Call for Abstracts

Assembling Cities is an international summer school exploring the relevance of science and technology studies (STS) in general, and -particularly- actor-network theory (ANT), in the fields of planning and urban studies. We invite applications from recent graduates, PhD candidates and post-doc researchers interested in discussing how STS can inspire problematizations, descriptions and formulations of spatial planning and urban issues. The aim is to provide students with a set of concepts and methods attuned to tracing and writing the assembling–i.e. the formation, negotiation and stabilization–of cities in everyday, professional and research practice.

In keynote lectures, reading workshops and paper presentations, the summer school elaborates on the STS repertoire productive for urban analysis, and develops the notion of the city always in the making. Thus understood as a relational and multiple entity enacted at specific sites of socio-material practice, the city is taken as the empirical site and the analytical object in the summer school. Tracing and analyzing the makings and becomings of the city, it emphasizes the city as a collection of assemblages, actor-networks and socio-technical artifacts that can be studied relationally through ethnographies, discourses and comparisons. This analytical stance is developed according to three research moves which form the thematic structure* of the summer school: Problematizing, Describing and Assembling

*For more information, please see Topics.

To submit abstracts see Registration.