Without Guarantees: A parallax view of everyday life and place-based urban political economy with Prof. Christian Anderson

Leveraging insights from feminist geography and diverse economies and cultural studies traditions, this talk will trace the contours of underrecognized but entrenched and consequential forms of labor, value, narrative, and social infrastructure—together amounting to an expanded sphere of social reproduction—in urban space. This is a conceptualization which initially emerged from an ethnography of everyday life among residents on a few blocks of a single street in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City. Published in 2020 as a book called Urbanism without Guarantees, that work explicated how ordinary people’s everyday experiences, common sensibilities, and routine practices at once reflect and buoy historically specific formations of sociality, economy, culture, and power in place. This talk will begin with an overview of core concepts from that work, then sketching out some possible ways those concepts might be made generative in and through the example of collaborative place-based oral history and critical humanities projects aimed at confronting inequitable urban development and displacement in Seattle, Washington.