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Just as neoliberal policy has unquestionably conditioned a wide range of urban transformations since the 1970s, cities themselves have provided essential sites for the ongoing construction—and contestation—of neoliberalism as a political project.
To mark the ten-year anniversary of Spaces of Neoliberalism, a path-breaking volume that grew out of a conference at UIC to influence a broad program of scholarship, please join us to revisit the evolving times and spaces of neoliberal urbanism.
The book’s editors and contributors will join scholars from other fields to discuss their own work and to reflect on a decade of research.
Day 1- Friday April 27, 2012
Jane Addams Hull House800 S Halsted
Chicago, IL 60607
10:00 a.m. Welcome
10:30- 12:00 p.m. Panel #1
- Nik Theodore (UIC)
- Neil Brenner (Harvard)
- Jamie Peck (University of British Columbia)
12.00-12:30 p.m. Lunch
12:30-2:30 p.m. Panel #2
- Andy Clarno (UIC)
- Claire Laurier Decoteau (UIC)
- Cedric Johnson (UIC)
- Robert Fairbanks (UC)
4:00 p.m. Reception at Jack’s Tab
901 W. Jackson
Day 2- Saturday, April 28, 2012 (Student Session)
*Please note that Saturday event is only open to UIC students
400 S Peoria (4th floor)
Chicago, IL 60607
- Nik Theodore (UIC)
- Neil Brenner (Harvard)
- Jamie Peck (University of British Columbia)
10:00 a.m. Breakfast
10:15 a.m. Open Discussion (Q&A)
12:30 p.m. End
This event is free and open to the UIC community, but as space is limited we are asking everyone to RSVP with your name, contact info and details of the date(s) you are planning to join us (Friday, Saturday or both dates). You can RSVP by emailing neoliberalurbanism@gmail.com or calling/texting Ivis Garcia at (312) 996-6671.
Neil Brenner
Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the coordinator of the newly founded Urban Theory Lab GSD. Brenner’s writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions. His work builds upon, and seeks to extend, the fields of critical urban and regional studies, comparative geopolitical economy and radical sociospatial theory. Major research foci include processes of urban and regional restructuring and uneven spatial development; the generalization of capitalist urbanization; and processes of state spatial restructuring, with particular reference to the remaking of urban, metropolitan and regional governance configurations under contemporary neoliberalizing capitalism. For more info
Jamie Peck
Jamie Peck is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Peck’s works in the style of institutional political economy, on a range of issues relating to economic geography, urban restructuring, and state transformation. Much of his research is concerned with the ways in which ostensibly global processes for example, forms of market-oriented governance (a.k.a. neoliberalization) are (re)remade through local sites and grounded practices. Ongoing projects include: (a) outsourcing expertise, a study of offshoring practices as a managerial technology; (b) policies without borders, tracing vectors of fast policy in globalizing urban governance and social welfare; and (c) remaking the Vancouver model, a critical analysis of the city's evolving development agenda." For more info
Nik Theodore
Nik Theodore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Theodore’s research agenda is focused on problems of socioeconomic inequality arising from the restructuring of urban economies. Grounded in community development practice, his research seeks to combine primary data collection and analysis, policy assessment and evaluation, and theory-building to illuminate the complex (and often contradictory) processes that give rise to economic hardship in urban communities. For more info
Andy Clarno
Andy Clarno is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Clarno’s research focuses include globalization and empire, urban and political sociology of Africa and the Middle East, race and ethnicity, and nationalism and state formation. In 2011 he won the Civic Engagement Research Award for his National Science Foundation-funded research on the “Interplay between Public and Private Actors in Shaping Local Immigration.” For the 2011-12 year Clarno has received a Russell Sage Foundation grant for his research entitled “New Destinations in an Old Gateway.” In addition to these prestigious grants, Clarno has published extensively in journals and book chapters. With his expertise in race relations, Clarno has been invited to numerous conferences and presentations across the country for segregation and border politics issues. For more info
Claire Laurier Decoteau
As an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Decoteau teaches undergraduate and graduate sociological theory as well as courses in the sociology of health and medicine. Broadly, her research focuses on the social construction of health and disease, health inequalities, and peoples’ grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, entitled Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in formal and informal settlements on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the project analyzes: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle over the signification of HIV/AIDS taking place in the public sphere, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. For more info
Cedric Johnson
Cedric G. Johnson is Associate Professor of African American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalist Culture and the Remaking of New Orleans (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2011). He was a recipient of the 2008 W.E.B. DuBois Outstanding Book Award at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and received nominations for the 2008 Ralph Bunch Book Award and the 2009 J. David Greenstone Award. Johnson also has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and reviews, and essays concerning the topics of racial and gender politics. For more info
Robert Fairbanks
Robert Fairbanks is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration. His fields of interest include urban ethnography, urban studies, welfare state theory, and critical social policy analysis. At SSA, Professor Fairbanks teaches courses on urban poverty, the political economy of urban development, and the history and philosophy of the welfare state. Professor Fairbanks' research focuses on the ways in which informal poverty survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the political economy of cities. His most recent book, "How it Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia" (University of Chicago Press, 2009), is an ethnographic project that examines how unlicensed, unregulated drug and alcohol recovery houses operate as street-level anti-poverty strategies and mechanisms of governmentality in postindustrial Philadelphia. He is also working on a co-edited project titled, "Critical ethnography in the neoliberal city" which will first appear as a special issue of Ethnography. For more info
For more info email neoliberalurbanism@gmail.com or call Ivis Garcia at (312) 996-6671.
Sponsors:
College of Urban Planning PhD Students
Great Cities Institute
Department of Urban Planning and Policy
Urban Planning and Policy Student Organization
Sociology Graduate Student Association
Student Activities Funding Committee
Department of Sociology