The Politics of Inhabitation
Organized
The Series of seminars "The camp: researching violence, exclusion and temporariness" are part of the Urban and Regional Development PhD program and are organized by Prof. Camillo Boano
Seminar description
The figure of the camp towers over our present. Our planners find it indispensable. Our political grammar finds it unavoidable. Our very conceptions of “the city,” and its once stable inside/outside demarcations, find its challenge insuperable. Camps are no longer temporary sites of emergency management. They are a global logic of government, an enduring colonial technology at the heart of the response to the climate/border crisis. Taking up the example of the Palestinian refugee camp, this article argues that camps no longer teach us anything about legal exceptions; rather they underline the politics of inhabitation. Camps enact the collapse of the separation between life and politics by making the very fact of inhabitation in itself the basis of both political control and contestation.
Speaker
Nasser Abourahme is a Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, New York, where he works between political geography and colonial studies. He is the author of several important publications on camps in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, City, IJURR, and Public Culture.
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Seminar series description
The camp is emerging at the crossroads of urban studies, architecture, geography, anthropology and humanitarian practice, reflecting both the spatialisation of biopolitics and the urbanization of emergency. Camp studies have expanded recently and have been codified merging humanitarian practice with various urban dimensions, putting knowledge, protocols in crisis.
This seminar series "The camp: researching violence, exclusion and temporariness" is intended to offer a reflection on the dispositif of the camp reflecting on the tensions between permanence and temporariness, exception and normalization, politicization and depoliticization. The below series of seminars are part of the Urban and Regional Development PhD program but open to everyone who wish to attend and contribute and are set out to initiate a collective and transdisciplinary discussion to engage in such specific site of enquiry, struggle and subjectivation. Registration is needed.
Seminar series program
12.01.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
The politics of inhabitation
Nasser Abourahme | Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University, NY, US
19.01.21 | 14.30 - 17.30 (GMT + 1)
Refugee Heritage
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti | DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research)
26.01.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
Spatial violations: reflections on socio-spatial practices inside Palestinian camps
Samar Maqusi | University College London, UK
09.02.21 | 14.00 - 17.00 (GMT + 1)
Talking camps: space, community and ‘the urban’
Wan Sophonpanich | Global CCM Cluster Coordinator, International Organisation for Migration
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To join the class
camillo.boano@polito.it
- Seminar "The Politics of Inhabitation" - Flyer
(646 KB) - Series of seminars "The camp: researching violence, exclusion and temporariness" - Flyer (625 KB)