Monika Streule – Seite 15 von 19

1. September 2017

Decolonizing methods: How to un-think something you don’t know you’re thinking?

RGS-IBG Konferenz London – 2017

(Zusammenfassung in Englisch)

This paper explores ways towards decolonizing methods, and thinks about how decentring and pluralizing knowledge production in the empirical field is intrinsically linked to the theorizations of the urban. In the wake of frequent calls to investigate urban processes in a planetary and comparative perspective, the empirical grounding of research is among the particularly complex challenges urban scholars are confronted with today. What are the practical consequences for comparative research after the post- and decolonial critique? How to put a decolonized urban geography into practice? Without pretending to answer these encompassing questions fully, this contribution discusses an experimental, critical and self-reflexive use of methods in a decolonial perspective.

If urban theory is to be both provisional and revisable, it is key to foreground the role of the corresponding methodological strategies. Thus, integrating theory, method, synthesis and reflection, the paper demonstrates how methodological innovations are both influenced by and formative of a decentered urban theory. Taking the original method Mobile Ethnography as an example, the paper engages with an inventive and transdisciplinary qualitative approach apt to engender an on-going transductive dialog between theoretical and empirical reflections in the field of urban studies. The main concern of this approach is to address inherent but often underrepresented power relations in the production of metropolitan territories, and in the scientific research itself.

(Spatial) knowledge, it is argued, is produced on behalf of the Mobile Ethnography and is reflected in the dialectical production of space by the researcher and the researched. In this view, the ethnographic field-site transforms into a research object of its own. Emphasizing thus the agency of multiple subjects in the social production of metropolitan territories, Mobile Ethnography understands everyday urban experiences as an integral part of knowledge production across the urban world.

Paper presented at the Session Decolonizing Urban Geography: Where have we got to; what next? RGS-IBG 2017 „Decolonizing Geographical Knowledges: opening geography out to the world“, 29.8.–1.9.2017, London

»La vida en el Multifamilar« por Antonio Acevedo Escobedo, en Arquitectura, Marzo de 1951

18. Juni 2017

Tracing the developmentalist regime of productivity. Nation, urban space, and workers’ Habitat in Mexico City, 1940s-1970s

Routledge – 2017

Focusing particularly on the conceptualization of developmentalism, urban productivity, and the production of the national identity of Mexicanidad, this chapter outlines the developmentalist regime of productivity as composed of three primary elements: productivism, social reformist urbanization, and nation-state formation. In the specific case of the workers’ housing projects in Mexico City between the post-WWII era and the 1970s, the concept of productivity was not the main driving force.

Instead, the first section reveals the entanglement of a wide range of practices among which productivist, nationalist, and gendered discourses, as well as urban functionalism, seem to have been the most influential. The second section shifts attention to the credit arrangements for affordable housing. It reveals to what extent they were embedded in contemporary social hierarchies based on gender, race, and class, thus fostering material disparities by narrowing access to housing and economic rights.

Against this background, the chapter concludes that a major shift in the social production of space and productive bodies occurred in Mexico City in the early 1970s, a change which can be described as a transition from developmentalism to authoritarianism.

Read chapter

Streule, Monika (2017) Tracing the developmentalist regime of productivity. Nation, urban space, and workers’ Habitat in Mexico City, 1940s-1970s. In: Bänziger, Peter-Paul and Mischa Suter (eds.) Histories of Productivity. Genealogical Perspectives on the Body and Modern Economy. New York: Routledge, 156–173.

23. Mai 2017

Die neue Weststrasse: Fünf Jahre nach der Verkehrsberuhigung und Umgestaltung

Zwischenberichte 001/ – 2017

Die Zeitung «Die neue Weststrasse» setzt sich mit den laufenden Aufwertungs- und Verdrängungsprozessen entlang der Weststrasse in Zürich auseinander. Sie entstand im Wahlfach des Frühlingssemesters 2017. Die Studierenden führten zahlreiche Interviews mit unterschiedlichen Menschen im Quartier. Zwei Gastbeiträge weiten den Blick über die Weststrasse hinaus.

Zeitung herunterladen

Nüssli, Rahel und Monika Streule (Hrsg.) (2017) Die neue Weststrasse. Fünf Jahre nach der Verkehrsberuhigung und Umgestaltung. Zwischenberichte 001. ETH Zürich.

1. Mai 2017

Post- und dekoloniale Perspektiven der Stadtforschung. Eine andere Lesart der Urbanización Popular von Mexiko-Stadt

edition assemblage – 2017

Postkoloniale Ansätze erfahren schon seit Jahren einen regelrechten Boom und beeinflussen wissenschaftliche Diskurse ebenso wie politische Debatten. Obgleich Lateinamerika auf eine lange Tradition antikolonialer Kämpfe und Unabhängigkeitsbewegungen zurückblickt, erfahren Beiträge, die sich explizit auf diese Länder beziehen, entweder weniger Aufmerksamkeit oder werden unter dem Stichwort „dekolonial“ verhandelt.

Der Sammelband subalternativen fragt nach der Relevanz postkolonialer Theorie für Lateinamerika und der Notwendigkeit einer spezifischen dekolonialen Perspektive. Dafür werden Schnittpunkte, Differenzen und Möglichkeiten der jeweiligen theoretischen Strömung beleuchtet sowie Beispiele emanzipatorischer Praxis vorgestellt, in denen sich die Theorieansätze widerspiegeln. Anstatt gesellschaftliche Missstände zum wiederholten Male zu thematisieren, wird in den Beiträgen subalterner Widerstand gegen koloniale Strukturen erörtert und gezeigt, wie dieser post- und dekolonial gelesen werden kann.

Zum Buch

Streule, Monika (2017) Post- und dekoloniale Perspektiven der Stadtforschung. Eine andere Lesart der Urbanización Popular von Mexiko-Stadt. In: subalternativen. Postkoloniale Kritik und dekolonialer Widerstand in Lateinamerika. Hrsg. von Rebecca Steger, Marie Ludwig, Julia Brychcy, Elisabeth Pütz und Kyra Sell. edition assemblage: Münster, 79–104.