240527 SE The City and its Discontents (P4) (2022S)

City life is regulated by various ideas, norms, rules, and projects. This class will focus on how these ideas, norms, and rules are politically and legally contested by a myriad of actors and institutions operating at different scales. We will use sites of contention as lenses to look into the complex entanglements between power, inequality, rights, and legality and the interconnected relations of dispossession and accumulation in cities. Who owns the cities? Who moves in the city? Who has the right to be represented, and how? Who are the actors that contest and challenge the status quo in cities? Through which methods and discourses? With such questions, the course intends to foster a critical engagement with the role of law in urban politics in both preserving and contesting inequalities and the relations between right-claiming and city-making.

The sources we discuss vary from sociology and history, ethnography, political economy, and geography. In the end, students will reflect on the potential of an anthropological perspective to analyze the contention and the discourses around the right to the city.

At the end of the course, the students will

1) Gain theoretical insight about the concepts of “right to the city” and “political contention,”
2) Be reflexive about how they can put law and legality to work in their urban research agenda in a critical and empirically grounded way to identify and understand the actors of political contention,
3) Advance their own research agendas through readings, presentations, and in-class discussion of personal projects.