Lumpen-City

CFP: Interdisciplinary Conference at York University, Toronto, Canada
March 12-13, 2009

Lumpen-City:
Discourses of Marginality | Marginalizing Discourses

Research on marginalized urban residents has been an academic cottage industry throughout the history of the social sciences ? addressing social problems related to issues such as poverty, crime, youth, race, ethnicity, gender, health, and employment. To apprehend these notions of difference, conceptualizations of the poor, the underclass, the outcast, the ghetto, exclusion, marginality and others have been developed and applied. Inevitably, research defines and represents a group and as such influences everyday preconceptions and politico-administrative strategies, including policies, regulations and laws.

Contextualizing cultural and behavioural patterns of marginalized populations, academic and activist research commonly seeks to humanize an excluded group and/ or suggest alternative strategies of intervention and modes of engagement by which to remedy the inequities of a particular situation. However, by virtue of representation fixity is imposed upon the identified population. Marginalized and excluded groups are often rendered vulnerable and passive through the circumscribed dictates of representational inscription. How can innovative and creative discourses break with this pattern of
subjection?

This conference challenges academics and activist-scholars alike to reflect upon the realities and potentialities of research on marginalized urban populations in the context of their struggles. We invite scholarly contributions which illuminate issues of representation by exploring multiple axes of identity such as class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, ability / disability, and sexuality.

The York University Sociology Graduate Students' Association (YSGA) in conjunction with the City Institute at York University and the Collaborative Urban Research Laboratory (CURL) invite academics and activist-scholars to participate in the interdisciplinary debates of this conference on Thursday, March 12th and Friday, March 13th 2009 in Toronto, Canada.

We accept proposals for:
- Academic papers (Presentation of 20 minutes)
- Short films, art, poetry or other forms of creative dialogue.

The deadline for proposals / abstracts (approx. 250 words) is December 15th. Submission materials and general inquiries should be addressed to: LumpenCity2009@gmail.com

Selected papers will be considered for publication.

Travel bursaries may be available.

For updates, please see www.lumpencity.com

Possible areas of engagement include, but are not limited to:

1. Methodological engagements:

The poetics and politics of representation
Comparing marginality across borders & boundaries
The description, inscription, and circumscription of research design
Ethnographic immersions
Activist alliances
Methodological alterities: Narratives of inversion/subversion

2. Institutional interrogations:

Local, extra-local, regional, national, international contextualizations
Welfare state retrenchment and visions of poverty
The funding and financing of research
Fashions, fads and foibles of urban research
Re-structuring the university
University-community collaborations

3. Controversies and Contestations:

Spectacularization of the urban outcast
Spaces of Struggle: Neoliberal citizenship and representations of
urban marginality
Post/Colonialism and the metropolis
The Unrepresentable Multitude in the Lumpen-City
Public sociology / sociologies
The marginalized and media discourse

4. Challenges and Change:

The role of activism in academia
Critique and the public sphere
Research, resistance and revolution
Envisioning the just city: claiming the right to the city
Social movements, citizenship and critical urban praxis
Progressive visual and aesthetic engagements