Spring 2019 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment: "Locating Politics"

Nasser Abourahme and Noam Shoked, Princeton Mellon Fellows

"Locating Politics" takes up the rise and fall of recent uprisings as a springboard for examining a broader inventory and longer trajectory of spaces of contestation. We question the historical and emergent topologies of politics and their changing relations to race, migration, indigeneity, coloniality, and crisis. We ask how histories of sites of conflict, ranging from houses and streets to camps and prisons, might offer us not just understandings of different locations of politics, but of the overturning and re-bounding of the very limits of the political. The term location suggests both place (locus) and relational position, and it is to this intersection that this Forum speaks—where and with whom do we act politically today?