Category Archives: Academia

How do we take postcolonial critique seriously from a location in the global North?

This blog has been dormant for some time. Happy to be back after a long period of parental leave, fieldwork, and a wonderful experience as a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Last week I attended a meeting of Urban Agency III: Towards a Sustainable Integration of Disciplines in Urban Studies, a scientific research network that I am part of (alongside Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Defne Kadioglu, Lorena Melgaço and Chiara Valli) through the Institute for Urban Research, IUR, at Malmö University. Urban Agency III seeks to investigate the “institutional embedding” of the discipline of urban studies across institutes in Europe and North America. The meeting was filled with interesting sessions discussing issues from “the interface between city and academia” to “collaboration and co-creation in the city.” One of the most stimulating interventions, in my view, was a presentation by two scholars who talked about how scientific networks can engage with postcolonial and comparative urbanism critiques. Two interesting questions posed to the audience were: How do scholars based in European institutes humbly try to take the postcolonial turn in urban studies seriously? Does doing urban research on European cities make you Eurocentric?

These thought-provoking questions reminded me of a workshop we had back in October at the IUR, Interrogating the South, led by the brilliant Kavita Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor in Geography and Global Development, University of East Anglia (who at that point was a Visiting Researcher at the IUR). For me, it is obvious that doing urban studies “on” European cities does not make you automatically Eurocentric since the project of postcolonizing (or provincializing) does not entail a geographical location, but a method. Drawing on Ananya Roy’s (2009) classic piece New geographies of theory, there are two contributions that have summarized this point brilliantly. The first one is by Nancy Odendaal (2021) who argues:

“Provincialising is not about rejecting Western/Northern debates, or only embracing Global South/Eastern experiences. It opens up analysis to how a phenomenon is tied to and generated by place, with a broader range of urban experiences.”

The second intervention is carried out by Lawhon et al., (2014) who state:

“… the South is not homogenous; different intellectual traditions exist throughout the global South and these can and should contribute to the development of theory from the South in different ways. This frames the “global South” as an epistemological location—rather than a geographical container—through which a provincialization of dominating theory can be crafted.”

It is necessary to stay away from the idea that the global South presumes a fixed geography—a precise location where one goes to carry out postcolonial approaches, for example. Instead, it is important to remember the “relational and on-going construction of North-South divides” that includes Imperial Souths, poor Norths, and bodies that carry the global South with them (Fonseca Alfaro, 2023). As one of the attendants argued, one can also find the postcolonial within Europe and explore the colonial remains that exist in contemporary cities.

As the discussion during the meeting moved to concrete actions, two suggestions emerged. One proposal suggested using pragmatism to respond as situations arose while a second opinion raised the issue that there is a need to create institutional space for postcoloniality. While both suggestions have their merits, I side with the second option. In my view, concrete actions that urban studies institutes based in Europe and North America could make to take postcolonial critique seriously include:

  • Ensuring curricula includes a variety of authors that describe urban experiences and processes from across the world (and not just the EuroAmerican heartland).
  • Making space for minorities in institutional spaces and teaching.
  • Enabling the interaction with institutes in the global South with, for example, Visiting Researcher schemes.
  • Acknowledging their “locus of enunciation” (i.e., location from where one speaks and produces knowledge. This includes a reflection of limitations in terms of generalizability and universalizing claims)
References

Fonseca Alfaro C (2023) Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism. Chichester: Wiley.

Lawhon M, Ernstson H and Silver J (2014) Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode 46(2). Blackwell Publishing Inc.: 497–516.

Odendaal N (2021) Everyday urbanisms and the importance of place: Exploring the elements of the emancipatory smart city. Urban Studies 58(3): 639–654.

Roy A (2009) The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory. Regional Studies 43(6): 819–830.

Featured image: Photo by USGS on Unsplash.

How can institutions help reduce precarious work conditions among early-career researchers?

I work as a postdoc at the Institute for Urban Research (IUR), a research program at Malmö University that aims to promote interdisciplinary interactions in order to increase our knowledge of the social, environmental, and economic challenges arising from urbanization processes. Despite its young age—the Institute was only formed in 2018—the IUR is a thriving center with more than 45 members working with issues from economics to urban ecology, and sustainability to mobilities. We have recently gone through a mid-term evaluation and the assessment we have received from the committee has been fantastic. The IUR is being successful at producing high quality research, securing external funding, collaborating with non-academic stakeholders, and building bridges across departments and faculties. Where the IUR is being less productive, though, is in its ability to bridge research and education. Facing what the evaluation committee, in their report, call an “administrative stalemate,” the IUR, despite strong efforts, has not been able to contribute to research-based learning as much as it could. This is not only detrimental to students, but also to early-career researchers who face a lack of opportunities to increase their pedagogical expertise and a path to permanent employment. In turn, this is counterproductive to Malmö University’s goals for high-quality education, global engagement, and internationalization. The IUR has been successful in attracting competent researchers with an international background, yet, it might have a hard time retaining them.

This is, of course, not a challenge that only Malmö University is facing. A report from the OECD (2021), Reducing the precarity of academic research careers, defines “postdoctoral researchers holding fixed-term positions without permanent or continuous employment prospects” as the “research precariat.” Conditions of precarity create uncertain work situations with risk of stress-related health problems because of high workloads and fierce competition to obtain permanent positions (Ericson, 2021). In Sweden, the research precariat faces even more challenges because career paths within academia tend to be unclear according to a report from SULF, the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers (Besançon et al., 2021). Temporary positions such as “researcher”—which is a term often used to employ postdoctoral academics—are often not part of universities’ employment regulations or appointment rules. This, in turn, brings a sense of uncertainty and muddles the path to a permanent position. SULF (2021, my translation) suggest four concrete steps to tackle this problem:

  • “Take responsibility for creating a national system for career paths in academia”
  • “Create clear career paths with transparent requirements”
  • “Include researchers in the university’s employment regulations. Researchers must be teachers”
  • “Announce employment openly and appoint them transparently in accordance with current regulations”

Transparency and more secure working conditions can only bring benefits to early-careers, but also students, research programs, and universities as a whole.

References

Featured image: “Reading List” by KJGarbutt is licensed under CC BY 2.0