged communities, and outward activities directed at the policy makers and general public, publicizing the issues at hand. But also, about the interrelatedness of activism and research and the somewhat artificial analytical division between them.
In the discussions, our team members questioned the term ‘activist research’ as it focuses primarily on the positionality of the activist researcher (and its authenticity), instead of concentrating on the process of doing research together in different forms, focusing on the process of knowledge production. We called for a new terminology, but did not arrive at any new suggestions. Not quite yet. Establishing a new concept takes time, and will be a work in progress that our team devotes to in the closest future.
On the first day, Dominika Polanska delivered a key-note speech on her research about her research on tenants mobilizations in Sweden and her experiences with collaborative research.
The final day of the conference saw the launch of a freshly released book, the Research Handbook on Urban Sociology, to which several members of the team have contributed. Luca Sára Bródy took part and presented her chapter on the rescaling of citizen participation in urban regeneration, and how the structure-agency debate informs its complexity. After a short introduction by Miguel A. Martínez, the editor of the book, various authors presented their chapters and shared their theories and methods to bridge classical urban sociology with the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. Together with the audience, fruitful discussions were held about what can be considered the urban, how class struggles can be represented, and how writing in English reflects on the power relations in knowledge production.
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