Registration now open for online attendance at two keynote lectures given by Professor Patricia Noxolo, Chair in Postcolonial Geographies, University of Birmingham, and Dr Austin Zeiderman, Associate Professor of Geography, London School of Economics

As part of the Urban Institute's Sheffield School on the politics, spirits and technics of urban inhabitation, led by Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, the keynotes will launch a series of dialogues bringing together a wide range of actors drawn from different disciplines, sectors and walks of life to explore the tangles among different dispositions of territory, temporality, blackness, and emerging commons and collective life.

Patricia Noxolo - Quantum Black Geographies: Urban entanglements with/in a climate-changed earth

Quantum physics is both entangled with (post)colonial genocides and, I will argue, a means of envisaging Black life otherwise in urban space.  Working through the writing of Michelle Wright and Karen Barad, as well as Pat’s previous work on entanglements and on Black Geographies, this paper considers the ways in which working against the imperialist roots of quantum physics, but working with its uncertainties, connectedness and materialised liveliness, can help us push towards forms of political realisation and spiritual transcendence that take concrete forms in the city.  The paper considers this quantum-informed Blackness as deeply entangled urban spaces with/in a climate-changed earth.

Austin Zeiderman - Alterlogistics

This talk explores two sites for thinking about the infrastructures of circulation vital to the contemporary global order: riverboats moving cargo along the waterways of northern Colombia and the popular districts bordering the port of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast. The first provides a window onto the navigation techniques of river captains and pilots, and their entanglement with the pervasive inequalities of Colombian society and of the logistics industry in which they work. The second foregrounds a popular cultural phenomenon called picó, which is equally embedded within transnational networks of shipping and the regimes of racial-and-spatial difference inherent to them. Both sites enable an appreciation for how people whose lives and livelihoods are deeply entangled with logistics mobilize socio-technical practices to ensure their survival, defend their autonomy, or assert their personhood. These practices do not escape the grip of racial capitalism and its predatory and extractivist logics, but rather maneuver within its gaps and fissures. Neither in opposition to nor captured by, neither in defiance of nor subsumed within, somewhere between the poles of logistics and counterlogistics—this is the muddled and murky world of alterlogistics.

Following the first dialogue in Sheffield, further dialogues will take place in Turin (Italy), Santiago (Chile), Chennai (India), and El Alto (Bolivia) during the coming months.

If you would like to know more about the dialogues, please contact urban.institute@sheffield.ac.uk