MOSPUS seminar: Using our Words to Change the Conventions of Urban Worlds

Cities are vessels and attractors of many ways of knowing, articulating, and acting. Cities already contain the intersectional combination of knowledge and imagination for a meaningful and achievable socioecological transformation–although, in spite of this potential, the fact is that cities in the Western world do not bring their diversity of knowledges, imaginations, actions, and energies to bear on solutions. The tendency not to effect transformative change in cities is not so much a failure to communicate as it is a failure to accept the full scope of communicative potential alive in cities.

I will make a case for attention to translanguaging, or moving across languages in interpersonal and familiar as well as overtly representational and political ways, as one way to expand this scope. Within cities are embedded a threshold density of cultures and entanglements of lives, experiences and forms, coming together in public and private, tangible and intangible processes that include the interaction of different language repertoires. As cultural competency as well as urban research methodology, translanguaging begs to be fostered and applied for its important and undervalued role in advancing a politics of urban transformation.

In this presentation, I will define and demonstrate what can be entailed in a translanguaging urban research methodology, using examples from Indigenous languages of Canada as well as French, Danish and Finnish. On the theoretical plane, I will take inspiration from the enduring scholarly fascination with language and cities as human inventions of the same socially complex, open-ended, pragmatic nature, from Dewey to Topalov to Thévenot. The neopragmatic view I advance pushes on the limits of thinking in terms of distinct regimes of engagement and the operations of conventions at critical public moments, to consider the coexistence of many worlds of possibilities in views and values of urban transition.

Meg Holden is Professor of Urban Studies and Resources and Environmental Management from Simon Fraser University, in Canada, where she directs the Centre for Sustainable Development. Her work is concerned with urban and regional planning and policy, sustainable development and well-being, and pragmatic philosophy. Among her previous books is Pragmatic Justifications for the Sustainable City (2017). This talk relates to the SAGA project, which seeks to investigate and advance sustainability transitions across language and context.

Registration:
All welcome, no registration required. For more information, please write to dpinder@ruc.dk 

The seminar is organised by MOSPUS, a research group in the Department of People and Technology that focuses on Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies.