Spaces of Contestation: Art, Activism & the City Lecture Series | Scarcity Makes the City

October 22, 2013

The first talk in the series, Scarcity Makes the City, features Vancouver-based economic geographer Geoff Mann. Looking at how modern political economy affects social relations and our experience of everyday life, Mann will discuss how contemporary capitalist dynamics shape Vancouver’s urban context, and the pasts, presents, and futures that weave it together.

Geoff Mann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at SFU. His researches focuses on macroeconomic governance in the affluent global North, especially the ways in which monetary and fiscal policy affect and are affected by economic and ecological crisis, and their relationship to the range of social arrangements we call ‘democracy’. He is the author of Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism (2013), and Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the American West (2008).

Upcoming speakers include: Jamie Peck (November 12), Urban Subjects (February 12), Stephen Collis (March 12), Kirsty Robertson (April).

Spaces of Contestation is a series of talks, performances, public actions, publications, and an exhibition that examines the collective walk/protest/public demonstration as both a performance and a social formation. The core of the project is in four collaborations between artists and community organizations, which initiate community engagement and democratic use of public space via the realization of site-specific participatory performances.

The project is co-presented with the SFU Vancity Office of Community Engagement and the SFU Institute for the Humanities, and is supported through the BC Arts Council’s Arts-Based Community Development Program.

Spaces of Contestation: Art, Activism and the City Lecture Series will foster critical discussion around issues of urbanism, community activism and politically engaged artistic practice. Taking as starting point the particular urban and socio-economic context of the city of Vancouver, the series will engage with notions of spatial politics, resistance, and aesthetic engagement. Speakers working in the fields of urban and economic geography, activism and creative writing, visual arts, and art history will be invited to engage with the topic from their particular research perspectives.

Spaces of Contestation: Art, Activism and the City is a series of talks, curated by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, presented by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the SFU Institute for the Humanities, and UNIT/PITT Projects. The series is part of a multi-layered project researching the aesthetic and conceptual overlap existing between strategies for participatory performance and activist self-organized demonstrations (presented as part of UNIT/PITT Projects 2013-14 programming year). Realized through a series of discursive events, site-specific performances, an exhibition and print publications, this project seeks to establish connections between artistic and activist actions in urban space, and initiate dialogue about the transformative potential of these types of interventions on the urban experience through the creation temporary communities and alternative subject positions.