Call for Abstracts at the RC21 meeting in Rabat 2025
As part of the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology “Knowing Justice in the Anthropocene” held in Rabat, Morocco from 6-11 July 2025, the Research Committee 21 on Regional and Urban Development (RC21) is organizing 28 panel sessions on a variety of urban themes, listed here.
BUL co-director Mona Harb is co-organizing with colleagues Sarah El Kazaz (SOAS) and Rafeef Ziadeh (King’s College London) a session entitled:
“(Un)Commoning amid Disruptions and Disasters: Insights from South-West Asia and North Africa Cities.”
The call for abstracts is below.
Panel Description
Cities and regions are shaped and disrupted by many forces related to the Anthropocene (disasters, climate change), as well as state structures (settler-colonialism, apartheid), political systems (authoritarianism, sectarianism, oligarchies), market structures (capitalism, growth/rent economies), international aid programs and mobilities. These disruptions often rely on strategies of wars/conflicts, financialization, privatization, land grabbing, gentrification, extraction and rent-seeking. They generate a range of adverse effects on cities and regions: crises, forced displacement/migration, unemployment, demographic shifts, ecological degradation, impoverishment and precarity. Yet, cities and regions are also shaped by collective actions, struggles and/or resistant ecologies seeking emancipation and justice (Nucho 2021, Swilling 2020, Lipietz and Bhan 2022, Foster and Iaione 2019, Borch and Kornberger 2015), whereby people organize to imagine, co-produce, and advance rights to urban, infrastructural or data commons—even imperfectly and transiently.
In this panel, we invite papers examining forces of disruption reconfiguring power and governance modalities in cities and regions and/or exploring commoning efforts and experiments, and their propensity to be co-opted, canceled, subverted and/or un-commoned by political, aid, or market systems.
We invite interested scholars and practitioners to share with their networks and/or consider sending an abstract to our session. The abstract can be submitted through this link. Guidelines for abstract submission and other details can be found here. The deadline for abstract submission is on 15 October 2024.
Cited references:
Borch, C., & Kornberger, M. (Eds.). (2015). Urban commons: Rethinking the city. Routledge.
Foster, S. R., & Iaione, C. (2019). “Ostrom in the City: Design Principles and Practices for the Urban Commons.” In Hudson B. et al. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons (pp. 235-255). Routledge.
Lipietz, B., & Bhan, G. (2022). “Commoning.” In GOLD VI: Pathways to Urban and Territorial Equality, Barcelona: UCLG.
Nucho J., (2022), “Social Class, Urban Space and Sect,” in Deeb L., Nalbantian T. and Sbaiti N. (Eds.), Practicing Sectarianism. Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon, Stanford University Press.
Swilling M., (2020), The Age of Sustainability. Just Transitions in a Complex World. Routledge.