Liza Weinstein: Illegal by Degree: Legal Exclusion and Crisis in Mumbai’s Slum Settlements
Thursday, July 23, 2020 @6pm Beirut (GMT +3)
Register here!
Illegal by Degree: Legal
Exclusion and Crisis in Mumbai’s Slum Settlements
Liza Weinstein, Associate
Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University
Discussants:
Hiba Bou
Akar, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.
Michele
Lancione, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
Session Chair:
Mona Harb, Professor
of Urban Studies and Politics
Bios
Liza Weinstein is an Associate Professor
of Sociology and the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Northeastern University in Boston. An expert on the politics of housing and
urban development in India, she is the author of The Durable Slum:
Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai(University of
Minnesota Press, 2014) and is currently completing a comparative study of
evictions and anti-eviction activism across urban India. Her work has been
published in Politics and Society, City and Community,
and International Sociology, and numerous edited collections. She
is also the editor of the Interventions section of the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is a member of the
Displacement Research and Action Network.
Hiba Bou Akar is an Assistant Professor
at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
at Columbia University. Her recent book, "For the War Yet
to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers" (2018),
examines how Beirut's post-civil war peripheries have been
transformed through multiple planning exercises into
contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of
conflict. Her first co-edited book, "Narrating Beirut from its
Borderlines" (2011), incorporated ethnographic and archival
research with art installations, architecture, graphic design, and
photography to explore Beirut’s segregated geographies. She is
currently leading the Post-Conflict Cities Lab at Columbia
University. Bou Akar received her PhD. in City and Regional
Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a
Bachelor of Architecture from AUB and a Master's in Urban Studies
and Planning from MIT.
Michele Lancione is an urban ethnographer
and activist interested in issues of marginality, diversity, and radical
politics. His most recent writing has focused on homelessness, racialized
displacement and underground life in Bucharest, Romania, where he also directed
a collaborative documentary around forced evictions and housing resistance (www.ainceputploaia.com). Michele is member of
the Common Front for the Right to Housing (FCDL), and corecipient of two
Antipode Awards (‘Scholar-Activist’ in 2018, with FCDL; ‘International
Workshop’ in 2019, with RHJ). He is also one of the founders and Editors of the
open-source Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an Editor of City,
and Corresponding Editor for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the
Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), where he is commencing work on a
5-year European Research Council funded program on ‘Radical Housing’. You can
get in touch @michelelancione
Mona Harb is Professor
of Urban Studies and Politics, and co-director of the Beirut Urban Lab at
the American University of Beirut. She is the author of "Le Hezbollah à
Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville" (Karthala-IFPO, 2010),
co-author of "Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in
Shi'ite South Beirut" (Princeton University Press, 2013, with L.
Deeb,), co-editor of "Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing
Decentralization in the Arab World" (LCPS, 2015, with S. Atallah),
and co-editor of "Refugees as City-Makers" (AUB, 2018, with
M. Fawaz, A. Gharbieh and D. Salamé), in addition to numerous
journal articles, book chapters, and other publications. Her ongoing
research investigates urban vacancies and public life,
local governance and displacement, and urban activism and
oppositional politics. She serves on the editorial boards of MELG, IJMES, IJURR,
and Environment and Planning C, and is a trustee of the Arab
Council for the Social Sciences. She founded the Cities Page on Jadaliyya e-zine,
where she is also an editor.