Program of the seminars and workshops | February-May 2025
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY SEMINARS 2025
Invited seminars and workshops on some of the key emerging research themes and methodologies in economic, social, urban and environmental geography, aimed to engage participants with more experienced scholars, and to introduce them to some of the most recent theoretical and methodological advancements in the field.
The program below will be updated periodically.
Organized by: Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Filippo Celata, Barbara Brollo.
Seminars 2025
Cristina Temenos, University of Manchester | Filling gaps and papering cracks: Innovation and state failures in the polycrisis (6 February 2025, 4:30 pm, Aula Fanfani, or online at THIS gmeet LINK).
Paolo Boccagni, University of Trento | Still life: Stories of migrants biding their time (March 13 2025, 4:30 pm, Aula Fanfani, or online at this link).
Martina Tazzioli, University of Bologna | The making of migrants' wageless life. Exploitation and life beyond profit making in refugee camps (April 4:30 or 11, tbd).
Georgia Alexandri, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology | The role of the state in the financialization of housing: insights from the cases of Athens and Barcelona (5 May 2025, 4:30 pm, Aula Fanfani).
Manuel Aalbers, KU Leuven | The Financialization of Rental Housing 3.0 (22 May 2025, 4:30 pm).
Workshops 2025
Space | Economy PhD Workshop (3rd edition) | 6-7 March 2025 | University of Rome La Sapienza, Faculty of Economics, Sala Lauree | 3rd annual workshop dedicated to doctoral candidates researching in the broad fields of Economic Geography and Regional Science at Sapienza University of Rome and the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L'Aquila) | Coordinated by F. Celata, G. Bei, C. Giannantoni, A. Ascani, A. Faggian, F. Zampollo.
GSSI Cities' research track Workshop | 27 March 2025 | Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila | Informal workshop for the discussion of ongoing research on urban Issues by PhDs and reserchers. Organized by the Cities' research track of the GSSI in collaboration with the geographers of the Department Memotef Sapienza.
Community and diverse economies research and practice | 27-29 May 2025 | Short course by Katherine Gibson for PhD candidates and early career researchers on the theoretical and methodological foundations of post-capitalist and diverse economies research and practice.
ToRoBo' Critical Geography Workshop | 4-5 June | University of Bologna | 1st edition of an yearly research workshop organized by the University of Bologna (Claudio Minca), the Polytechnic/University of Turin (Francesca Governa), and Sapienza (Filippo Celata), for the presentation and discussion of ongoing research by PhD candidates and early career researchers.
Abstracts and readings
Cristina Temenos | Filling gaps and papering cracks: Innovation and state failures in the polycrisis
Polycrisis is the new buzzword of our time. In 2022, ‘Permacrisis’ was the Collins Dictionary word of the year. While very different, these two relatively new entrants into the governance lexicon indicate that multiple and intersecting crises are the current zeitgeist. In times of increasing uncertainty and intersecting crises - health, economic, social, and environmental – cities search for ways to mediate competing pressures on already strained systems. It’s no wonder then, that urban innovation has become an imperative for municipal governments which, as countless research has shown, have long acted as entrepreneurial actors (Harvey, 1989, Leitner 1990, Phelps & Miao 2020). What urban innovation means in practice however is often more iterative than truly paradigm shifting, despite what the notion of innovation may evoke in popular and political discourse. While couched in a neoliberal, technocratic or corporate grammar, there are emerging progressive and radical models of urban governance that have been given the space to form under the shelter of intersecting crises. Perhaps most notably, new municipalism, a form of radical democratic decision-making focused on issues of social reproduction such as housing, sustainability, and health (Russell 2019). Simultaneously, ‘innovative’ change is often pushed forward through a framing not only of crisis but that of state failure. What success and failure mean in practice for urban governance is as much a question of political infrastructure as political will (Temenos 2024). Drawing on preliminary findings from current research in Santiago, Athens and Manchester, this paper explores the co-existence of formalized routes of urban health innovations and grass-roots experimentation in order to increase access to health services for marginalized communities. I analyse the ways in which crisis policy-making has given rise to new and experimental forms of radical and progressive care work in cities, alongside ongoing projects of revanchist and reactionary public health politics (MacLeod 1999, Temenos 2022). This paper asks how the concept of innovation works through competing needs of having to demonstrate urban entrepreneurialism while providing public health provision amidst ongoing austerity?
Suggested readings:
1) Temenos, C. (2022). Troubling austerity: Crisis policy-making and revanchist public health politics. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(6), 728-749.
2) Temenos, C. (2024). FROM BUDAPEST TO BRUSSELS: Discursive and Material Failure in Mobile Policy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 48(3), 523-538.
Link for attending on line: HERE
Paolo Boccagni | Still life: Stories of migrants biding their time
Suggested readings:
1) Boccagni P. (2022) At home in the centre? Spatial appropriation and horizons of homemaking in reception facilities for asylum seekers. In Making home(s) in displacement. Leuven University Press (link)
2) Boccagni P. (2023) Rooms with little view: Reluctant homemaking and the negotiation of space in an asylum centre. In Migration and Domestic Space: Ethnographies of Home in the Making (pp. 117-135). Springer (link).