About

Insurgent Spatial Practices gathers an interdisciplinary group of academics, activists, artists, and a diversity of urban dwellers to generate an alternative more political, democratic, and creative engagement with a variety of urban spaces of different scales in diverse contexts.

We understand critical thinking and insurgency as vital for democratic societies. As insurgency often aims to create a better world and enact everyday utopias, we believe that insurgent spatial practices help continuously scrutinize urban processes and help re-imagine and re-invent the city. By using the term insurgent we want to underline the political practices that may not seem political at all in the first place. At the same time, we want to build bridges for understanding even radical insurgent practices as important parts of urban realities.

Research

As researchers, we aim to engage in and with insurgent spatial practices in order to generate a theoretical understanding of their variegated forms, drivers, and meanings and begin to envision more sustainable urban futures and democratic spatial practices. Our research is mobilized by liberatory epistemologies, different qualitative methodologies, and theories emerging from different parts of our cosmopolitan world.

Education

As educators, we aim to explore with our students the meaning of insurgent spatial practices, their political qualities, and their potential to mobilize change. We employ situated, embodied, and embedded forms of teaching and learning, encourage critical thinking, discussion, and reflexivity, and promote active, engaged, political, and transgressive scholarship as well as citizenship.

Art

As artists, we aim to generate a creative dialogue with space and help restore the relationship between body and space through performative, visual, and textual modalities and media deploying playful, experiential, and potentially subversive tactics.

Citizenship

As urban dwellers, we aim to support insurgent spatial practices, including urban social movements and urban activisms, to voice their demands, appropriate urban space, create networks of support and action and challenge established power dynamics manifested and deployed in urban space.