Colloquium: Sophie Oldfield
Tuesday, 24th September 2019, at 17.15 - 18.30
ETH Zurich, UNO B 11, Universitätstrasse 41
High stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theory in Partnership
"High Stakes, High Hopes" reflects on a decade-long research and teaching partnership, a collaborative process through which members of a township civic organization in Cape Town and Prof. Sophie Oldfield have researched the city together. In the paper, examine the ways in which our partnership opens up provocative conversations on everyday urbanism. The argument unfolds in narratives and stories, which bring into view the partnership and its practices. Narratives open up the collaborative process, the forms of expertise in the Civic and in the university on which it builds, and their synthesis in the substance of the urban theory we produce. Anecdotal, ordinary, grounded, they become portals to theorize the city,able to move between university and neighbourhood. In the partnership’s methodologies and epistemologies, I argue, are high hopes for creating disciplinary forms of knowledge embedded in the city’s multiple publics and politics, everyday struggles, and their contradictions and possibilities.
About Prof. Sophie Oldfield
Trained in the United States (PhD, University of Minnesota), Sophie Oldfield holds the University of Cape Town–University of Basel Professorship in Urban Studies, based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She is internationally recognised as an urban geographer for research on Cities in the Global South through her theoretical and primary research, and as co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (2014). Her research is grounded in empirical and epistemological questions central to urban theory. Focusing on housing, informality and governance, mobilising and social movement organising, and urban politics, she pays close attention to political practice and everyday urban geographies, analysing the ways in which citizens and organized movements craft agency to engage and contest the state. She has a track record of excellence in collaborative research practice, challenging how academics work in and between "university" and "community". Commitment to this collaborative approach lies at the heart of her research and writing on cities of the global south.
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