Insurgent Practices in the Planetary City, SOAS, University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2015-10-22

http://www.soas.ac.uk/development/

This presentation titled "Insurgent Practices in the Planetary City: Post-Politicization and the Spectre of the Political" was given by Professor Erik Swyngedouw, Manchester University as part of the Globalisation Lectures at SOAS, University of London on 12 October 2015.

Since 2011, a seemingly never ending proliferation of urban rebellions sparked off by a variety of conditions and unfolding against the backdrop of very different historical and geographical contexts profoundly disturbed the apparently cosy neoliberal status-quo and disquieted various economic and political elites. It is precisely the aftermath of such urban insurrections that provides the starting point for the arguments developed in this presentation.  I proceed in four steps. First, I discuss the contested configurations of the processes of post-democratization. In a second part, I propose a series of theoretical and political arguments that help frame the evacuation of the properly political from the spaces of post-democratic policy negotiation on the one hand and the spectral re-emergence of the political on the other. In the concluding part, perspectives for re-vitalising the political possibilities of a spatialized emancipatory project are presented.

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography in the School of Education, Environment and Development at Manchester University. He was previously professor of geography at Oxford University and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at Science Po, Paris, 2014. He recently co-edited (with J. Willson) The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spectres of Radical Politics Today (Edinburg University Press, 2014). His new book with MIT-Press, Liquid Power, focuses on water and social power in 20th century Spain.

http://www.soas.ac.uk/development/events/globalisation/