Theory in Crisis seminar - AbdouMaliq Simone

What is the role of critical theory today and who is it for? What kind of maps can theory provide in the context of entrenched capitalist crisis? These are some of the questions posed by this seminar series.

In this session, AbdouMaliq Simone will give a talk titled ‘At the Extensions: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture’:

Urbanization proceeds unabated as a process of incessant articulation, of crafting entangled relations among heterogeneous geographies, modalities of making and taking, and practices of making sense of things. More urban inhabitants are living and operating within extended regions of cities, extensions which do not replicate the form of the city and become volatile zones of both operable and inoperable relations--in other words, confluences of forces and ways of doing things both calculable and existing under the radar.

What are these extensions, overdetermined with countervailing histories and logics, and what do they have to say about ways of living excessive of being framed, not necessarily in the imaginations of liberation, but prefiguring of something else besides the stultifying controls and extractions imposed in the name of life's prolongation?

Speaker
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), 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, (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.