17th – 18th January, 2018,
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
Professor Ananya Roy, The Institute on Inequality and Democracy, University of California, Los Angeles
Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality
and Democracy at UCLA Luskin.
She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of
California, Berkeley, where she founded and played a leadership role in several academic programs, centers, and divisions,
including Urban Studies, Global Metropolitan Studies, International and Area Studies, Blum Center for Developing Economies, and
Global Poverty and Practice. At UC Berkeley, Ananya held the Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice and prior to
that, the Friesen Chair in Urban Studies.
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Racial banishment: Old and new forms of urban transformation in the United States
Distinguished International Visiting Fellow Lecture
5pm, Thursday 18th January, 2018
Large Lecture Theatre, Department of Geography, Downing Site
Cities such as Los Angeles have long been structured through technologies of spatial exclusion and frontiers of urban displacement. Yet, social movements on the current frontlines of urban struggle insist that new types of violence are afoot. Rejecting the standard vocabularies of urban studies, such as gentrification and neoliberalism, they call attention to processes of racial banishment. In this talk, Professor Roy will detail key elements of racial banishment and indicate how urban transformation is articulated with necropolitics, including mass incarceration. Thinking from Los Angeles, she will argue that what is at stake is not only a more robust analysis of urban transformations but also attention to the various forms of urban politics that are challenging racial capitalism.
Lecture – poster
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Postcolonial theory and the project of urban studies
Distinguished International Visiting Fellow Seminar
4.15pm, Wednesday 17th January, 2018
Small Lecture Theatre, Department of Geography, Downing Site
In previous work, Professor Roy made the case for the relevance of postcolonial theory in the reconstruction of urban studies. That reconstruction requires tackling the epistemological persistence of Eurocentrism in the production of conceptual categories and the deployment of modes of universalization. In this seminar, Professor Roy will seek to continue such dialogues by pinpointing key aspects of Eurocentric thought as whiteness. At a historical moment of resurgent white supremacy, she will examine the debates about this form of disciplinary power and its effects. Specifically, she suggests that postcolonial theory and critical race studies, especially when read together, can challenge the proprietary prerogatives of whiteness and make possible a different ontology of theorization and a different history of knowledge.
Seminar – poster
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