Connecting Concrete and Abstract

Conversations on Urban Revolution Inspired by Henri Lefebvre

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The State and Everyday Life

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Stuart
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Connecting Concrete and Abstract Colloquium #1

The State and Everyday Life
Stanley Aronowitz, CUNY Graduate Center
Neil Brenner, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Friday, February 10, 2:00pm
Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York NY 10003

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Historicizing Space

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Stuart
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Connecting Concrete and Abstract Colloquium #2

Historicizing Space
Manu Goswami, NYU Department of History
Kristin Ross, NYU Department of Comparative Literature

Tuesday, March 6, 5:00pm
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
New York NY 10003

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Hegemony and Resistance

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Stuart
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Connecting Concrete and Abstract Colloquium #3

Hegemony and Resistance
Stefan Kipfer, York University Faculty of Environmental Studies
René Francisco Poitevin, NYU Gallatin School

Monday, April 9th, 5:00pm
Institute for Public Knowledge

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The Built Environment

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Stuart
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Connecting Concrete and Abstract Colloquium #4

The Built Environment
Łukasz Stanek, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery
Alejandro Velasco, NYU Gallatin School

Wednesday, April 25th, 5:00pm
Institute for Public Knowledge

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“Events belie forecasts”

The last twelve months have witnessed political upheaval on a global scale. From the Arab Spring to the European Summer to the American Fall, cities have been at the center of popular struggles, raising the prospect of worldwide urban revolution. The closest precedent to the current conjuncture is the global revolution of 1968, which led the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre to reinvent his social theory with urbanization at the center. Henceforth, the politics of space defined his ongoing investigation of the abstractions of capital and the state and the concrete everyday struggles that oppose them. In the past decade a wave of radical scholarship has reassessed Lefebvre’s thought and pushed it in new directions. At the same time, contemporary politics are almost unrecognizable from the perspective of 1968. What can we appropriate from Lefebvre to make sense of current events, and how are we forced to rethink our inherited research strategies?

Throughout spring 2012 the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Program in Metropolitan Studies at NYU are staging conversations between leading scholars of the state, space, and everyday life whose own work has been inspired by Lefebvre. The conversations will be wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, like Lefebvre’s oeuvre itself, with the goal of providing new ideas, agendas, and concrete methodological practices for scholars and activists in these unsettled times.

Sponsors

  • Institute for Public Knowledge
  • Program in Metropolitan Studies, NYU

Fellow Travelers and Friends

  • Brecht Forum
  • Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, CUNY
  • Henri Lefebvre Today
  • People's University in Washington Square

Journals and blogs

  • Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
  • City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action
  • Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
  • Human Geography: A New Radical Journal
  • International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
  • Progressive Geographies
  • Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
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