AbdouMaliq Simone: “Black Urbanism: Life at the Extensions”

AbdouMaliq Simone will be giving a free lecture on August 18th as part of SMR's Open Seminar Series for August-September 2022 entitled: “Black Urbanism: Life at the Extensions” You can register for his talk on our Eventrbrite page here: https://tinyurl.com/d5wjpnb8

AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Key publications include, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, Duke University Press, 2004, and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads: Routledge, 2009, Jakarta: Drawing the City Near: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, Polity (with Edgar Pieterse, Polity 2017), Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance for an Urban South (Polity 2018), and The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Simone has worked for a wide range of multilateral institutions and NGOs specializing in urban development, as well as holding academic appointments at Medgar Evers College, the University of Khartoum, Cape Coast University, Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg), the New School, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. For decades he has travelled across the world working with various municipalities, research groups and social movements on issues of urban transformation.

The School of Materialist Research hosts seminars on original content engaging materialist thought and practice across the humanities, arts, and sciences. Topics covered in the seminars range from contemporary philosophical, political, and scientific materialisms, and the various ecological, aesthetic, and feminist materialisms that have sprung up in the last few decades, to the material challenges and possibilities confronting engineering and design on a planetary scale (through the distributed practices of computing, finance, urbanization, etc.), especially the host of geopolitical, racial, and ecological asymmetries that emerge in their wake. The seminars, therefore, embrace a full range of methodologies—philosophical, artistic, empirical, ethnographic, etc.—and offer a platform for showcasing research and experimentation on the many complexities of materialist thought and practice today.