Rethinking Urban Global Justice: An
international academic conference for critical urban studies
Open Session 11:15 – 12:45 /
Exhibition Hall:
Liquid Cities? Exploring
Zygmunt Bauman’s Contribution to Urban Studies.
Distinguished social theorist and
longtime Professor of Sociology at University of Leeds, Zygmunt Bauman passed
away aged 91 earlier this year.
The founding director of University
of Leeds Bauman Institute, Mark Davis leads a discussion with
colleagues (Adrian Favell, Thomas Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński and Rodanthi Tzanelli) from the School of Sociology and Social Policy about Bauman’s legacy to the field.
Link to presentation by Rodanthi
Tzanelli
13 September 2017
Abstract
Bauman’s
legacy in urban studies has a distinctive political flair that connects to his
critique of the ways urban strangers (tourists, migrants, vagabonds and
pilgrims) become socially positioned, ‘interpellated’ or represented by various
constituencies and groups (including researchers).
I
argue that his reference to ways of seeing as political tools does not
compromise his analysis of liquid urbanism as an aesthetic project, but works
politics and aesthetics into a distinctive proposition on the ‘right to the
city’ for all. This proposition forms (in the tradition of Simmel’s sociology),
a moral basis for which cognitive and affective ambivalences function as
epistemological tools.
