About this Event
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MOVING THROUGH ENTROPIC TIMES: RUBBLE, REFUSAL, AND
REGENERATION
It feels impossible not to be consumed with melancholia, outrage and disappointment in the face of overlapping injustices, violence, and frightening political and ecological collapse everywhere one looks. How then do we hold onto a modicum of hope as we navigate the classroom, our field-sites, and reflect on the meaning of what we do? This talk builds on a piece written during the Covid-19 pandemic, “Beyond Repair: Staying with Break-down at the interstices”. Here, I reflect on what it means to move through the break-down, to think about the generative moves that work with entropic times of disorder and uncertainty. I ground the discussion by reflecting on recent events in Nairobi, Kenya, that echo wider politics of climate injustice and urban removal, political uprising, and quiet ecological encroachments. This rebel city brings together outrage, joyful militancy, and a hustle urbanism that is underpinned by a politics of hope and collective struggle amidst the breakdown; a politics that we could think with as we try to grapple with entropic times and troubles elsewhere.
Tatiana Thieme is an urban ethnographer and Associate Professor based at University College London in the Department of Geography. Tatiana draws together her training in dance, anthropology, and geography (from Cornell University, LSE, and University of Cambridge) to study the social, economic, ecological and cultural lives of young people navigating precarious urban environments. Tatiana’s primary field-site is Nairobi, Kenya, where she has been conducting on-going research in popular neighbourhoods since 2009. Her secondary field-sites are Paris and Berlin where she has worked on grassroots migrant solidarities since 2017, and London where she has studied the porosity of carceral spaces. She has published in various journals and has a forthcoming monograph (Spring 2025), titled Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi, with University of Minnesota Press.
Image credit: © "musings in sketch form" - by Tatiana Thieme
Organised by
The event is funded by the European Research Council Inhabiting Radical Housing project (n. 851940, PI: Lancione).
It is also supported by DIST (Polytechnic and University of Turin), DINAMIA’CET-ISCTE (Lisbon University Institute), the ICS (University of Lisbon) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Castello del Valentino, 39 Viale Pier Andrea Mattioli, Torino, Italy
USD 0.00
