Ordinary Imperatives: migration "within" social change

IMES lecture

Lecture

This lecture explores the accelerated pace of societal transformation intrinsic to twenty-first century mobility through conceptualising its ordinary unfolding. We will focus on how urban societies are diversifying through the mixings of people and spaces that are integral to contemporary processes of movement and exchange.

We will further pursue how the ‘ordinary’ offers a frame for comprehending migration “within”: as a change process emerging within society, rather than as an external force assaulted on national integrity from the outside.

In opposition to a political-economic nexus that generates an ‘unfreedom’ founded on economic requirements for migrant labour and political requirements to be seen to preserve national identity, we will turn to the ordinary as the everyday practice of social reconfiguration within an era of heightened global migration and urbanisation.

We will engage with two critical framings of the ordinary: the ‘ordinary city’ and ‘ordinary resistance’, expanding urban conviviality from a cultural to a political prospect.

About Suzanne Hall

Dr. Suzanne Hall is an urban ethnographer at the London School of Economics and has practised as an architect in South Africa. She is currently leading the ‘Ordinary Streets’ research project, a visual and ethnographic exploration of the economies and cultures of street in the context of urban migrations.From 1997 to 2003 Suzanne Hall established a practice that focused on the role of design in rapidly urbanising, poor and racially segregated areas in Cape Town and her work has been published and exhibited internationally.

Hall teaches primarily in the Cities Programme within the Department of Sociology and is a Research Fellow in ‘Cities, Space and Society’ at LSE Cities. Her research and teaching interests are foregrounded in local expressions of global urbanisation, particularly social and spatial forms of inclusion and exclusion, urban multiculture, urban migration, the design of the city, and ethnography and visual methods. 

Registration

There are limited places. Please register with Helena Uzelac (h.uzelac@uva.nl)